Pam,

It’s only been five hours, and I miss you. I miss your smile and your laugh and your hair and your hands and your mouth and you. I just miss you. I’m selfish to want all of you or to even miss you this much, but I don’t care.

On Friday, I left work early and drove up to see you for the first time in two weeks with the wind in my hair and you on my mind. I think about you so much, too much. I kissed you on your dormitory bed with the late evening sun leaking through the blinds and dried paint on your fingers. I professed my love to your lips and your neck and your thighs, and when I try to remember the night in detail, I can only imagine your face above mine, your hair in your eyes, and laughter in your voice. On Saturday, you bought me bagels at a little shop two blocks away while I was still asleep and we ate them on courtyard benches with fresh orange juice and I love you I love you I love you. You looked so alive as we walked through the city, and with this amazing city around us, I thought for the millionth time that I am so, so lucky to have your hand in mine. I carry your ring everywhere I go now because for the first time, forever is within reach. I tell myself that it’s two more months and then forever.

It’s so hard not having you here. I tell you that I miss you, but I don’t know if you’ll ever really understand how much. On Tuesday (or maybe the day before that or the day before that, the days have been melting into each other for awhile now), I woke up sweating and heaving and terrified that it was 2006 and my life was a countdown clock. I wanted to call you and hear your voice and listen to you promise me that you’re mine, but I couldn’t wake you because you’re in New York living your dream and I’m so, so selfish.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. Thinking about you and thinking about us and thinking about the future that I’ll soon get to call ours. I want to buy you a house with a terrace here or New York or anywhere you want to live. I want to marry you in the summer, but I don’t think I can wait that long. I want to take you to see the Pacific Ocean because you’ve always wanted to go and I’ll work at Dunder Mifflin forever if it means I can make all your dreams come true. I want three kids— two boys and a girl— but when you ask, I’ll tell you that I’ll be happy no matter what and I love you I love you I love you.

I’m terrified of losing you. You’re it for me. You’re everything.

Tomorrow, I’ll close a big sale, maybe the one that will pay for the terrace or the Pacific Ocean or our wedding. On Tuesday, I’ll go on a sales call and buy a client lunch and buy myself a lemonade because you love lemonade and it makes me feel closer to you, makes two months seem a little shorter. On Wednesday, I’ll talk Michael down and pull a prank on Dwight with no one there to conspire with me. On Thursday, I’ll dream of you and only you. And on Friday, I’ll get to hold you and fall in love with you all over again and I love you I love you I love you.

Yours forever and always,

Jim

Jim,

I don’t really know how to start this letter. It’s late and I’m sitting in bed and thinking of you, and if I were telling you these things on the phone, I think you’d ask me what I’m wearing in your wonderful low voice and you’d laugh and I’d laugh. People have this misconception that laughter is only for things that are funny, you know? Laughter can just be an expression of happiness in its simplest form; I use laughter in that context a lot when I’m with you.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll send this letter. If I had to take a guess, I think this will end up being a lot of mushy rambling that I’d be far too embarrassed to ever show you, but I think I’ll keep this, just for me. I like the idea of having a little encapsulation of this moment that I can relive tomorrow or two months from now or two years from now. I have that feeling a lot now. I want to capture everything, remember each moment. I don’t want to lose any of these memories and I wish I could remember everything. You’re always so good at remembering everything— the piece I was working on last week and the restaurant I mentioned wanting to go to a few months ago and the brand of shampoo I love and that I prefer daffodils over roses (you showed up at my door on Friday with a bouquet in your hands and I kissed you in the doorway with my hands on your face the flower pressed between us).

You make me feel like a teenager again, but even this isn’t like my teenage years. You’re so passionate about me that it scares me sometimes. I know that sounds weird, but you spent years falling in love with me before I ever realized that I was allowed to love you back, and I almost feel like I’m playing catch up, that I have to make up for the time that I lost. You’re such an amazing person, and I don’t understand how everyone else isn’t in love with you. You’re so funny and charismatic and confident and beautiful in this way that guys usually aren’t and charming and you make me dizzy with your romantic gestures and untamed passion and I don’t understand how you could love me like you do because you’re so much and I’m so little. I can’t believe that this is my life, that I’m in New York living my dream and you’re loving me back in Scranton. I feel guilty for not being happy all the time, for ever wanting more. You’ve overwhelming in the best sort of way, and I think if I told you this, you’d take it wrong and wonder and worry, so I don’t.

My classes are stressful right now, but you make it bearable. You send me a new CD mix every Monday morning and I listen to them over and over as I paint in my dorm with all the windows open and you as my muse. In exchange for your CD mixes, I mail you paintings and sketches and doodles and you send me pictures of them hanging on the walls of your bedroom and it all feels intimate and wonderful. I like thinking of you as a part of my life, a constant. I want to hold onto this feeling forever.

Love is an odd thing, the way it manifests itself in so many ways. The spectrum seems to be endless, indescribable, but I’ll try to put it into words anyway. I can feel your love in obvious ways, beneath the sheets and against my lips and around my waist. I can hear your love, in your laugh and in your words and over the phone. Your love lingers in your absence, in your CD mixes and in the hoodie you gave me (the one you know that I love that you insist looks better on me, with the sleeves hanging down over my hands) and in the daffodils in a vase on my kitchen counter. I’m not good at declarations of love like you are, but I want you to know that you mean everything to me. The future is nebulous in my mind— a blur of you and me— but I want you to know that I’m happy with you right now. I used to feel like I was waiting on a moment when everything would come together, when I would finally have it all. I don’t have it all, but I have you, and I will love you as long as you will let me.

Yours,

Pam