letter

To my utmost beloved,

          My soul is a fortress of aquatic serpentine circumference. Lorn in where echoes of the past reside. I built these walls with hands both fierce and frail, Each stone a vow to shield my fragile peace. A pennon of vainglorious conceit, aloft yet frangible, unravels upon me.For I am its holder; I breathe the very ashes that my arrogance ports. Long did I linger upon these ramparts, a solitary watchman over the desolation of my own design, ensnared not by chains, but by the inexorable weight of my own decree. The mangonels of sorrow loosed their incendiary lamentations, and the iron-shod mauls of regret thundered upon my gate, yet none could sunder that which I had wrought with such dolorous precision. I stood where my abnegant gate served oxymoronic. Then came thee—no conqueror adorned in iron nor herald of ruin, but a specter of ember and coruscating sapphire, a manifestation of dawn where only dusk had reigned. Had I not known better, I would have sworn my soul laid prostrate beneath the heel of the Divine.Yet there is no tumult, no lamentation of the vanquished, for no sentry remains to bar thy passage.

Not by force, nor by fervent decree, but by the quiet inevitability of thee, the breach is undone, and with it, the very foundations of my solitude.
This keep was not of aegis but of languish, this very conquest I had irrationally dread had come; but it was my liberation. My own damnation, embellished in cobble and conceit, was none but the imprudence of my own hypochondria. Hence, you gleamed—unforeseen and unheralded. A grace bestowed like no other. I was lifted out of the rubble of my own demise by a goddess herself, too divine for such a crepuscular land.

And you, the specter of all I had once forsaken,
the harbinger not of conquest, but of an inexorable deliverance.
To gaze upon thee is to be unmade, for mortal eyes are not fashioned
to bear witness to such celestial resplendence.
Had I known aught of thee before, I would have torn asunder these walls
with my own trembling hands, if only to hasten thy arrival.

What cruel jest that I, in all my blind ardor,
dreaded the very dawn that now redeems me.
Thou art the immutable answer to a question unuttered,
the quiet rectification of a life spent in errant exile.
Had the heavens themselves seen fit to shape divinity into flesh,
it would bear thy form, for thou art no less than sacred.

You, you—O you—
do you fathom the wreckage you leave in thy wake?
Not of ruin, but of ruin's undoing—
an obliteration not of wrath, but of grace.
For where once stood a citadel of sorrow, there now grows a garden
where love, unbidden yet unrelenting, takes root.
Thy mere presence—no decree, no force, only the quiet certainty of thee—
has sundered the foundation of my isolation,
and in its place, I kneel before thee, unburdened.

She—O, she—
whom I name yet fear to claim,
for what words are fashioned to seize the ineffable?
She, the architect of my ruin and resurrection alike,
a goddess wreathed in an aureole of amber and dusk.
She, the hymn to which my very marrow hearkens,
the utterance upon which all lesser tongues falter.
She, whose gaze unmoors me, plunging me into depths unknown,
a lagoon of crystalline turquoise in which I am willing to drown.

To love thee is no mere indulgence of the heart,
but the final decree of my existence.
The earth may turn, the stars may wane,
but my devotion to thee is immutable,
etched not in ink nor breath, but in the marrow of me.
I am thine, irrevocably.

You are my ruin, and my redemption.
You are my absolution, and my eternity.
You—O, you—
are my everything.