Re: E-mail.
My greeting to you came on a piece of paper within a book, hence it took the traditional form. However, I will concede to liking the greeting, even in the electronic medium. Hence:
Daniel,
Most importantly, I am glad to know you are home and that you have coffee that is to your liking.
This e-mail will be brief for two reasons: 1) To prove I can send an e-mail that does not rival War and Peace for length and 2) Because I am on my morning break. Since a certain author has not given me anything to work on, I am working with a new authoress that specializes in vampires of the teenage variety. She is a lovely segue for your commentary on love, which is what I will dedicate my fifteen-minute break to.
You sway from saying it does not matter if Anne deserved Frederick's love, to saying you feel she did. I have found you out, and I approve of your opinion. Your language around the Yeats, however, is what drew my attention most in this, your latest correspondence.
What if past lovers have not yet blurred together, but the misconception that a touch of bare skin can bring eternal bliss has faded? If you're old enough to realize that love is much, much more than sex, but if you still long for the press and comfort that comes from being intimate with someone you have a strong connection with? I confess to imagining as much pleasure derived from the exchange of thoughts on a couch on any given Sunday, as I imagine from nights spent writhing in pleasure.
I suspect that my elderly spinster facade is irreparably cracked and shattered?
Claire, who is about to return to fangs and brooding teenage love, but who does not think you're quite as cynical as you claim to be.
P.S. I do not barb. Daniel is a much better name than Harris Biggs-Withers.
P.S.S. I encountered an old lover recently, and I found that my hurt had faded to something akin to caring pity. A result of distance and time, do you think? And I realized that all my imaginings of the happily ever afters he lived after we ended were falsehoods. Why do we torment ourselves?