Vox Meditantis

1247 San Fernando Road, Apartment 3B, Burbank, California

March 15th, 1954

My Dearest Grace,

I’ve been sitting at this kitchen table for near on two hours now, watching the California sun slip behind the San Gabriel Mountains whilst I try to find the right words. Funny thing is, after all these months of letters flying back and forth across this great wide country of ours, I reckon the words I need most are the hardest ones to write.

Your last letter came three days ago. I’ve read it so many times the paper feels tired in my hands. You write about spring coming to Baltimore, about the cherry blossoms by the harbour and how your students are getting restless with winter’s end. You write about everything except what we both know needs saying. That’s all right, darling. I understand. Sometimes a man’s got to be the one to say what hurts.

I’ve been thinking plenty about us lately – about this peculiar courtship of ours that never quite fits the usual patterns. Here I am, a grease monkey who builds flying machines, sweet on a schoolteacher with more books than I’ve got tools. Three thousand miles between us, and hearts that somehow found each other anyway. If someone had told me two years back that I’d be writing love letters at fifty-five, I’d have laughed them clean out of the factory.

But that’s the thing about life, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, when you’ve settled into your routines and made your peace with what you’ll never have – well, then something like you comes along and turns everything upside down.

I won’t pretend I haven’t dreamed about us closing that distance. Lord knows I’ve spent enough sleepless nights working out the logistics – could I find work back East, could you make a go of it out here in California. I’ve run the numbers like I’m calculating stress loads on an aircraft frame. But some problems don’t have engineering solutions, do they?

The truth is, Grace, we’re both too old and too set in our ways to be starting over somewhere new. You’ve got thirty-five years invested in those Baltimore children who need you. Your whole life is there – your house, your work, the community that knows and respects you. And me? Well, I’m just a factory hand who’s spent most of his life learning one trade in one place. Not much call for aircraft workers in Maryland, and at my age, learning new tricks gets harder each year.

I keep thinking about that poem you sent me – the Frost one about roads diverging in a yellow wood. Makes me wonder if maybe we found each other at the wrong time, or if there ever could have been a right time for folks like us. Maybe some loves are meant to live only in letters, in the sweet anticipation of the postman’s arrival, in the careful choosing of words that travel further than we ever could.

Don’t mistake me – I’m not sorry for loving you. These months have been the richest of my life, Grace. Your letters have shown me corners of my own heart I never knew existed. The way you tease me about my technical manuals, how you make me think about things beyond pistons and rivets and production schedules. You’ve made me feel like more than just another pair of hands on the assembly line.

But I’m tired, darling. Tired of wanting something I can’t have, tired of measuring my weeks by the arrival of your letters, tired of lying awake wondering what might have been if we’d met twenty years ago when the world seemed bigger and time felt endless.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m letting you go. Not because I love you any less, but because I love you enough to stop asking you to live half a life. You deserve more than a man who exists only in blue airmail stationery. You deserve someone who can hold you when the Baltimore winters get too cold, someone who can walk with you among those cherry blossoms you write about so beautifully.

I’ll treasure every letter, every photograph, every word you’ve shared with me. You’ve given an old factory worker something precious – the knowledge that real love exists, even when it comes too late or lives too far away.

All my love, always,

William

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved. | 🌐 Translate