I keep loving and missing you day after day.

I’m losing sight in one of my eyes, the right one, to be specific. So, since it’s impossible to recover – so I’ve been told by the doctors – I’m left with a bad eye and a good one. Half blind? Half aware? Anyway, half, once again, as I’ve always felt. In the worst case scenario, I’ll completely lose my right sight and become half blind. But is it something new? Haven’t I always been half blind? Still, one can never be half blind! Either you're blind or you're not. That's why we have two eyes, two kidneys, two lungs... So we can afford to lose one and still not being considered handicaped (what a deal for social security!).

Half of me as always been extremely aware. Half has always strived to see things the way they really are. Half has always given up too soon by realising how impossible to climb were the mountains of prejudice and circumstance. Overwhelmed, half of me has always felt joy.

Meanwhile, there was this other half of me, the going-blind half of me, the cloudy, shady, fictional, unclear half. And this half fantasised, dreamt constantly, was at the origin of several emotions, conceived new and strange worlds. This half, deprived of clear definition, chose myth over science, chose fiction over reality. This was always, maybe, the half capable of feeling love.

Next Monday, September 28th, it will be a year since the first time we talked to each other. We’ve met the day before at Riga’s airport, but our first words to one another were on this day. I’m keeping track of all these little things because that’s part of what you left me with. That’s how blind my blind half is!

One year, and it hasn’t gone away my love. It is quiet now, it is silent, but it’s still here. Even now, after all this time, I rather go on loving you than anyone else. I don’t want to be rude, but even dead you’re so much more loveable than any living woman I know! Of course I may be loving you with my blind half, but be as it may, I’m looking at others with the sharp and aware part of me. Lea, you are irreplaceable. I know that's almost like saying "water, you're wet!" But as I’ve said, I may be losing sight in one of my eyes, but still I only have eyes for you.

These last days I’ve been missing you more than usual; I’ve been thinking things I’ve never thought before, little details, like how profoundly sad it is to die in the snow: death over white, over purity. Me, at least, whenever I conceptualized a place filled with snow, whenever I imagined a snowy village, pure, beautiful, clean, white, death had NEVER a role to play. White as Heaven, I always thought... But is there death in Heaven?

Red over snow, like blood in Paradise: The world has definitely changed. No more sacred places, I won’t hide again. You see, here is the going-blind half of me: In the absence of clarity, illusion! In the absence of rationality, dementia! Maybe religion will still have a word to say...

I just miss you and don’t know what to say and how to say it, and because I miss you I don’t know how I can stay for so long without writing something to you. I just talk and talk, with no-one to hear words that will be lost forever.

You loved me once Lea. You’ve changed me and I will love you forever. Today it’s my birthday, but what I celebrate in me is you.

I’ve been away Lea. Away from Portugal, away from my everyday life, away from Internet, but never away from you my love. Everywhere I go I miss you much. It doesn’t hurt anymore, I think, but your absence is felt every moment. I feel you so close sometimes.

Hello my love. It’s been a long time since last I wrote to you, I know. But this is not the only place in which I talk to you. Far from it, and you know that. The truth is that I miss you everyday. I won’t say I miss you more every day, how could I say that? These things can’t be measured. But I do miss you terribly, and every day it’s stranger, every day I feel more hollow and sorrowful. Every night I imagine you, I imagine I’m lying there with you, that I’m not alone and never will be... But then I feel all that silence around me, and I search you with an arm in bed hoping for a miracle that never comes. Then I tend to get exhausted and eventually give up and sleep. When I wake up, everyday, my first reaction is disappointment towards life itself.

 

I’m a mess. At first the pain was unimaginable, and tears were always finding their way out of me. Now it’s different. I don’t cry anymore. I can’t, although my eyes still feel tears coming very often. Now I just miss you too much and feel so lonely. Sometimes I just want to go on with things here, try to have a life, try to feed myself out of my grief and anger. Other times I just which I had in me the strength to give up, because no matter what I’ll never have you again in my arms. No matter what I do, never again I’ll be able to kiss you, to take your hair out of your eyes as I used to do... In a way, go on living feels like treating like trash our moments and our plans together.

 

I’m going away from Portugal for a time. I’ll try to give a rest to myself for some time. I’ll be away from telephones, from computers, from my family, from friends who don’t understand how I need to be alone and keep calling me; keep talking to me about things I don’t want to hear anymore; keep inviting me to things I don’t want to do anymore; keep believing I’m the same. Well Lea, I’m sure I'm not the same, that I will never be the same. You were so much more than a girlfriend to me! You were many of my infant dreams made flesh! I will never be the same, partly because I don’t want to go back being the person that I was, someone who did not knew you.

 

I don’t want to be alone. But every time I’m with someone I feel so tired. I feel I’m acting to be a mix of the person I am now and the person others met once, somewhere in the past. It just takes all the strength out of me, although, I repeat, I don’t want to be alone. I’m just so scared of life without you here.

 

So I’ll be away for some time my love. I’m not going to the mountains that you loved so much – how I wish I would… Everyday I dream with snow and our Christmas in Slovakia. I’m going to escape Portugal for a while, but to the north, and try just to stare at the sea. Come.

 

I love you and I miss you always.

I hope one day things can finally be stored again in their respective drawers and boxes, for right now I feel like they’re all scattered through the floor. I have no home without you Lea. There are no words for the way I miss you.

I’m still here my love. I still miss you much, though I’m feeling blank and empty. Some nights ago I dreamt a lot about you, although in the morning I couldn’t remember a thing. I woke in the middle of the night with you on my thoughts; with the absolute certainty that it was you who were there with me, in that dream of mine. Many times I think about writing you something in here, but everything I have to say feels so dull and hopeless… I want to give you good news, for once, but still haven’t any and maybe I feel kind of ashamed of that fact. Anyway, I’m still here, loving you, missing you, thinking and dreaming about you everyday. And as long as I’m here you’re alive too Lea. You’re always with me, and you’ll always be. 

Sometimes, not very frequently, I shut my eyes and imagine I’m close to you, just sitting in your tomb or standing next to it. I then face the little hill downwards in front of me, the houses of the small village, and behind them the narrow peaceful river. And on the other side of the river I can see the vast agricultural plains, with the mountains on the horizon. Behind me, only a few meters from your resting place, the hill where the cemetery stands transforms itself in a forest, and from those woods I can hear a variety of sounds, mainly from birds. If we stay very still and silent we can even see rabbits, foxes, or a deer. And in there, with my eyes shut, I can hear the sound of the tree leaves blown by the breeze. You’re in a pretty, unpretentious, and very peaceful place my love. I’m very glad I went to say goodbye to you there. This way I can always keep a visual memory of the place in which you will rest forever.

 

I keep dreaming with you Lea. Even today you were there, in one of my nightly fantasies, in terms I no longer remember exactly. I miss you so much! Everything’s lost its meaning and it’s getting lonelier here everyday. When in bed, before I fall asleep, sometimes I try to remember your expressions on precise moments. And eventually I succeed and try to hold that thought for some seconds more. I find it particularly hard, though.

 

I still have your phone number in my cell phone, as well as all the messages we’ve sent each other. In my photographic camera I still have the memory card full with all the photos I’ve taken when I was there with you last Christmas, with the exact dates of when they were taken. I’ve thought of what it would mean to me to erase them. I already have them on my computer and in another data device, but I think I will not be able to do it. I can’t erase them, not the photographs nor your cell number or our messages. Also the things you gave me in Christmas, like that beautiful book about the Slovak mountains you loved so much, plus the photo of you your mother gave me after you died, and some other little things, are all inside a plastic bag I keep over a table in the room where I sleep without opening it. I don’t seem to have the courage to open it. Better said, I have, but I know it will hurt too much! I dream of the day I’ll have my own house, or room, in which I can put your picture in a frame and keep it at sight forever, like you deserve.

 

Like I said, I miss you too much Lea. And so, I want to leave here this picture, of the church in Rézekne in front of which we kissed for the first time, sitting in the grass in that freezing night in Latvia. It’s just another fragment of our story that I can look upon if I ever loose my reasoning. Anyway, I still hope one day I can be just fine.

I love you.