I feel time like a heartbeat, the seconds pumping in my cheast like a reckoning. The luminous mysteries that once seemed so distant and unreal, threatening clarity in the presence of a truth entertained not in youth, but only in it's passage.

I feel these words as if their meaning were weight being lifted from me, knowing that you will read them and share my burden, as I have come to trust no other.

That you should know my heart, look into it, finding there the memory and experience that belong to you, that are you, is a comfort to me now as I feel the tethers loose and the prospects darken for the continuance of a journey that began not so long ago, and which began again with a faith shakened and strengthened by your convictions, if not for which I might never have been so strong now.

As I cross to face you and look at you incomplete, hoping that you will forgive me for not making the rest of the journey with you.

I hope that in these terms you might know it and know me, and accept this stranger that so many recognize but cannot ever completely cast out.

And if the darkness should have swallowed me as you read this, you must never think there was the possibility of some secret intervention, something you might have done.

And though we've traveled far together, this last distance must necessarily be traveled alone.