Thou inscrutable Power why must you visit upon me this affliction? Why are you forever inscribed in the pale margins of my remembrance, outlined in phantasmal tracings about each hour, like the after-glow of some departed star upon the night-bound eye. Each breath I draw is tinctured with you; each footfall of my mortal pilgrimage resounds with the echo of your shade. a penumbra upon every threshold, and I—poor votary— have grown perilously aware of your spectre, and tremble with an anticipation too vast for my frail frame to hold. O Thou cruel Architect of my hours how did you contrive to become my rite and liturgy, How subtly have you hollowed the chalice of my days, pouring therein only the bitter-sweet wine of absence. you have robbed my moments of their substance and filled the emptied vessels with longing’s putrid ghost. Hope—O treacherous balm!— has seeped like some narcotic into my veins, its naïve bloom numbing sense even as it awakens ache. It spreads a pale and delicate fire through every nerve, till I am left intoxicated with what I may not grasp. Was this your cunning? Your slow and secret art, to trace yourself line upon line along the edges of my existence, till the very borders of my soul bore your image? And now—how monstrous my yearning— I pine for the sketch to stir, for the ghost to be clothed in flesh, for abstraction to harden into the warm reality of you. How sly your cruelty, how sovereign your dominion. At each trembling turn, I crave not the echo but the substance, not the phantom but the pulse. And how foolish am I, how frailly made of porcelain and dew, to cast my swaying heart upon the storm, that it might flutter as some fledgling at the abyss. exhausted to the very marrow, I yet kneel beneath the weight of you. How I would strip your memories and fill them with my absence, to make you ache and hunger as I ache and hunger, O Thou whom I yearn to name in silence, O Thou for whom I burn with this ungoverned fire, And still—O still— I pray it was not design, this quiet colonisation of my soul. For in secret I long to live in Thee as Thou livest in me, that one incandescent moment of hope which keeps you wakeful in the dark. PS: This is a letter to my future husband. Bro get yo head in the game, lock in and find me. (My stoic boy, i was made from the most crooked part of your rib. Do you think it will be easy to love me? Oh my sweet stoic boy, wont you write me in all your wistful, aching poems?)