The Twelfth Letter
Dear Lily, Two months have passed since my last letter, and I confess, I've carried a thousand half-written messages in my head. Each time something happened, my first impulse was to tell you, to pour out all the details as they came. But I have been teaching myself not to let my world spin entirely around you, to live with the thought of you without letting it swallow me whole. Still, the weight of these past weeks has settled on my chest, and I find myself needing to lay these moments down simply, like small stones in your hand. Life has been a strange tapestry of fleeting wishes and sharp pains. At an event, someone asked if I had a girlfriend. I lied, laughing it off with a pretend photo, but for a fierce, sudden ache, I wished it could have been your picture I held out with pride, a truth I could have shared. Another time, I reluctantly went camping, preferring gentle walks in the park to the discomfort of the wild. Yet, under a moon so much ...