When a Letter Comes Close to Prayer (standard:romance, 384 words)
Author: KShaw	Added: Jul 30 2005	Views/Reads: 3372/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Thanks to Jenny for allowing me the freedom to continue to love what is missed, and to a stranger for being the seas lost voice.

Tom sat and read the beautiful letter, its fine musical intervention
carrying its own breath, long lines, short ones, and setting lost 
images before him. It was not the first beautiful letter he'd read, 
there'd been many, just not recently, and written with the seas lost 
sound. He had letters that spoke of the mundane, the household chores, 
painting the house green or yellow, and some impatiently speaking about 
his worn and shabby overcoat. Others talked of places visited, Rome, 
Amsterdam, Ruth and Knud's bar. Words recalling a child's smile, given 
from the window of a passing bus, and leaving her in tears for its 
beauty. But the letters he loved most were those that spoke of her love 
of him, when she spoke of snow on her face, the creaks and sighs the 
house made during the winter nor'easterlys, and wanting him back home 
for the comfort of his arms around her. 

Now a stranger writes, ‘...those sleepless nights, you wait for a sign,
a sound, a whisper...' echoing those words he has loved and known so 
well.  ‘The milky world does not often come to a shoreline, so while 
you trust your compass to find me, I turn inland to step on snow, 
knowing tomorrow my footprints will be gone, but never your heart.' 

Tom placed the letter down on the table, under the blue and white
Anemones, and stared out the window across a shoreline shrouded in 
mist. Out of sight waves bring a mingling of auburn hair and kelp while 
tricky tides fondle breasts. It is absurd to feel grief when so much 
joy can be undone. He turned from the window and took the letter into 
his hands again. 

At the time, and long after the doldrums, Tom understood how words could
replenish energy, sentences spiralling like blue delphiniums, ever 
higher, reaching out. Impervious that a bland day was happening beyond 
the window, he felt centred, powerful, happy, as if someone understood 
the wholeness of his love, its dignity, and had, in a sentence, 
captured its light and shadow. 

‘We choose our happiness, our sorrows, our fears, and our desires.' 

He kissed the paper on which those words shone then donned his shabby
and worn overcoat, crumpled the letter into his pocket, and went to 
meet with his wife. 


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