Dear Sandy,

You'll probably never read this, but I want to tell you that my
first love was your husband.  When he taught me poetry and we
made eye-contact in class, and I forced myself somehow not to
look away from those dancing happy intense eyes of his, I don't
know who seduced whom.

You lived with him for a long time.  Seventeen years, I think he
said.

You must have known that all that intellect and all those young
women with their  energetic lust for life would eventually wrap
him around and capture him.

He said I was the first, and I doubt it, to tell the truth.  We
all tell lies when we are in love.

And he was in love.  I do believe that.  Perhaps in the rapid way
that men have, perhaps.

Oh, Sandy, how I envied you, though, spending days and nights
with that man and his warm cock that I only felt in my young body
twice a week when I fell head over heels onto his couch in his
office and he made love to me more passionately and tenderly than
anybody ever did, and I came just from lying upon his body while
he undressed me.

I wouldn't let him use condoms, I wanted all of him.  I lied to
him and told him I was on the pill, and when I thought I was
pregnant with his child I was giddy with delight.  As I write
this I can feel the crisp Illinois October on my skin, smell the
burning of leaves, see the bright orange and red of the trees as
he and I walked across campus trying not to look like what we
are, lovers come fresh from a fucking that satisfied the soul.

I want to say that I'm sorry such things are hard on you.

It wasn't easy on me either.

And though it is tempting to see him as a casual frivolous bad
man, please do not.  Please see him for what he was, just like us
looking for his happiness, and finding it for awhile in a young,
adoring brunette's small body as she rode him like Leta fighting
for her life with the feathered Zeus.

Perhaps I knew then it would end too quickly.

It was the best sex of my life, but I don't miss the sex so much
as his scent, the scent of fresh love, conversation, laughter,
and the rushing giddy divinity of feeling him orgasm, knowing in
that moment he was mine and we had strangled time so that he was
mine forever.

Such a young girl I must have been then.

If you ever read this, fuck him for me tenderly, and suggest that
it would be lovely to go out in the wood, and read Yeats, and
kiss as though you were eighteen and he were a forty-five year
old man who has been made young again by love and lust.

He'll know it was from me.

Love, Sara 


  
Sara's Apology