The Eleventh Letter

Dear Lily,

    I dreamt of you yesterday. Finally, your presence appeared in my sleep after so many nights of absence. But even though it was you, something about the way you moved and looked felt unfamiliar, as if the version of you I saw had been changed by a life I no longer had access to. In that dream, I found myself in your home, visiting you just before your wedding, which was only a month away. That was also the first time I saw your future husband, he was there too. You were visibly distressed, but not in the quiet way I’ve known you to be. There was something storm-like in you, a sharpness in your voice, as if you had been carrying too much for too long and had finally let it break.

    I wasn’t sure whether I had arrived at the wrong time or if I simply did not belong there at all. From the fragments I overheard, you told him he had betrayed you more than once. And this time, with your sister. I stood there frozen, not knowing where to place my thoughts or how to hold my feelings. I found myself hoping you would walk away from him, that you would say something final and certain and step out of all that pain, but the words never came. You stayed, even with all that sorrow clinging to the air between you.

    It unsettled me, seeing you fierce and furious, raw in a way I had never seen before and I didn’t know what troubled me more, the thought that you had changed or the thought that even in your hurt, you still chose him. I tried to understand but something within me pulled in too many directions. I felt confusion, disbelief and something else I didn’t want to name. There was a flicker of relief, faint and uninvited that he had failed you. As though some part of me still quietly alive beneath everything I’ve tried to bury, had begun to wonder if your heart might finally turn toward mine.

    When I woke, I stayed still for a long time, trying to let the dream fade from my skin. I wished it had never unfolded the way it did. And though I’ve longed for your presence in my dreams, I think I would rather endure the emptiness than witness a version of you shaped by betrayal. Because more than I want to be with you, I want you to be loved gently by someone who sees your spirit as something to protect, someone who would never carry the carelessness to wound you in that way. Even if I still quietly wish I could be that person, more than anything, I want you to be safe, to be honoured, to be held with the kind of love that never asks you to accept less than you deserve.

    That dream left behind a heaviness I couldn't quite name. Not pain, exactly, but something that settled in the spaces where warmth used to live. And now I find myself wondering whether you are still the same as when I last knew you, whether the version of you I carry so gently in my memory still exists. I hope she does. 

    I hope nothing in this world has dimmed the light I once saw in you.

Yours,
H