To be drawn into the past is to experience it anew.
I hadn’t meant to find it, this missive that triggered so many memories from my past. I had been looking for something else, rooting around an old storage box in my basement, when I came across a decades-old love letter tucked among postcards, articles and photos.
It was postmarked September 1991 and addressed to me via general delivery at the Block Island post office. It’s a miracle I even got it. It was long: five pages of handwritten single-spaced prose, baring the soul of a man with whom I had fallen deeply in love.
He wrote, “Part of me loathes art, literature and the quest for the eternal. Part of me couldn’t live without it. I’m torn, crunched and scrambled.”
He kept on, diving deeper into our growing passion. “You draw the best from me, but you don’t consume it; you play with it, you slam it, you enliven it, but you don’t consume it. After I’ve been with you, I feel charged. I respect you for your love, for your strength, and for your straightforwardness. Never have I encountered a woman so sure of her body.”
The feeling was mutual. This man was my equal in every way — intellectually, sexually. He was strikingly beautiful, of German descent, as was I. Perhaps our ancestors had loved one another in a distant age?
We were not strangers when our lives collided — we had known each other in college — but any attraction back then was tempered by the fact that we were in loving relationships with other people.
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