Dear Tess, because you are dear to me
You know, better than anyone, that I can easily talk about philosophy. Debating theory and ideas is second nature to me.
But I realise that I’ve never had the language to talk about how I feel until now. To, quite simply, speak with my heart. Even thinking about it makes me stutter and stumble over my words and want to hide behind hard-to-understand dialectics and epistemologies.
So I’m putting pen to paper because we both know that once words are written down, they carry weight and meaning which endures through time and space. Their truth remains lodged in our hearts, our souls, and can’t be undone.
And a letter certainly worked for Captain Wentworth in Persuasion so I hope that writing you a letter will work for me too. How I envy Captain Wentworth for being ‘half agony, half hope’, when I’m ninety nine per cent agony and only one per cent hope.
Now, where to even begin? Maybe right at the start.
I believe the seeds were planted at our very first meeting when you told me that one could learn more about life and love and humanity from reading Pride and Prejudice than Plato’s The Republic.
(How right you were! Although, to be even-handed, The Republic does still have some merit.)
Since we last met, and I will get on to that soon, I’ve read Pride and Prejudice countless times.
I’ve seen all the adaptations (the 1995 BBC adaptation is clearly the superior work).
I’ve read everything that Jane Austen has ever written.
Ditto the Brontes. Oh God, I’ve even read Middlemarch, and I finally finished Anna Karenina – I now know more about farming in nineteenth-century Russia than I ever wanted to know.
I’ve read romcoms. I’ve read romantasy. I’ve read steamy romances, which had me clutching my metaphorical pearls.
And Nora Ephron! Why had nobody ever told me about Nora Ephron? Or Richard Curtis? Or that my heart would hurt from five simple words when Barbra Streisand sees Robert Redford outside the Plaza hotel in The Way We Were and cups his cheek?
I’ve had a crash course in the philosophy and semiotics of love and I’m forever changed. But I was changing long before that: ever since I met you, Tess.
Our mutual acquaintance, Fitzwilliam Darcy (I hope that alluding to fucking Darcy won’t be triggering for you), when talking of his love for Elizabeth Bennet (again, I don’t mean to trigger you), said, ‘I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that it had begun.’ One could think that such a statement could apply to us, to the time we spent together.
Sharing dim sum. That long walk and talk along the South Bank.
In a way, we were dating without even realising it.
But I can pinpoint exactly when my feelings for this maddening, exasperating woman who’d read too many romantic novels and ‘it has turned her brains’ changed. It was during your date with that absolute twat, Edward Rochester.
I watched you across a crowded restaurant and it was a revelation. I think we can both agree that it wasn’t a good date, but you gave it your all. You weren’t and aren’t and are never afraid to be your most vulnerable and authentic self and that takes real courage.
After that, well … yes, I did sabotage your dates.
But please believe me when I tell you that it had nothing to do with my exalted aspirations for the library and everything to do with the fact that I couldn’t bear the thought of you finding happiness, even an ephemeral, temporary happiness, with someone else.
I didn’t want you looking for love in the pages of books when I was right there in front of you, flesh and blood, willing and able.
But instead, I gave you every reason to hate me.
There’s a lot to hate. You worry that you’re ridiculous and that no one takes you seriously, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’m the ridiculous one with my stuffy ways, my intransigence, my inability to see what’s right in front of me.
I could never be as brave or as honest as you.
I’ve never been in love. I’ve never wanted to be in love. Then you came hurtling into my life and turned it upside down. Trampling over all my logical, well-thought-out arguments against the banality of romantic love until all I could think about was you, you, glorious, beautiful, darling you.
Of all the time that we’ve spent together: a mere handful of hours that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life, I especially adored arguing with you.
I now know this to be a much-loved trope in romantic fiction: enemies to lovers.
Except, I was never really your enemy and I was only your lover for a fleeting moment.
Which brings me to our last encounter in the library.
It doesn’t feel like hyperbole to say that making love with you and yes, fucking you, was transcendental.
That what we shared together wasn’t something that you could find in a book.
That’s what I meant when I said it was real.
That I was real. That we were, and I hope are, real.
It was never about the library. The Love Library. About using you and your romantic aspirations to bring about its downfall.
It was an expression of how I really and secretly felt about you.
I still do.
Tess, even now I don’t have the appropriate words to explain what you mean to me. I have to borrow from greater writers than I.
You make me happier than Mrs Bennet when Netherfield Park was let at last.
In the words of Bridget Jones, when I’m with you, I feel v.v.v.v.good.
I’m just a man standing in front of a woman and asking, begging, her to love him.
Tolstoy, when he wasn’t waffling on about farming and religion, had it right when he said, ‘Yet he saw her like the sun, even without looking.’
But maybe William Shakespeare said it best and I write it to you now, ‘I would not wish any companion in the world but you.’
You were right and I was wrong. Love is everything and I am nothing without it. Absolutely nothing without you.
I like you, Tess. I miss you. I might even be so bold as to admit that I adore you. Even bolder still to say that I’m in love with you.
If you feel for me even a fraction of what I feel for you, then put me out of this abject misery that is my constant companion.
Yours, so very yours,
Gabe