On finally finding my lover, Alex Strachan

Darling,
Ever since we first met I want you to know I have never stopped loving you. In that earliest dawn of blurry adoration, your softness of touch brushed against the inner self, leaving a fingerprint on our soul. Your physical beauty, your sublime graces, your great strengths were so often lost on the lusts for our new beginning. And later, in our youthful vigour, when they caught my rare attention, they seemed as if fish on the surface of a sea, noticed for but a blink of the eye, before they dive back into the great unplumbed deeps. Then and for many more years, I simply took you and all of life as infinitely invulnerable.

Not until we had formed a kinship so radical in its physical and intellectual sense of selflessness, did I began to realize how much the ‘me’ in me had become inseparable from the ‘you’ in you. These two selves, so often entirely independent in our youth, the thoughts of one and the actions of the other, have over the decades become a welded oneness. So, that as life now inexorably slips between our fingers, the sense of being begins to lose its diluted feel. It becomes thicker, more viscous, like a rich sauce that is melded together from its many parts. I have begun to taste that change in our relationship that is, how shall I say? - more munificent than what we had in that time gone by.

Although the form is not quite as it was; the damaged limbs, the scars, the waning vitality, all those medals of a life well lived; it seems the veneer of our youth and beauty was only that, a veneer, which when stripped away has exposed a framework of substance, one I had never even vaguely been aware existed, beneath our outer selves.

Like the skeleton of some great sailing ship, that has stood the wrath of heaven induced tempests, forging in it somehow a wisdom for a life of voyaging. So we have become forged with much the same wisdom by our own time of voyaging together.

What I find my darling, is that as the sands of time have whittled away at our edifice and softened its edges, they have exposed a new me and a new you. A deeper layer once uncovered has allowed us to love one another with a passion that had no such coexistence in our previous journeys. Perhaps it is because the miles we are now travelling are no longer limitless but are, of a more finite nature. As each day passes, the essence of all that time out of mind spent in each other’s company now distils into a liquor profoundly more intoxicating than any that has come before. Or perhaps, it is fragments of brain dust that have collected in the corners and been puzzled together over ten thousand nights into dreams we can now feel, touch and smell. Is this our reality finally; a new being, birthed to an old soul and body?

Hark my angel, 'tis the season of renewal and we both feel it in the air. Our step is jaunty and an ineffable energy of mind fills us with new promise. As the birds nest and new shoots make their radiant appearance, a passion for life envelopes about all things yet again. But no more so than for you my love, who embodies for me always that infinite and eternal springtime.

With all my soul, I love you.

Caledon March '09

Alex Strachan was born in England and emigrated to Canada as a teenager. He divides his time between the French River in the summers, where he designed and built a beautiful small resort http://www.frenchriver.com/, and a log cabin in Caledon north of Mississauga for the winters, where writing, reading and walking with his border collie are his main occupations. Alex founded http://www.inbalanceinternational.org/, a non-profit organization that aims to get more women on the boards of large institutions by using women's consumer power.

Notes: The photo illustrating this piece was taken at Alex's lodge on the French River.

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