Dearest Rachel –
There’s no particular reason for it; it isn’t as if the morning sky is particularly grey today, nor can I hear the impact of raindrops on the bedroom roof. It wasn’t that I stayed up particularly late last night, either, although I did find myself finishing a third batch of laundry at about eleven-thirty, which might count in my book. Certainly not in yours, however. But for whatever reason, even as seven rolls slowly into eight, I find myself hard-pressed to find sufficient motivation to get out of bed today.
There’s not even some sort of specific malaise I could point to that might be behind this. I may be on the verge of shaking off a typical spring cold, but that’s been a couple of days already since that was even worth commenting about; I’m only doing so now to eliminate it as a cause for my lack of desire to get up and start the day.
It’s not even that you’re not here to talk (among other things) to. At this hour, you wouldn’t be ready to do anything but sleep, even as I prepared myself for the day, whether I wanted to or not. Understandable, as you’d poured yourself into bed so much later (although you would have gotten a fair amount of involuntary sleep on the couch in the family room; not sure if that counts for much, though), so you had some catching up to do if you were to collect as much sleep as myself. Mornings were not really for conversation, to be honest.
It’s not like I feel like talking right now, anyway. It might be faster to get the words written down, but I’ve no desire to utter a single word to Siri at this point. It’s all hunt-and-peck on my phone instead, at least for the time being. It’s a slower process, but I’m in no hurry.
But as I’m putting my thoughts together like this, I find myself wondering: do I say more to you now than I did when we were together? It seems like an absurd question. I always assumed that we exchanged more than these mere thousand words a day on a regular basis, and yet, a day like today seems like a reminder that this wasn’t always necessarily so. Some days – in fact, it may have been many days – we just didn’t have a whole lot to say to each other. The fact that too many of our waking hours were spent apart from each other – to say nothing of the fact that I rarely wanted to talk about my day at work when I got home – couldn’t have helped.
And it’s not that we were ever trying to give each other the silent treatment; that just wasn’t our style. For one thing, we rarely fought in the first place, and I’m eternally grateful for that (although it does leave me incapable of relating to other people who aren’t so fortunate); for the other, there were so many days that just didn’t seem all that different from the day, the week or the month before – what was there to tell about?
To be sure, I think we just assumed that there would be so many more “days like this” in our lives that it didn’t matter if a few of them were spent mostly in silence. It’s also true that I still have more than a year to go before our time together falls below half of my entire life, so it’s not that we didn’t have the time. And in those last few years – especially that final one, when I was home from work for good (particularly once it was all but legally enforced during the plague year) and we were tending to Chompers, taking him on walks as such – we did spend so much more time together, even talking. But those were exceptional times; too much of our lives were spent in silence (or at most, with the television providing the ambient sound in the room) as we went about our separate ‘things,’ even within the same room. But at the time, we were fine with that, I think.
Besides, there were times when we exchanged more than just words. Ours was a tactile relationship, and sometimes a touch said more than what words were capable of. Whether it was the kiss as you dropped off breakfast when I was working in the booth, my coming up behind you and rubbing your shoulders in the kitchen, or your resting your head on my shoulder as I draped my arm around you in an audience setting, there didn’t need to be any words exchanged between us.
I really miss those days.
All I have now are these letters, and whatever I can put down to fill them. It’s a poor substitute, but it’s the only thing I can do for now. It would be nice to think of the future world when we can be reunited again, and exchange words, glances and touch without this need to organize thoughts into neat little paragraphs like this anymore. Because some days, I would rather have to deal with fewer words, and let something more than speech do the talking.
Until then, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 