Dear Albert

This love is not wrong.

I am far too young for you I know, but you are my first love, eternal. You are in fact dead, of course, before I have even been born. I fall in love with the ghostly remnants of text you have left behind, and the photographs of you, grainy, faded. Handsome. I think. Barely sixteen years of age, and I am seduced by your text, my heart captured. You are there in my blood, pulsating. Wrapping these texts around myself like a warm blanket on a cold day and this day, Albert, and the next day and many days that follow are cold, practically arctic. I am never quite where I am Albert. This confuses me. I look around me at the sea of faces in the corridor at school, and wonder if any of them actually see me. This is common teenage angst but … I fill this emptiness in my heart with your texts – sentences, ideas, dusty, well-fingered pages, the smell of aged paper, this is the texture of Love, the sexual of the textual. I am Fallen. Not yet Woman, but no longer Girl.

The darkness gathers. Blood leaks. Things swell. My body changes, betraying me and I am transformed by the gaze of others who devour me, strip me, and begin fucking me, all in the blink of an eye as I pass by.

I slip inside the space between the lines and take comfort there while the wolves begin circling.

Oh god yes, this is Love with a capital L.

I am as alone as I will ever be, with only your ghost whispering sweet nothings in my mind. Erotic. This imagined hot breath on my skin, words falling across my bare flesh, each one a tender caress that carries me beyond the pain of growing up.

The Sweet Nothing where I tread lightly, hoping to go unnoticed until such time as I find my place in this world, in this body.

I want to meet you in Paris, sit at a café with you, wearing a dress, which is too revealing in the way that certain dresses are on teenage girls. I want to enjoy being too young to know, awkward, and shy as I sit there drinking in every masculine detail of your body, your face, and your hands, which weave the spell of seduction. I want to suck on your cigarette, drink from your coffee cup, curl up in your lap and waste hours upon hours listening to the sound of you breathing. If only. If only you could be my first Lover, but alas we have this entire dimension of Reality between us. I am here, and you are not. Time has not been kind to us Albert, but it doesn’t matter.

At sixteen I understand that I will always, and ever, be in love with words, ideas, and the people who peddle them.

I say again: This love is not wrong.

Where the Lover is absent, words still bring a song of Joy into my heart. This love is enduring. Timeless.

FIONA