Letter 3
Dear Wren,
I want to tell you something that might lower your opinion of me.
I was never much of a reader. I didn't know I was a writer either.
Not until the Army told me I was. They put me in communications, and I wrote reports, briefings, dispatches.
I wrote letters home to my mother, to friends, to a woman I thought I might love, until the letters were the only thing holding that together, and even they weren't enough in the end.
I learned something from that. I learned that words on paper are not the same as presence.
I knew that. I knew it, and then I picked up a pen to write to you, anyway.
Because when I am near you, the words I want to say to you simply will not come out of my mouth. But I pick up a pen and they come. All of them. More than I need. More than I deserve to say.
You recommended Neruda to the woman with the red umbrella this week.
I went and found a copy at the library that same evening.
I want to be honest with you: I wasn't prepared for him.
There is that poem where he says he wants to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
I read that line and had to put the book down.
I had no idea poetry could do that. I thought it was something people performed.
Neruda just tells the truth at full volume and dares you to look away. I found his words brave.
Reading his work has given me the courage to tell you that when you walk past, my heart does something I have no tidy word for.
When I hear your voice across a street, through a door, reading aloud to a child who doesn't yet know how lucky he is, I feel my whole body exhale.
As though it had been holding its breath and hadn't told me.
That is entirely your doing, and I thought you should know. Even if you never know it was me who wrote it.
— Your Secret Admirer