Of Houses and Lakes and Letters in the Box

Critics be damned I went. I knew it was my kind of movie, I knew it would touch the parts of me that believe in love, the parts that were once described as “hopelessly romantic”, the very same parts I try to ignore. How could it not? Even the title was my sort of title, “Lake House” was my sort of place and the idea that love could transpire through letters, well, it’s my sort of love story. It’s not for everyone, I know this from the empty theater I watched it in, but I prefer it that way. It doesn’t have to ring true to everyone; it just rings true to me.

I remember a time when I wrote letters. I remember the promises within. I remember the words he wrote back, words on a page I can see so clearly even now. I waited. For the time to be right, for the pieces to be in place, for everything to come together, I waited. But he didn’t.

Tonight I miss those words on the page. I miss the absolute certainty with which I trusted those letters, those words, that love. It is not him perhaps, that I miss anymore, but the woman I was when I was with him. The woman of whom he spoke in those letters. The woman I could only dream of being. I was a woman in love. Once.

Tonight, I am diminished to a woman in tears. Over all the things that might have been. Over all the things I have closed myself off to. It would scare me now to read such words. I am a cynic to anyone that might try to urge my faith in such promises again. It is my own undoing. Perhaps once upon a time it was to allow my heart to heal. Now it is just a way to keep it from having to feel at all. I know, deep down, that I believe, still, even yet, but I also know the depths within that I would have to climb to unlock that door, the depths that someone would have to go to even find the key. It is, perhaps, asking too much. Love is difficult enough in the years together, it shouldn’t be nearly so hard to get to in the first place.

I shall go, it upsets the pup when I cry.