Title to follow as well as the rest of the story but here is a start.
He started with that verse from Corinthians, that one about love overcoming everything. It filled 4 lines on that piece of stationary. He was thankful for these words to borrow and the indent to follow, for his own words seemed to stutter ineloquently, in brief little spats of frustrating seconds, where his thoughts played a melody to which his mouth hadn’t the words. So many miles between them and his words wouldn’t reach halfway. Iris’ letter had come 2 weeks before, sitting on his night stand, read over and over again ‘til he knew each mark by heart; not just the words themselves, but where the letters darkened as she was thinking, where her print loosened when she knew what to say, where she had wondered how to dot her i’s without being cliché, where there was a spelling error, where there wasn’t one. This is how she spoke, betwixt her writing; in the space between the letters she filled in her voice, packing into those curved lines all the new portions of her being that he had not gotten to taste.
Blais lounged in his room, part of him striving for comfort, the other knowing he dare not request that. His letter, now totaling 6 lines lay on his bed, as he tried different positions of his body and the light trying to make those lines multiply. Persevere. That was the word he was searching for, but it did not come.
We can get through this… we will get through this; neither tense sufficed his faith and his fears. What was “this”, the distance? Or was it more…the dwindling of a flame. The fire had stirred as they left and now was it gone? How short the wick of love’s candle in the summer.
