love letter

Today in class we worked with point of view. We tried an exercise that would help us to challenge ourselves and our writing. Our challenge was to write a love letter. It was a very broad subject. Dr. Morris said that we could write a love letter to anything or anyone. Classmates chose subjects to write about including chocolate, the earth, poetry, boyfriends, their bed, and many others. I went the somewhat stereotypical route, but I chose my boyfriend as my subject. I chose to write in first person, past looking back. Before I share what I wrote today in class, I want to touch upon something. Our class has a big issue with being wrong. To me I find it a little bit funny. As I have said in previous posts I don’t like to be wrong either, but I think that sharing things is the class isn’t something we should be afraid of. I enjoy the comments of my peers, and sometimes it does help to be critiqued. Dr. Morris responded to someone today saying that they were afraid to theirs wasn’t right with, “Fuck right.” And what came to my mind was, “Fuck right. Go left,” basically meaning that who cares if you’re right, be confident in what you are doing and run with it. Either way here is my love letter, which by the way I wrote in montage style, because I am really trying my hardest to be successful in this form of writing.

You smiled at me from across the table. We sat outside having dinner. It seemed like we were set in Paris. But we weren’t in Paris. We were in New Jersey, where we had both grown up. The night was warm. It was the summer that we fell in love. We were young and in love and nothing else mattered. We finished our dinner at the café. You paid. We walked home together hand in hand. When we got to my house you walked me to my back door, and you kissed me like you had dozens times before.

*

We laid in my bed. I think I was tired, and you weren’t in a good mood after a night of parking cars. I think it was raining and you got off early from work. You asked to come over. We laid together back to chest, and it was like being together and touching rejuvenated us, putting a new life into our night. We watched Rescue Me, a new show on FX. It was a show that we both had gotten hooked on. One of the characters was professing his love to his significant other. I watched intently as I always did. That’s when it happened. The character told his girlfriend that he loved her, and you whispered in my ear, “He beat me to it.”

*

Saying goodbye was the hardest. We knew it was coming all summer, but we avoided it like the plague. We stood in the alley behind my house holding each other tightly in each other’s arms like we had millions of times in the past two years. He was going south, and I was going north. We’d have one hundred of miles separating us for months at a time, rather than 3 blocks separating us for twelve hours. But we were determined to make it work. And we still are.

A couple of my classmates read their love letter out loud. I don’t think I would have been able to read mine out loud, because I probably would have cried. My classmates wrote a lot more prose, but I think mine is well done. I like it. It’s writing to him giving him my impression and my perspective on the events being described. They all are important events to me: a date that we went on the summer that we fell in love, the night that he told me he loved me, and the night that we had to say goodbye before our freshman year of college. I’m not sure if it is my favorite part, but I really enjoy the ending. We will be dating for 5 years this summer, and we have spent 3 years of college away from each other for extended periods of time. We are still determined to make our relationship work.