Epilogue
My darling Wren,
You are going to find this letter in the poetry section, because that is where everything began and it seemed right that it should end there too. Or not end, exactly, but turn a corner. You would have the better phrase for it. You usually do.
I have been trying to say this out loud for three weeks.
I tried in the kitchen on Tuesday morning when you were reading the newspaper and the light was coming through the window in the way it does at that hour and I thought: now, say it now.
I tried on the drive back from Dylan and Maggie's when the night was cold and you had my jacket over your shoulders and were arguing with me about something I no longer remember but which you were, as usual, completely right about.
I tried yesterday when you were on the ladder in the back room reorganizing the top shelf and you looked down at me with that expression. I had all the words and then you smiled and I lost every one of them.
I am better on paper. You know this. You have read enough of my letters to know the size and shape of me on a page.
I have signed my name to all of them as promised.
I am signing this one too, but I want you to know something before you reach the end: this is the last letter I will write to tell you something I should say in person.
After this one, the letters will be for the ordinary things — the good days and the bad ones.
Especially the ones with you reading in the armchair on a Saturday morning and the sound you make when you find a sentence you love.
The letters will be for everything. But the important things, the true ones, I am going to learn to say out loud.
Starting tomorrow.
But first: this.
I fell in love with you the first time I saw you.
I have told you this. I want to tell you again because it is one of my favorite true things and I intend to tell you regularly for the rest of our lives so that you cannot possibly forget it.
You were laughing at your nephew in the yard at the ranch and the morning light was on your hair and I was twenty feet away thinking: there she is.
I did not know what I meant by that. I know now.
You are the warmest and the sharpest and the most entirely yourself person I have ever been fortunate enough to stand twelve feet from for eight weeks before I found the courage to stand next to.
You see the small things. You remember everyone's name and the book they mentioned once in passing that they might like.
You sit on the floor between the shelves when something moves you and you talk to Heathcliff as though he is participating in the conversation, which he is, as we have both always known.
You make me want to be present. You make me want to be known.
You have made me, against considerable personal resistance, into someone who says true things out loud, which I consider to be one of the more significant achievements of the last year.
I want to write to you every day for the rest of my life.
I want to walk on the street side of every pavement we ever walk down together and notice the glass on every cobblestone and make your flat white every morning without being asked, and I want to argue with you about things that are worth arguing about and several things that are not, and I want to sit across from you at Dylan and Maggie's table and watch you with their children and feel the feeling I feel when I watch you with our children, which I have not yet put in a letter because some things want to wait for their moment.
This is their moment.
I want you to be my wife, Wren Banks. I want to sign my name next to yours on something that is not a letter.
I want to give you the ring that has been in my jacket pocket for three weeks while I was trying to find the words, because you deserve the words first and then the ring and I have been working my way toward both.
When you look up from reading this, I will be on one knee.
I want to acknowledge, in writing, that getting onto one knee is not a casual undertaking for a man with my particular hip, and that I am therefore making a fairly significant statement about the nature and depth of my feelings, and that I hope very much you will say yes reasonably quickly.
I love you. I have loved you from the ranch and from the wrong side of the glass and from twelve feet away and from every letter and from the first time you said my name and from every moment since.
I love you in the shop and on the pavement and in the cold and in the amber lamplight and in every ordinary daily present moment, which is where love actually lives.
Please say yes.
Look up.
— Freddie