LETTER 10
Dear Wren,
I know you are looking for me.
I noticed it the way I notice most things about you: quietly, from a distance, with the helplessness of a man who sees something coming and cannot make himself step aside. You have been watching people differently these last few days.
More carefully.
I recognize the look. You wear it when you're reading a book that has started to answer a question you didn't know you were asking.
I am writing to ask you, as gently as I know how, to stop.
There is a kind of attention that looks like indifference from the outside, and I think you mistake my stillness for not caring, when actually stillness is just what caring looks like on someone who has learned to be quiet about it.
Stillness can be a kind of secret. A choice to stay quiet about something that deserved to be spoken. I know the difference between privacy and cowardice. I have not always made the braver choice. I want you to know that I am aware of that. Whatever else you think of me, I want you to know that thesilence was never meant to hurt you. It was about me, and my considerable talent for standing just outside the light.
You know the Cowardly Lion. You know how he walked all that long way to the Emerald City, certain that the Wizard would give him the thing he lacked — the courage that felt missing, the roar he couldn't quite locate. You know the end of the story. You know what the Wizard told him. That the courage was there all along, only waiting for the right moment to be needed.
I am afraid I am not that story. I am the Lion who found his courage only in the dark. Only with a pen in his hand. Only when the woman he is writing to is safely asleep and cannot look at him. In the daylight, with your eyes on my face, the words dry up. My tongue goes numb. The brave thing, whatever small brave thing I managed to be on paper, disappears entirely. I have no Wizard to blame for it. It is simply what I am.
You deserve Dorothy. You deserve someone who will walk the whole road in daylight, without hiding, who will say the true thing to your face and mean it. I slide letters through a door in the dark and call it feeling. I am not sure it qualifies.
So let me stay behind the curtain. Let me be a dream, something warm you reach for in the morning before the day takes over, something you are not required to name or find or hold up to the light. Light will not make what I feel go away. But light will tie my tongue and steal what little nerve I have, and you will be left looking at a man who cannot give you a single word of what is written here. That is not a fair exchange for what you deserve.
Know this, at least. I have never meant you anything but good.
When you smile, something in my chest does what I imagine the Tin Man felt the first morning he understood what a heartwas for. When I hear you laugh, I carry it for the rest of the day like something valuable I've been trusted to keep. You made a cowardly lion brave enough to pick up a pen and write honest things in the dark. That is more than most people have done for me. That is more than I thought anyone would.
I will carry these joys for the rest of my life. I will know, in whatever quiet way a person knows the things they cannot say, that you made something in me brave for a time.
Please don't come looking for the man behind the curtain. Let him love you from the shadows. Let that be enough.
— Your Secret Admirer
