Between the Folded Pages

Letter 4: October 22, 1983 – From William to Elise

My Elise,

Your letter arrived yesterday morning, slipping through the letterbox like a whisper, carrying the weight of your longing. I did not open it immediately. Instead, I sat with it for a moment, pressing my thumb against the seal, tracing the curve of your handwriting on the envelope. I let it rest beside my cup of tea, as if prolonging the anticipation might somehow bring me closer to you. Then, when the city outside had quieted, when the fog thickened against the glass of my window, I read it.

And then I read it again.

How is it that your words know exactly where to find me? How do they slip beneath my skin, settle into my ribs, curl themselves around my pulse? Elise, my love, I can see you in every syllable. I see you walking through Montmartre, your green coat darkened by the rain. I see you at that café, your fingers tracing the rim of your coffee cup, your gaze resting on the lovers at the next table. I see you pausing outside the bookstore, where the old man still remembers me as your poet. And, God help me, I ache for you.

You asked about our dreams of water—first your rowboat, then my ship. I have been thinking about it ever since, turning it over in my mind like a stone in my palm. The sea, my love, is distance. It is the space between us, deep and endless, shifting under an unrelenting sky. But it is also movement, isn’t it? It is something that carries us forward. We are not drowning, Elise. We are sailing.

But to where?

I fear I must confess something to you, and I do not know how to begin. There is no easy way to say it, so I will say it plainly: I have been offered a position at the university here in London. A permanent one. It is everything I have worked toward, everything I have labored over late into the night, sacrificing sleep, time, even—God forgive me—you. And yet, when they placed the offer before me, I felt no triumph. Only hesitation.

Because it means staying.

I can hear you now, Elise. “But William, you were always going to stay.” Yes, I suppose I was. But I think some foolish, desperate part of me believed that I could have both—London and Paris, poetry and you, ambition and love. But cities are greedy things. They demand allegiance. They ask us to choose.

And so, I must ask the question I have been dreading: What happens to us now?

I want to tell you that nothing changes, that we will continue as we have, writing letters, closing the distance with ink and memory. But would that be enough for you, Elise? Would it be enough for me? I do not know. And yet, the thought of letting you go—of waking up one day to find your letters have stopped, of passing through my days knowing you have moved on—it is unthinkable.

Tell me what to do, Elise. Tell me if I should come to you, if I should leave behind the life I have built here and build something new, something ours, in Paris. Tell me if you would even want that. Or tell me if I should let you go, if I should fold our love into a memory and carry it with me, quiet and undisturbed, for the rest of my life.

I do not know how to exist in a world where you are not waiting at the other end of a letter.

Come back to me, or let me come to you. But let us not be stranded, lost in an ocean of almosts.

With every piece of me,

William