Roland Barthes writes that every love letter is written to someone, and it's true that you have been a frequent guest in my texts. At the time of dedication, it's an intimate act, an embodied part of the on-going dialogue between my inner-most self and you-in-me. And in returning to the site of text, I am resubmerged in its ritualized wishing-into-being, I am affectively returned to my relating to you, even if you are no longer the same you, even if I no longer long for you.
Talking to someone in your mind only works insofar as there is still hope. Why would I write to a you who is not intimately known, being discovered with baited breath or wondered about? Except in memory, where you remain in the realm of the potential and I do not have to deal with what you became to me later. Disgusted.
You are a golden, sunlight-on-cornfields force who makes my world bright.
You are a darkness that swallows everything and leaves a trail of sweet sighing emptiness inside my mind palace. I don't go there often anymore. The walls are closing in on me and I'm not so drunk on what I might become as when I'd just discovered all of it.
Sometimes you are me. Little young me with twinkles in your eyes and a thousand crowns to spend exactly how you want. I carry her safely tucked away in a pocket of wool behind my ribcage.
Really, obviously, you are always me. I am made of yous, as well. And I feel you, when I read the spaces where your name could never have been written, even when I don't always remember what it would have been. I feel you.
And I cover you in wool and carry you, safely, sleepily, inside me.