Love Notes

I sat down with the intention of shutting everything down and hopping into bed to be really warm for the first time all day.
Instead I started sorting out emails (deleting, archiving; something that is a little of a time waster but actually is soothing to me in an OCD sort of way).  Inevitably I see ones about my brother that make me cry a little, but tonight was not the night I stopped on those.  The ones I kept coming across in a random-seeming manner were ones from him, from this man I have this dance with.
I haven't ever gotten too far away from thinking about him since we met, some years ago now, but in the last couple weeks he's been especially present in my thoughts.  Maybe it's my maternal clock, or my gray hairs, or my count-down to 30, but anyway the thought that has been re-appearing in my head is that maybe we should give it a shot, like a real shot, like we never really have before.
I read these emails from every few months over the last couple years and I felt foolish tonight.  They aren't notes, I realized, they are love letters.  Spread out it's harder to see, but then I think of him and how little he gives up, how as little as he's let me in is many times more than he's let almost anybody else in, and I think of the things I've written about him, and how he's seen me in many a situation (with family, at a party, by myself, healthy, sick, sad, happy, on vacation, at work, in a relationship, in a break up, single, single and hunting, hot, cold, naked, clothed...) and I have clarity.  Not direction or purpose, maybe, but clarity.
I don't know if we'll ever really make that leap.  Sadly, but sweetly too, I write that knowing how much I'll miss him one day if we don't.