I’m afraid to change you at all (even in your opinion expressed here), because there’s no way to improve on the glistening rainbow of a butterflies’ wing, or the color of water falling from an eagle’s claws as she rises with a lurching trout from a mirror-still pond in Alaska, or the tinkling-chimes sound of a child laughing in the summer sun by the sea, or the magic alchemical taste of an endless kiss beneath an unblinking moon on a sultry night.

But it simply isn’t credible that anyone who has met you would not long to be with you. And I know that any man who reads your words here would wish these thoughts were about him.

Life as a human among others (as opposed to simply being by oneself) is profoundly difficult and confusing, in good part because words are incomplete even at their best, and often utterly confounding when not spoken personally, directly, and clearly. Does this person know you feel this way? If so, and we can’t doubt you (for you write with greater fidelity and deeper thought than anyone I know), then I am certain this absence from you has nothing to do with a lack of affection for you, and everything to do with the mountains and rivers of life between you.

Any honest man who meets you would worry that he had far to little to offer, and would take very literally any suggestion you might have offered that he was to be just a friend. That itself would be a great boon and he would clutch that to his heart as sufficient treasure. You are, after all and in certainty, unnervingly well-educated, impossibly well-read, heart-breakingly beautiful, far too good a thinker and a writer for any but a limited few to think they could ever be your equal, and simply such an incarnation of basic goodness and goodwill as to be a challenge for human approach. I doubt you’re an angel, but for a woman with so much light you cast remarkably little shadow.

I really don’t think you’re writing about me. But I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to compliment you. Some of us here worship the ground you walk on.