To say I love you in the written word is one of the most cowardly acts possible.
And yet it is an act that private, dreaming men are often wont to engage in, for it is the safest form of declaration.
To say I love you in ink, graphite, text is to gather up our brimming, soul-consuming affection up into a bag and toss over the edge of a vast, yawning cliff.
Into the void of nothingness.
No response needed, no acknowledgement required. We pine, we yearn, we suffer, our hearts rattle and race in our chests as we pray for an answer, yet hope no confrontation comes, no forced interaction of us and our heart's greatest wish, for there can only be two results from the collision.
Either we are shattered by our disappointment or downcast by our disillusion as the slender, sylph-like, gossamer-winged seraphim we have created turns into tubby, ordinary, wingless toadess in the span of ten hours, ten days, or, in the luckiest cases, ten years.
Even if the fantasy should match the reality, the success as delicious as the dreaming, it is still a cruel course to write those three small words.
Nick is a perfect example of what I mean.
Dumped by Melody, he has only the text, the scrawled out letters. Only his eyes are permitted to cherish and summon her affections. The other senses are shut out forevermore.
His only recollection of her affirmed love will be the impersonal white paper, the cooled ashes of the words she wrote. No sound, no touch, no movement, no context accompanies these dead letters.
All conjuration and all speculation he could come up with, the desk she may have written at, the pen she chose to scribe her doomsday message, what she wore in that hour, the furrows and shifts of her lips, eyes, hands, feet... all of these would be no more than mastubatory projections, mirages built upon the sands of the deserted relationship, with no actuality, no truth, and no connection to them.
It is he and he alone who has these imaginings, for she has robbed him of the colors, the sights, the music, the dance, and the scenery of love's confession in the spatial-temporal-material world. All his mind, all his senses would be engaged, enflamed, if she only had been a little kinder.
Love by text is one of life's great paradoxes: Removed from time and place in which it is written, the feeling it induces is emphemeral, alive for only its too-brief spot of relativity before it becomes and dead. Not so a physical, multi-faceted confession, for -that- is able to be re-animated, to live again and again on memory's silver screen.
Those who know my own past will accuse me of hypocrisy in this matter and they would be right to do so, but then, I am what I am:
A trembling, shadowy fool who knows his own folly, cursed with the inability to act against his original nature.
