The Sanctuary of Whispered Names

What to do when you crave more than romance. When you want dark, undying acts of devotion, unequal, unmatched. This prefaces the letter John Thomas wrote his love Mary Wickham in the Spring of 1886. The unspoken vows, promises, prayers.

My love, I must confess that I have loved you always and forever beyond reason. I prayed only for you when others might have prayed for reprieve, for mercy, for trivial things. I pray for a love that would outlast the mechanics of this life, the next life and all the candles, flowers, and diamonds we might find along the way. I pray to love you no matter the time until even the walls and the paint and the dirt forget our very names. A place where time lets go and our wordly burdens no longer battle to keep us.

Let us not pray for sanctuary, but instead, let us still utter each other’s name up through the after-life and beyond. Let us still see the recognition of the stars and the moons and all the glory in each other’s eyes, for yours are the only ones I see—be it this life or the next.

As I am not sorry for what manner I love you, in its many varied ways. I love you fiercely, endlessly and without promise of ever letting go. I will not apologize for the ways in which your name is carved in my heart or how your words etch themselves across my bones and travel against my skin in ways that no one else can manage. No one else can handle.

And if this is a sin, to love you, to want you, to need you—then let me and you be damned by that thought, those ways, and that burden forever and ever until our sins become truths and our truths become dutiful. I will kneel at the altar of your absence and pray to your being forever. Whispering your name until my voice becomes ashen dust left to rot in the ground. For a life without you would be torturous. Endless. Devoid. Worthless. Always.

I promise you this, forevermore—that no absolution will ever take you from me. There is no life I can imagine without you. I cannot wash you from my hands, my heart, my mind. I carry you in spirit, in breath, in secret. Until even death grows tired of waiting for our love and we have no option but to speak it out loud.

I want to pray on your pages and carry you with me forever. Speaking only your name, whispering it, telling it, loving it, above all others. You are my vow. Your words settle like ink, staining my skin, always. Your name and word and vow the gospel from which I pulpit.

For if others were to shy away from our love, let them be, let them go. If those of saintly values scoff and turn their face in shame, heaven will not close its doors upon us. Let them bask in our glow and our shine and our reverence, for we are our own altar amongst men. Let me be gladly ruined in this sip of devotion. Kneeling quietly forevermore in your honor, your memory, your presence, in your pool.

Until I whisper your name no more and the darkness allows me to keep the last of you as my penance.

Our love is a place I place our eternity, its not heaven echoing through me. Its not words spoken once and forgotten. Or a ring placed once to remove. It’s held in reverence, in places time cannot reach or diminish. A quiet cathedral where mere mortals cannot retreat. Where loving you is my sentence—and in that sentence, let it be life without end.

We are a garden, flowers bubbling from ancient bulbs. Where bees swarm and flutter and reminisce as they lay pollen. May no ruin find us here in god’s great reprieve.

The world could break in to a half dozen pieces, and sink and saunter and I will think of you. I will look for you, I will wait for you. For we are seeds planted in a silent garden where we water and nourish and break and bend. We grow and prosper and heal and mend. Our spirits and our names and our heart strings blend. Rooted beside you, rooted with you, in a mountain valley where light falls slowly upon us and the hands of time kneel deep, their hands turning the Earth around us until we are whole, and new and rebuilt and as one.

So that if, in this world, in our time, storms may come. We can weather them. Let them forge their own paths around us, to us, beyond us. So that when time takes its weary tolls, collecting tides, and happen to pass by our front door, it will know we were once touched and forgotten and left in ruin, but we grew. We were not lesser hearts left to rot.

We had a love that was never meant to be touched by idle, ill gotten or spotted hands. How we were meant to promise forever. The peace and hush and knowledge that two hearts learned the language of eternity and never let it go. We swore our love in darkness, in light, in crowds and in fights. Unyielding, unwavering, unchanging—no matter our plight. We forged forward in uncertainty—for if death was to seek one of us out, let me go first. Let it break the vow of uncertainty and run steadfast into my devotion. Because my love for you is not a wish, it is not a hope, it is something I want forever and always.