Between the Folded Pages

Letter 5: October 28, 1983 – From Elise to William

My William,

There are moments when the world seems unbearably quiet.

It is in those moments that I feel the absence of you most acutely—not in the grand, dramatic ways that the poets write about, but in the small, unspoken ones. The silence of my flat at night, where your voice should be. The empty space beside me in bed, where your warmth should rest. The hollow ache in my fingers when I reach for you instinctively, only to remember that you are not here, that you have not been here, that all I have of you is ink and memory and the trembling echo of your last touch.

I read your letter again today, sitting on the floor beside the window, my knees tucked to my chest, your words spreading through me like the first sip of wine—warm, intoxicating, dangerous. How carefully you phrase your uncertainty, how gently you lay your doubts before me, as if afraid they might shatter in my hands. And yet, William, I have never feared doubt. I have never feared questions, nor the weight of difficult truths. But what I do fear—what keeps me awake at night, staring at the ceiling while the city hums softly beyond my window—is that our love is only this. That it thrives in longing, that it is sustained by distance, that we are beautiful only because we are apart.

You asked me what happens to us now.

I have turned that question over in my mind for days. I have carried it with me through the streets of Paris, pressing it into my palm as I walked past the bookshops where we used to linger, past the cafés where we whispered about the future like children dreaming of castles in the air. I have weighed it against the memories of your hands on my skin, against the soft cadence of your laughter, against the quiet certainty I once felt whenever you looked at me as if I were the only thing in the world worth looking at. And still, William, I do not have an answer.

Because love is not just poetry. Love is not just letters sealed with longing and the promise of one day. Love is waking up beside each other and arguing over who gets to make the coffee. Love is you losing your glasses under a pile of books, and me teasing you for being the most disorganized academic in London. Love is me burning dinner and you laughing as we sit on the kitchen floor eating bread and cheese instead. Love is not just waiting. Love is being. And we have never been.

We have only waited.

And so, I must ask you a question in return—one I have been afraid to ask for fear of the answer.

Would you still love me if I were not a distant thing? If I were not a voice on paper, a shadow in your dreams, a memory wrapped in silk and longing? Would you still love me if I were near enough for you to see my flaws—the stubborn way I refuse to ask for directions, the way I get restless if I stay in one place too long, the way my moods shift like the tides? Would you still love me if I were not a Parisian dream but a woman who wakes with tangled hair and coffee-stained fingers and the occasional unkind word?

I ask because I have known love that was only beautiful from a distance. I have known men who adored me in theory but recoiled at the reality of my unpolished edges. And I do not want our love—this love that has sustained me, that has been the air I breathe and the light I follow—to be another illusion.

You say London has offered you permanence, security, a life you have built with your own hands. And I am glad, William, truly I am. Because I know what it means to have something solid beneath your feet, something that does not shift with the tides. But I also know this: I cannot be another thing that stays at a distance. I cannot be another thing you write to but never touch.

So, I will say it plainly, as you did.

If you want me—truly want me—then come to Paris. Come, not for a weekend, not as a visitor, but as someone who is ready to step into a life that is ours. Come, knowing that it will not always be poetic, that we will have mornings where we argue over small, foolish things, that love is not always grand declarations but sometimes just quiet companionship in the spaces between words. Come, not as a man caught between two worlds, but as a man who has made his choice.

Or tell me that you cannot.

Tell me that London is the life you have chosen, that what we have will remain between the folded pages of our letters, a love immortalized in ink but never in touch. Tell me, William, so that I can grieve what we were and find a way to live without waiting for a letter to arrive, for your name to appear on an envelope like a promise I can never cash in.

But do not leave me in this space between.

Do not make me an almost.

I have loved you with a love that has filled my lungs, that has stretched across cities and oceans, that has rooted itself into my very bones. But I cannot live my life as a woman who is always waiting at the other end of a letter. I cannot love you only in the pauses between our separate lives.

I want to love you in the present tense.

So tell me, William—how does our story end?

Yours, if you will have me,

Elise