Sumire,
You asked me a question once, and I never answered it properly. Let me start there. Let me finally start somewhere true.
Our first day. The cave. The museum had been torn out of the world with all of us inside it and set down on this island like something discarded, and while everyone else was shouting or praying, you and I went looking for supplies with one dim torch between us, because someone had to, and neither of us knew how to sit still inside a catastrophe. There was a passage that went deeper. I said I'd take it alone. And you looked at me in that torchlight, half shadow, half worry, and asked if I'd be okay down there by myself. If I wouldn't get lost without you.
I laughed it off. Of course I did. I told you I'd yell for you if I got lost. You rolled your eyes, and we went on, and the moment folded itself up small and quiet and waited.
Here is my answer, weeks too late, which is when all my true things seem to arrive: yes, Sumire. I get lost without you. Not in caves. I could navigate this island blind and upside down. I mean the other way, the way I didn't understand yet when you asked, the way where a man can know exactly where he's standing and still have no idea where he is, because somewhere along the line you became the thing I was navigating by, and I never told you, and now I have to learn to read the dark by some other light, and I don't know if there is one. That's the truth, and here I yell. There's no wit in it. I looked for some, out of habit, and came back empty-handed.
That same day, in that same cave, I told you I was running from a throne. You remember. I'd carried that secret through years and borders and close calls, held it shut like a wound, and then a woman I'd known for a single day tilted her head at me in torchlight and I simply handed it over. I've been telling myself I don't know why I did that. I've always known why. Because I have stood in places built to make men feel small, and crossed distances you would need new words for, and never once, anywhere, felt what I felt standing next to you in the dark, which was the unmistakable sensation of arriving. You felt like home, Sumire. Immediately. Effortlessly. To a man who has never had one, who wasn't entirely sure the word referred to something real, the way you're never sure about a country you've only seen on maps. And then there you were. The whole country of you. And I stood at the border like a fool, holding my papers, rehearsing my accent, waiting for a more dignified moment to cross.
I was going to ask you to the ball. I want you to know how close it came. I had the words. I had the pause before the words. I knew where I'd stand so the light would be kind to us both, and if you're smiling at how ridiculous that is... good, smile. It was ridiculous. I planned that evening the way other men plan expeditions. And then the news of your engagement reached me before my courage did, and every carefully chosen word I'd been saving turned to ash in my mouth at once, and I had to stand there and be happy for you with a mouth full of it, and Sumire, I was happy for you. I am. Both things are true, and I'm done pretending the second one cancels the first.
I wanted it to be me. There. One sentence with no armor on it. I've written ten thousand clever ones in my life and I think that plain little five-word thing might be the bravest of the lot, and I managed it weeks too late, on paper, in a letter I'll be gone before you read. That's the whole tragedy of me, in miniature.
I loved you. Love you. I hid it inside jokes and glances and perfectly timed exits, and I told myself the hiding was patience, but patience is just fear that's found a flattering coat. What I have now is something with nowhere to go: a tenderness that arrived too late to its own appointment, and sits in my chest like a guest who's missed the last train home and is too polite to mention it. I don't know what to do with it. I suspect I'll carry it a long time. I find I don't entirely want to put it down, which is its own confession. And now the part I've been circling this whole letter, the way I circle everything that can actually hurt me. I don't want to write it. I'm going to write it anyway.
I'm leaving the Feathers. Tonight. By the time you read this I'll be gone, and leaving them means leaving you, and I want you to know that of everything I'm setting down, every rank and bond and belonging, you are the one my hands don't want to open for. I have left a family before. I left an empire's worth of expectation without looking back once. I have looked back at you the whole way down this page.
You'll hear things about why I went. Some will sound ugly. When they do, remember the cave, the man who told you he ran because staying meant becoming someone he couldn't survive being. He's doing it again. Not from you. Never from you. There is a silence in that house I cannot stand inside of, and I hope the fullness of that reaches you soon, and I hope when it does, you'll understand why the one person who felt like home is the one I couldn't stay for.
Be happy. Be so happy it's almost rude. Love him plainly and let him love you plainly and never once make him rehearse. And if some evening you think of me, think of the strange boy in the cave who was always a half step behind his own heart, and know that he finally answered your question, and the answer was yes, and it will go on being yes in whatever dark he wanders into next.
Lost without you, exactly as you feared, in no way you intended,
Sol