There are letters scattered about my room�on my desk, beside my bed, on a pile of pillows beside my bookshelf. I haven�t counted them, but subconsciously, I�ve surrounded myself with them�built a nest of my lover�s words as I would her arms if she were here.
Many of the letters contain rose petals�just a single petal in each cut-open envelope. One envelope, though I couldn�t tell you off hand, has two ibuprofen folded in a little piece of paper; she sent that letter on a week that I was having an especially horrible headache that seemed as if it�d never end. And another envelope has a project from arts and crafts�a ballpoint pen wrapped in embroidery thread with my name and a heart weaved into it. She sent me her backyard with another letter�leaves from a pecan tree, pressed flowers from her step-father�s potted plants on the back porch, pieces of rope from the tire swing�I think it was that letter that made me homesick for her.
For the past week, there has been a letter from her almost everyday. Letters with her silly acronyms on the back that take me the duration of reading the letter and even longer to figure out what they mean. Letters with poems and promises of more poetry (poems that she swears are works-in-progress). It is only in the last two letters that the same depressed longing that I feel has seeped through in her words.
�It is different,� she insisted not long after she left, �our missing. I am going home�I am going back to people I have spent the last six months missing. And you are staying there with nothing to distract you from shadows. It makes me sad.�
But in this last letter, she wrote that she was envious of my shadows, and that her poems-in-progress have turned into the length of days between us as the longing that grows with each hour passed.