Sofie D

Dear Lisia:

Every now and then I get this sort of melancholy and I come to think of you. I often feel I betrayed you, that in the course of that drink we had, that intoxicating love we shared to the last drop, somewhere, lies were swallowed. Fantasies were lived and I was stabbed by my cowardliness in the back. I still think very much of you as you can see by these letters.

Its been five years now, nearly that anyway since I left. I couldn’t leave my children. I have a fractured past you see, I am a fatherless child, my mother an alcoholic that through the years, I’ve come to understand her decision not to be around us. It spared us a lot of pain and probably thought it best that my grandmother was a better home for us. And that is why it was so painful to contemplate the idea. I backed off. Back in Stockholm its only the forest that knows how much pain I came to deal with when we parted, they are the keepers of my unyielding belief in love, I screamed them to deafness.

You might question then that what I expressed at the height of our deep love affair was just the effects of the moment. You penetrated me more than that. I know.

Will I ever go to Gent? Most likely, when? I don’t know, and I won’t just go there to see Jaque Louis David’s Marat Assasiné. I dream of walking the streets you might walk in, the air you breathe, those kinds of things, maybe have a beer, sit down and enjoy the Belgium sun.

I still miss you and often wonder how you are, if you are married and wonder if you have children, those sort of things….

Chris