Love Letter by Deslea R. Judd
Written for Winter Baby
She has no
right to wish for anything else. Not when he's out there
somewhere, trying to salvage whatever might be left of his life after
it all fell to pieces.
She knew that this, or something like it, was going to happen when she went in. The Dark Man never lied to her about that. "You know he's going to take a fall, Marita," he'd warned her the first time he saw them brush hands at a meeting and linger a moment too long, and that was before they were together - maybe the very first time she wanted him. Marita knew. Alex was young and green and about to be assigned to Fox Mulder, and that was a recipe for death if he was not either very very smart or very very lucky.
But Alex
was smart, if not particularly lucky, and he prevailed -
assuming you consider survival a form of prevailing. And now, he's out
there somewhere, slumming it with Cardinale, possibly right here in New
York but still a world away from her elegant apartment and her elegant
desk and the elegant cream-coloured notepaper she holds in her elegantly
manicured hands.
Feeling the
weight of the heavy-grade stock in her palms, she
understands that its elegance is not only frivolous but useless. She can
never tell him what she feels on this. Can never risk committing such
a thing to paper at all. They have protection of a sort for the moment,
but the Dark Man is playing a dangerous game of his own, and the time
will come when he is no longer there. She longs for the simple freedoms
accorded to lovers the world over this time of year - to hold hands on
the street, to smile at each other in an airbrushed haze of desire and
longing, to write the words that never seem to come so easily or so perfectly
in their spoken fumblings at this...this *thing* they'd long believed
their lives had seized from their reach.
But what,
really, would she write if she dared to write at all? What
would she say to him as he fights for his life while she sits at home,
forgotten? She can hardly reproach him for it. Her oh-so-conventional
sensibilities are so radically removed from the demands of the lives they
live. But then, for a long time she thought love was so removed as well,
and perhaps that's the problem. There are no precedents, no strategies
for conducting a love affair in their world, and so she falls back on
the precedents of the outside world, even the selfish and unsatisfactory
and trite.
Sitting there,
staring out into the rain, she considers and rejects a
thousand things she would say to him if she dared. But slowly, the
words come, and she writes them, allowing them to mark the paper, rising
from nowhere without a salutation and ending just as abruptly.
*Part of
give and take in a relationship is that sometimes one needs
more and the other has more to give.*
The words sit there, challenging her. What is it that she has to give? What is there that could mean anything to him this cold Valentine's night?
He has her understanding, at least. That's something. She wishes that he was here, but it isn't in her to resent that he is not. It occurs to her that love is this - to be forgotten amid the chaos, and to accept the forgetting with compassion and not with rancour.
She thinks that if this were a story in a women's magazine, or a scene on a television show, the story would end with Alex on her doorstep, clutching flowers he'd endured great trials to deliver. They would fall into each others arms and make love on the floor amid the petals. Romance lurks grudgingly in her soul, and the image pleases her, but she understands its falsehood. There will be no grand gesture tonight, no reunion. There is only this: an empty room, and words on paper that she can never mail.
She sits
there in the empty room, and she loves him, and she
understands.
END
