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The letter was signed, "With all my love, Heather S. W. Correll."
There was a postscript added: "Dearest, I had to take your canvas bag. I needed something to put my rain soaked clothes in. I hope you can do without it."
I had put the letter down, ashamed of my stupidity. Now, many years later, I treasured this letter. I treasured it as a memento belonging to the brighter times I had seen. It started one of the brightest epochs in my life. It opened the portal to a time when I was beginning to love myself; a period in which I became sane; a precious period of a gentle time; a time that had not grown dim with the years of great challenges. Many people had become a part of it. Heather, to some degree became intertwined with every one of them, throughout all those years in which these times unfolded.
Some of the challenges appeared more severe when they unfolded than even the challenge that we seemed to be facing this time, and they had all been met, one by one, on the strength of what we had discovered about ourselves and one-another. Heather's letter was intertwined with the beginning of that time and the long string of little and big victories that came out of it; that came out of the depth of our humanity. That's what made her letter so precious.
Of course, I was unaware of that on the morning when I found the letter stuck behind telephone dial. I was angry with myself for not having been able to foresee her reaction, which in hindsight had been inevitable under the circumstances. We had both been drunk with a newfound love, and in this drunkenness had ignored the challenges of that New World we had stumbled into. We had been too overcome by the brightness of that love to worry about those 'other' things that we had pushed into the background. Maybe we had realized deep in our soul that "Rome hadn't been built in a day," as the proverb reminds us. In our exuberance we had pretended that it had been the work of a few days, because that was all the time we had had, and had pushed forward in that love as if the world can be changed without effort.
The reality, though, had a way of reasserting itself when the impasse became insurmountable. The world had remained the same. It hadn't changed. I had become forced to face the cold hard fact that one can't change the world by dreaming. It changes only when one labors to make the dreams come true. This lesson was drawn from the rude awakening.
Oh what a fool I had been!
I had felt empty that day. There was nothing in my heart, or mind, or soul that could have built that platform on which we could have remained together. Now in the dark, with the Typhoon barely a shadow, I felt the same emptiness again. The sub's very existence represented the same impasse. The entire world seemed to be moved by an insanity that created one impasse after another. Perhaps this was the reason why I felt the same emptiness again. Still, I should count myself fortunate that I at least was richer than most, for having met Heather.
I actually began to smile now in the dark, remembering those exuberant days. Sure, I hadn't smiled the day when I found her letter. I had tears in my eyes. Her address was on the envelope, but I also knew I could never use it.
I had been angry with myself that day, and many days thereafter. What a klutz I had been. She had judged me right. I knew the exact place in Pittsburgh where I would have let her out of the car, the very corner near my house where I would have stopped the car just long enough. She had figured me right; it would have been a quick ending with a hurried kiss.
Against the background of this pain my own unfolding love for myself, in which my love for Heather had been anchored, came to light more and more. It became a source of strength, a strength that would eventually make it possible to establish a basis for that freedom that we had claimed so briefly, and to make this a platform, over time, that uplifted everyone.
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