The Storms Of Time's Swords. Letter 4.

These letters are responses to letters published on The Exquisite Thread (the link can be found to the right). In case you were wondering.

Dear______,

It is rare to find a heart filled with want, insular and hollow and yet still beating so steadily, so passionately. You make such grave and solemn claims, to forsake that with which you feel, touch and see, and yet there is a deep irony which lives within the weight of your emotions and which betrays the very words with which you claim this darkness. Perhaps you fade into the muddy depths of dumb dreams but those are not the dreams of an unborn child; they are the dreams of someone lost in life, afraid to accept the burden of the gift he has been given but which is so hard to give back.

The proof that we are alive lies in everything around us and in our ability to perceive it and to make it something new, something with our own reflection glancing back at us, hidden just beneath the surface of the universal. My heart beats irradiatively, flecks of lambent light aflame inside my chest. I try to fill the swelling space which you so definitively describe with the beauty of words and sounds and sights. When I stare into a sky alight with the summer sun and awash with the billowing clouds, I find that there is little need to peer over into the space within a space at the center of all things. And even when I am overcome with the immeasurable depravity of the human condition, I never find other people arbitrary. It is when I am mired most deep in disgust for the sins of the individual that I look to others for solace. I look to others but I also look inside myself.

I live in the hope that our words will one day sustain someone the same way that Shelley's and Shakespeare's words have sustained me and you too, my dear. Your words also sustain me and each time we finish fleshing out these thoughts and making them words, I breath a heavy sigh of relief that something was expressed and understood and will be remembered. I am happy to be a bastion, a citadel to hold strong against the storms of time's swords. What better use of these words than to cushion the beams in the walls of one's heart. For that is surely what your words do for me; it is what the best words achieve. I will use your words to remind me that I am not the only one who seeks to say things long since left unheard, that you too absorb and reform the world's words and make them your own.

These letters, though beautiful, do conceal a certain simplicity. The ease with which we've been able to leap into these letters after such a long silence is, I think, not quite clear. There is so much detailed inward focus and so little of the drab and daily. Tell me what you do when you are not writing me lenghty, lovely letters. Tell me how you came to write me again after so many voiceless years. Disclose some lost, hidden secret and I will as well.

Unveiled,
_________________