The Letter
My lord of silence, I remember you again.
The days are long in Siena now, but the nights longer still.
I sit by the well behind my father’s house, the one with the stone lip worn smooth by generations of hands—hands like mine, restless with remembering.
I look into the water there, still as glass, and there you are again.
Not as you were, perhaps, but as you became in me.
You must know, wherever you are, that I still think of you.
Or perhaps you knew I always would. Everyone always says I am brilliant—too brilliant, as though a woman’s mind is a dangerous thing to carry unguarded through the world.
But with you… I never needed to quiet myself, never needed to dim or soften.
You listened. I know this as I know you.
Now, in that silent pool, I see not only you, but the woman I was with you. Not a girl scribbling translations by candlelight, not the scholar’s daughter in her father’s shadow. I was the woman who laughed, who dared, and who loved.
I miss her almost as much as I miss you.
They still call me bold. They still say I am sharp, dazzling, impossible. But they do not know the hollow space beneath it, the place where your voice echoes—not in words, no, but in that silence we shared so well. You taught me silence was not emptiness. With you, it was presence.
I have no way to send this letter, this prayer to the one I know in my soul but cannot find. Yet, I must write this and hope that this prayer finds you.
Until we find each other again,
Livia