Winter Part Two

 He sat down to write a love letter.

First, memorializing the date...in case this piece of paper was ever found, tucked in a drawer, concealed in a secret space...many, many days in the future...so somebody reading it, discovering it would be able to detect the time.  

He scrolled her name...a name that he had said many times...breathed it out, whispered it in an evening, it fell from his mouth like a poem.  It wasn't her birth name, but rather a shorter version.  It was phonetic and delicate...and youthful.  

He struggled with a bit of the opening lines, wanting to catch her early...pull her in.  A gob smack.  He was writing in ink so there was no chance to re-do...edit.  It was spilling words literally on the page.

She had mentioned that his handwriting was hard to read at times and so he strove to craft carefully...trying to articulate a feeling that was likely unfathomable.  Colors to the blind, music to the deaf.  

Rarity.  That was his most poignant prose.  Her rareness.  Despite her efforts to remind him she was "every-day" he proposed that she was like a new one...somewhere between Saturday and Sunday...she was the peace of a weekend, the calm of a break...but even rarer.  Like a Leap Year...but even rarer still.

A comet, every 80 plus years or so.  Yet he got to enjoy her every day...whether in his mind, or in person.  And when in his mind she was pane-glass window colors...a little fuzzy on the edges but those colors...lit behind by a sun...beamed down upon him.  

He tried to describe her voice, which is a bit of an odd compliment...her drawl, her brogue.  It was uniquely hers...and he had heard it in his ears, pressed tightly, squeezed out in breaths, and sometimes just opening a conversation on the phone.  It changed only when there was a hint of trouble...and he liked that...he could tell she was taking issue...like a barometer before a storm.  A detection.  He could attempt to defuse, and restore the sonorous delicate southern lilt of hers.

His words carried across the page.

He remembered how she smelled in a morning, freshly showered with lotions applied.  He attempted, poorly, to capture that.

The way her make up came off in a shower, the color of her hair slicked back, her plain nakedness that revealed such extraordinary beauty.  No need for anything else...

He tried mightily not to compliment.  Nor flatter.  Rather, he tried exceedingly hard to describe the way he saw her...the way she revealed herself to him.  And if in that reveal it was striking, or was complimentary then so be it.  It was at that point a truth, so she couldn't dismiss it.  It was a fact.

He wrapped the letter with some wishes...he looked outside at the evening and the slate of snow that covered the world outside the window.  It was a cold but beautiful evening.  It made him want to clutch, clench...have proximity to her, hands in her hair...a sort of wildness that generated heat.  The steam rising from a bathtub of soapy waters.  The slipperiness of entanglement in said waters.  The cold outside stewed a sense of her inside of him.  

It was winter.  He wrote her a letter and signed his name at the bottom.  It felt inadequate but it was the very best he could conjure.  And that is exactly what he tried to tell her.