April 5, 2018

My dearest,

When you’re alone you turn on the lights. To make the rooms brighter, you say. To signal uninvited things that they may not enter. Life’s better that way. When you’re alone and you are not afraid.

When I’m alone I turn off the lights. I’ve loved the dark since I was a kid, when I would climb downstairs in pitch blackness, wander into the kitchen, to open the fridge, to see if there was anything I could eat. I’m odd that way. When I’m alone and I’m not afraid.

When we are together, we negotiate. You’d turn on lights and I’d switch them off. I’d turn them on and you’d reverse it. We leave some lights on, turn some off. And when we go to bed at night, together, we don’t need any lights or darkness anymore. We have each other and we are not afraid.

Yours, ever and always.