LOVE. I am writing in pencil today. My pen seems to have flown the coop.

Your latest letter was great to receive, and contained a whole bunch of stuff.

Just one more try, let me say they do not all have to be ten or more pages. Multiple short letters are great.

One problem I have as I write this to you is the sensory overload!

Without being overly dramatic, think of being in the desert with no water for days, and then you suddenly run into an oasis and get sick from so much water.

No, your letters do not make me sick, but it is a very uplifting experience and coming down sucks!

So, when you can, do not sweat short or even unfinished letters. Drop what you have in the mail.

OK, enough of that.

LOVE. That was very comforting to hear you say. Thank you. I love you also and can say your actions writing me, buying the books, and keeping me up to date with web stuff, do show you care for me. And I do not want you to ever lose sight of that.

Yes, sometimes I might seem to bitch a little too much, but thanks for being there and hopefully, through our letter writing, we can strengthen and enrich each other.

I am actually working on a 500-word essay on romantic love. Yes, I know that is not what you meant, but one of the books you sent this week was entitled The Passions and I needed to have a source for my essay, so the book became my source.

The book says: "Much of what passes for love is not love at all; those passions of dependency and desperate bids for warmth and security, the often resentful ties that binds us without elevating us and set us against each other rather than draw us together. Love is an ideal of all of us; intimacy and mutually elevating complete trust and maximum esteem for both ourselves and others."

They keep saying that you cannot love someone else until you love yourself. One thing the last five years has done is given me a stronger sense of self!

One example is, for instance, my saying out loud, hey is it my job to keep the letters going, and your admission that, yes, it is. Better it is out in the open than either of us thinks the other is doing a favor, or worse.

Yes, it can be scary to put one’s feelings out there, but the reward of being accepted is worth the risk!

But I do think we are trained to not take the risk.
  ¶ 7:57 AM