A Lack of Understanding

12th October, 1919.

It’s getting colder here and the leaves are starting to turn this wonderful gold colour and I wish you could see all of it.

Sometimes I think that it was just yesterday that you wrote that people always said that Paris looked beautiful in the summer. Other days it feels like a lifetime.

My sleep is littered either with dreams that wake me in the early hours of the day, cold sweat pooling on the bed sheets and an immovable image printed to my eyelids. Your battered and bloody body lying in a back-alley, or your barely conscious form seated on a hard chair in the middle of a harshly lit room. Sometimes sleep doesn’t come at all, and I can’t decide which is worse, not seeing you, or seeing you dying.

And if I sleep a dreamless sleep, I still wake up and I still see your ghost and you might as well be dead and stretched out on the floor in front of me.

Everyone keeps tiptoeing around me like they are scared I’m going to break, but how can I break when I’m already broken? It scares me that there is someone whom I need like a vital organ. That there is someone who I trust. Someone who knows me better than I do.

We both know what comes next, but I’ll still say it, I’ll never stop saying it.

 I love you.

F.