My dearest,
I missed you yesterday. I missed you so much that my head ached. My body yearned for you and, without your gentle direction, my mind wandered.
You are the warm promise that gets me up in the morning. You are the silken river flow that propels me through the delta of my morning and into the heaving, seething ocean waters of the the rest of the day. You are the earthy inspiration that allows me to endure while others fall away.
You are my spark. My tinder. And my life fire.
You are my dawn. My dusk. My aurora borealis.
You are my one. My all. My everything.
You are mid-1980s Sooty Show. You are raspberry Weis’ ice-creams. You are post-apocalyptic cassowaries.
They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder and your absence yesterday left my heart so full of fondness that I thought it might explode like a dying star. And die is exactly what I would do without you.
Coffee, my precious: never leave me.
Yours in eternal deference,
Jonathan
An edited version of this article first appeared in the MyCareer section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.
You can read the column, Benign to Five, in those papers every Saturday, and if you miss it, you can look it up online in the BusinessDay section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times. (I now wankishly call myself a “syndicated columnist” on my CV.)
Thaught of the day
If I ever received an overwrought love letter of this sort I would release the contents of his stomach onto it. Yuk. (Except for the Sooty and Weis’ bits – they were quite good.)
good article, thank you