It’s another cold rainy Monday. Now spring won’t even come to console me. A conspiracy of temperature, distance and precipitation. How many shades of gray are there?

I am looking out the window, and I wish you could see the dogwoods, the red oaks … the spring bulbs I planted are poking through the ground now. I don’t know if they will flower this season; I planted them too late. Seems like that’s always happening to me, always too late for something. Like meeting you. Story of my life.

Last night for the first time in years, I sat down to write a love song. I hurriedly scribbled the words and the music and tried not to let on how deeply it was all affecting me. Else how could I explain writing about a lost love and almost crying because of it? No one would ever understand.

Am I too foolish, too naive to believe that we will still see each other again someday, at least one more time? I hold on to that hope in near-desperation. I think it is what keeps me going, what gives me something to look forward to that’s entirely mine, the only true selfish thing I want. Does that make me a bad person?

Somewhere in my mind I believe that there is a certain kind of love so strong and so pure that it transcends right or wrong, good or bad. I believe that when it exists in a person’s life, it becomes the one true beacon by which one’s life is then lived. Whether the love is realized or not is merely consequential. That it is there and that it now owns your life is what cannot be escaped.

You are my beacon. My guide. My direction. All things in my life, all thoughts in my head, they all lead me to you. It is a bittersweet slavery, but how else could things be? There is no other way. You are my only way.