Oh my love, you have embraced the apothecary trade as passionately as you do me. I know you regret that with the plague they had to shut down Avignon University. But it's okay, we shall get by. This will all be over soon, as you have foretold and you'll return to your studies in the blink of an eye.

How I love to watch you late at night as you write. You seem so incensed and consumed scribbling away with your quill by candlelight. And yet I don't complain you neglect me nor do I sigh. I know you have your heart set on Montpellier for further schooling, but can't imagine why.

You know they won't accept you, they can't take on a practitioner of such a manual trade. You've seen it and shared it all with me my love, these are the cards we're to be played. And you saw yourself married soon with children, though it won't be with me. I wept the night you confided that, distraught in misery.

Ah Michel, you're a man so detached from the emotions of others, I don't wonder you can write such awful predictions. I've seen the worst and best in you, the angst of every quatrain torturing you with conflictions. You must get truth out, or be consumed like fire holding it in. Ours is a doomed desire, you've said as much, to die out as if it had never been.

A tear drops from my eye as I believe you can't contain all that God confides through you as you look at me. Your hand still writing, those vacant eyes in a dreamlike reverie. It's hard loving someone you know will be moving on, leaving me bereft. But I'll stay for as long as it's good; as your writings taught us living for the now is all we have left.


© .Garry Saunders