Feeling a bit lost...

...he picked up his pen again. It had all been so much easier when he had been just thinking it through.

Dearest Jennifer,

Was that an appropriate way to start? Was there an appropriate way to start.

We have known each other for so long. I've been your friend, your confidant, your advisor, your jester - I've been whatever you needed in the situation. I've been so close to you and yet kept at arms length. To say I have admired you from afar is a cliche that is neither true nor false. I have loved you from the moment we met...

"No wait, scratch that line... grr... another piece of paper, maybe I should write this in pencil." His thoughts seemed to tumble over one another neither falling in place nicely nor accentuating one another. "Why is this so difficult?!"

But it wasn't that difficult. At least it wasn't as difficult as it should be, and he knew it. In person was another story. There was no way he could form the words - his tongue and lips, so loquacious when shaping the words of any trivial matter seemed paralyzed when faced with the mere idea of telling her how he felt.

"A pencil indeed." he muttered to himself.

Pencils have erasers after all, and this was going to require a bit of on-the-fly editing.

Scribble-scribble-scribble-snap!

"Broken lead." A wry smile crossed his face and he grabbed a mechanical pencil from the little jar on his desk. "Hah! Problem solved." Was it really?

A few lines later, "Viola!" He held up the page in mock-victory and shook it. Reading it over, he grimaced a couple times at particularly clumsy wordings. "It will have to do though."

He reached over to a shoebox, dusty and weathered, sitting under his desk and opened the top. One last loving look at the letter he had written - the slight twinge he felt no longer that deep pang that moves and motivates. "Into the box you go." He smiled as he said it.

There they were, the loves of his life, gathering dust with the years.