You and I, we walked down the beach together. Looking for shells in the half moonlight, straining our eyes through the dim light it shed on the glittering sand. We’d pick them up, the shells, laugh, and leave them where we found them. Continued onwards, looking for another shell, another reason to laugh. Remember that?

Will I Think of You, next time I go for a walk on that beach? Will your laughter be in my mind when I look at the shells we discarded? Will you actually be by my side then? I’m not sure. I hope so, but I can’t be sure. I know you can't be. But I can hope. But I know that I will be happier for having been with you, laughing for no real reason, dancing past the shifting waves in the half light.

I Am Not Spock, not a Vulcan, able to simple turn my heart off and see the tides as mathematical equations. They’re the poetry of the moon, the movements of the earth, ceaselessly washing the very shells we sought. Washing our feet as we walked half in, half out of the freezing water in our search. I thought all of this as I watched you walk away.

We are All Children Searching for Love, searching for our own shells on our own beaches. Each person has their own laughter to share, a unique shell to search for. Perhaps not as literal as our shells, not as tangible as the cold water, not at audible as our cackling into the night, but maybe more permanent. Love as a concept lasts forever. Our love in practice did not. But if we tried again, tried to grasp that concept as we grasped the sand with our toes…

Come Be with Me, I invite you openly. Come to me in person, or in my thoughts, it doesn’t matter, as long as I can hear your laughter when I find another shell that has washed up on our beach. I see it as ours, though the land belongs to someone else, and it has probably been used by hundreds of other people like us. It’s theirs too, all theirs, for that evening they shared. And it was ours, could be ours again, if you came back.

Thank You for Your Love, your laughter. Thank you for your existence that night, that lifetime ago. Thankyou for making sure I didn’t stray to far out into the waves, didn’t get completely drenched by the salty spray. I don’t go to the beach now, without you, because I always wander into the deeper water and get wet. Cold.

These Words are for You, no other person in existence. For who you were, for who you are, even though those are different people now. But it’s for all of you, everything you were, are and have been, the only person I could say “it’s our beach” to and not be lying. I don’t like lying to you. I still don’t understand why I did, back then, and let reality in to our love. I watched it oxidize, so to speak. Believe me, I tried to keep the taint away.

Warmed by Love, I believed I could cover our precious love with our shells, stop the inexorable dribble of life from blackening it. But you stopped laughing when we found the shells, and they lost their ability to hold back time. When you stopped looking for them altogether, I lost my last stronghold. I know it was my fault that you stopped your laughter, I know I too began to ignore the lap of the waves, but I have learned to live with that.

I Am Spock now, I can’t afford to be anything else. I can’t afford to be anything else but a cold form, filled with nothing but the cold of the water that soaked me when you weren’t there to hold me back. Cold from head to toe, with only one small source of heat stopping me from being ice. Thawing me so I can move my hand to write you this letter. That is the memory of you.

A Lifetime of Love exists in my mind. A lifetime of love lost lives outside it. I can’t let the cold water finally extinguish my flame of hope. But I miss our beach. I can’t go there without you, I’ll freeze, and then I wouldn’t be able to see a shell for the miles and miles of untrodden, solitary sand underneath a sky with a pale, lonely moon. I don’t want to see that.