Sadly, It is sometimes only when a relationship has ended that you can truly value how precious it was.

This one was by death and the only true relationship I have ever known. Of course, there was fancies and flirtations along the way and a constant wandering eye. There were liaisons too that could have so easily, so easily, wrecked this ship and dragged it onto the rocks. But and here is the thing, it was not by any virtue or any strength of character on my part, nor was it that this relationship was somehow indestructible. It was not because of some adherence to rules of behaviour.  These rules, these laws, that some organisations have adopted to protect and maintain fidelity are simply that, rules, and they do not, and cannot, take account of the deceitfulness of the heart. The heart that will put down layers of lies upon lies like coats of varnish on a wooden surface to make it hard and impervious to heat and water or to the razor-sharp sword of conscience. The corruption is deep and subtle and not only deceives others but convinces itself. Nor was it kept secure with the watchful eye of others, what they call “being accountable”. No, it was not by any of these but by the great mercy and grace of our God.

It is sometimes only when a relationship has ended… that you can see what it was you had.  “You don’t know what you’ve gone till its gone.” Its only then that you learn things that you had never cause to think about. You learn more about your character, its flaws, its emotional dependency and many other negative things but more than that you see something of astonishing beauty of how an unlikely relationship was born how love, like a surprising gift, lands at your door and draws you up into a new landscape with new horizons and a journey shared with a steady and constant travelling companion. It’s a picture of something deep and wide and so much bigger than yourself.

In the act of clearing out I stumbled upon a box containing letters she had kept, neatly arranged, folded and returned to their envelopes in date order, some 200 or so. They were letters I had written from day one and I had no idea they were there. Picking up and reading some at random was intensely poignant. I had a glimpse back some 50+ years into my former self and the feelings and emotions of a 20yr old starting out in life with the intense and surprising delight of finding a soul mate. At once they were illuminating, embarrassing and hilarious, but coursed through with simple clear observations on people, situations and ideas, some lucid and perceptive, others contrived and absurd. Sometimes the writing was of a surprisingly high standard. The same could not be said about the spelling or the punctuation. There was a constant famine of commas and capital letters.

Most of the letters belonged to the year before we got married, when we lived in different cities. At that time you could connect by telephone, but you needed to be sure that the person was there on the other end of the line, or could be found soon. For in most accommodations, a single call box would be situated in the hall and you only had three minutes. It wasn’t cheap either. So, inevitably the preferred media was letter writing, sometimes three letters a week.

In this collection I had the story of that long year from one side of a conversation. It was a special discovery. I found I could remember most of the events described, but I had forgotten how I felt. I had forgotten how I was overtaken with the rapture of love that expressed itself in such ridiculous ways That was the thing that got to me. Our emotional memory, it seems, is quite short. We can remember the recent excitements, the fun as well as the disagreements, and the minor upsets, but we need prompts like photos or music or places to help us reimagine what we felt back then. In this case, it was the hand written scribbles with sketches and silly rhymes that brought back all that feeling and the wonder at the hand that had so carefully folded, ordered and kept them.