Letter № 217

You will have already left by the time anyone reads this, which is the point, I think, and also the difficulty.

I sat at the kitchen table all evening with the tide chart in front of me, trying to decide whether a letter is a kind of departure or a kind of staying. I have not decided. I have only written.

The harbour is quiet tonight. There is one gull on the lamppost who has been there since six o'clock and does not appear to want anything. I understand him.

I had meant to tell you, in person, what I am about to write. That was the plan. The plan was a train, a platform, a sentence said plainly while the doors were still open. But the sentence would not come to my mouth, and so it has come to my hand instead, which is a coward's detour and also, perhaps, the only honest one.

I am not asking you to return. I am not asking you to wait. I am asking only that you know, at some point, on some ordinary morning in a city I will not name, that you were the reason I almost said a thing out loud, and that I did not, and that the not-saying was its own kind of fidelity.

The tide goes out at half past five. I will watch it go. I will not go with it.

—

Yours, in the only tense I manage,

M.