Dear Ruby,

This is not the first time I have tried to write this letter; a letter for and about you but a letter you’ll most likely never receive.

The previous attempts were thinly veiled sentiments on your 21st and at the dawn of the new year. This letter is much less concealed about things, make no mistake this is a love letter true to the traditional understanding of that phrase.

I love you. I love you like I have loved others before you and like I will love others after you. What does that mean? It means that from my ability to fall in love with one person, I have found it easy to fall in love with many.

It has caused me great bother in the past and it’s true, sometimes, I make a mistake and what I think is love is infatuation or just an overwhelming physical attraction. Regardless, this all has to do with my dissatisfaction for the conventional way to love and be loved. Don’t worry, I’m not going to regale you with my unique love philosophy. I’m all too aware how easy I can slip into unemotional and overly intellectual bullshit. This letter is supposed to be about you.

I do however want you to understand my meaning completely. To me, love is many, many things with an excitingly small list of rules or guidelines. To say “I love you” does not require visions of a future or even a demand of togetherness, although it is preferred. One can and sometimes must love from afar for reasons not limited to physical and emotional distance. So it is with you, that I love from afar.

To me you are time-stoppingly beautiful, but not when you’re posing for glamour shots or when you have been purposefully planning your appearance with skill and attention to fashion, trends, and have a perfectly pitched or honed look. I find you most beautiful in the simpler moments. When you concentrate for example and a look of fierce determination sweeps across your face dominating your features. In the middle of a scene, on stage or on camera, especially when I am there, there is a moment where you click into another character, and you relinquish everything else. There is nothing so phenomenally attractive than witnessing someone immeasurably talented do what they love.

I love you Ruby when you’re drunk and singing in the street unashamedly out of tune and unsteady on your feet. It’s like watching someone at a mad rave without the context of a 100 other people, it’s nothing but endearing. You are wildly confident and surprisingly innocent which is a cocktail as intoxicating as ever. Like so many you have vulnerabilities you’re reluctant to show but when you do it’s because you trust so completely and without hesitation or because there is bubbling anger underneath your soft façade. You have a fairly uncompromising sense of justice about life, love, and leisure which is upheld with a steely regard.
Sometimes you can be naïve in the most unapologetic of ways but are often eager to learn and grow from mistakes you have made. You can be selfish, but what 22-year old isn’t? Now is your time, your era, your world and if you’re not at the centre of it now, when will you be? You can’t be faulted for that.

Your heart and mind are kind and warm places to visit but noisy with the beat of your unique energy and view of the strange muddled place we live. A beat that few others can match or keep up with. You’re careful with what parts of yourself you bring to the table, there is guesswork involved in a friendship with you.

In this world, one where image matters and is shaped and edited by a select few, you manage to stay ahead of the curve, the trends, the movements. You do so with ease and without smugness. You are a modern girl but not without individuality, although I would say you could afford a little more of that, or at least show a little more, I know you hide some of it. You’re a traditionalist when it comes to romance and that is something rare and precious about you. Perhaps so much so that even a letter as gushing as this could find space to exist with you rather than be cast aside and dismissed as something of an outdated and misplaced gesture.

All of this considered, you and I are from different places personally, culturally, emotionally, and more. The distance between us is wide and seems impossible to bridge even if my feelings towards you were reciprocated on one level or another. I feel we would have to work hard to maintain a balance and a sustainable relationship. The love I hold for you is delicate and untouched but not so resilient to external factors and compatibility. Neither you or I are in a place to nurture something fragile and vulnerable into something strong and robust.

It remains though that I love you and will continue to do so until whenever I don’t which in my experience and as precedent dictates almost never happens. Maybe one day I’ll have the courage, the timing will be more appropriate, and less obstructions will be in place for me to tell you, sitting across from a coffee or some Japanese cuisine. Or maybe you’ll beat me to it and a new chapter will begin.

In the service of love and sanity.

Isk.