18TH FEBRUARY
3:53 AM EST
dearest ella,
historically, i have done really poorly with a journal. i have never been faithful to it. writing, if not for you, has often felt the same. the idea of writing without an audience always seemed futile. words seem to lose their spine when they are not walking toward someone. towards you. but i have gotten used to it now. i suppose most of us are lonely in this big world, but we must fall tremendously in love to find it out. i have composed countless beautiful letters to you in the sleepless, nightmare hours of the night, and most of them are gone. i just miss you, in the simplest and the most desperate human way.
i suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. you, with all your careful, luminous sentences, would never lower yourself to something so plain; you would never let a simple feeling of missing someone stand there in its bare, fleeting bones. perhaps you would not even experience it in such a blunt way. but i also know you would mask it in such exquisite phrasing that it might surrender a fraction of its reality. with me, it stands unadorned and severe: i miss you more than i ever believed i could, and i had already prepared myself to miss you a great deal.
i know i won’t make you love me by laying myself bare like this. if anything, it tips the balance against me. makes me more naive. but what choice do i have? i cannot be clever with you. and i cannot lie to you. i love you too truly for that. you have no idea how reticent i can be with people i don’t love. i have finely tuned my craft in that. But you had done something that no one else had ever done before: you made me whole again. and i miss that.
please forgive me for being such a miserable stranger.
n.