I will write to you. Day after day, I will pull words out of the earth and bring them to you in clumsy bouquets unbefitting of a place on your table. Still I will write. Night after night I will pore over tomes searching, ever searching for the right thing to say when there is really no wrong thing to say. Moment after moment I will seize my wrist and beg the violence of my pulse to cease. You will come one day. One day, you will come. You must. Until then, we write. There is nothing else to do.

Sometimes you have to go. You don’t leave, but you do go. I often thought about it but I didn’t know a person could really do that. You can. You do. And as much as recognising the difference is a comfort to me, it still means an absence. It still means you’re not here.

There is nothing more isolating than you not here.

Inside it doesn’t matter that you are a woman or that I am not a man. Inside we are both and neither all at once. In another dimension we exist in all permutations and combinations of twos-as-one. It doesn’t feel strange. What does feel strange is you not being in a single photograph with me. It has been nearly 40 years.

This is a comma. It might be a seashell. I know it is made of butterflies. But to me it is a comma. You know what a comma is, don’t you, it means continuity. It means there’s more to come. It means it’s not over yet. As long as there is a comma, it means we can go on,