…
It is not so hard to imagine these papers, in some few years from now, consigned to some drawer, mingled with other artifacts of a time in your life which, when you weren’t paying attention, finally lost their resonance, their energy, as a candle burns down or a stem sags slowly in its vase. Then, the words written here will have been pressed finally dry and flat, beneath the weight of consequent events.
It is selfish and naive of me to believe that it should be otherwise.
Acknowledging that the impression of our lives upon each other will and must fade (for how else are we to go on?), the need to leave you with something of myself persists still. I don’t wish, however great the temptation, to be sentimental. If anything, the thin strands of sentimentality will surely cause what I write here to lose its potency as if somehow writing were itself the agent of devitalisation. Sentiment floats, like motes of dust in sunlight, when love, fallen from the tree and not finding the substance to nourish its potential, endures its slow annihilation.