Given to irredeemable platitudes, I must assume it not unintentional that I have often, after our parting, found myself beseeching the vague recollections of your phrasings, winks, and subtle but not coincidental contact, not suffering any true mark to have been made, any lasting indentation or impression to have been left on the body. Miraculous, to have perfected such a touch, whose very sensation, impression, and faint memory lifts away with the also maddeningly subtle, albeit temporary, and tentatively grasping and frantically releasing, retraction of the hand? That I cannot reconstruct certain, even the most casual and unassuming of sensations, that I reach toward them as in a dream from which one has been violently and prematurely wrenched, that I cannot reconstruct enough of these common but irretrievable moments even for my own sustenance may be far crueler than all that I had previously assumed myself deprived of.
In light of this, this latest request, delivered without fanfare or the slightest urgency or anticipation, still I must warn you against vagueness and that doe-eyed, trusting ambiguity of intention which so simultaneously attracts and repels us from one another. Even before commencing what promises to be a long-awaited response, before settling back into finely-drawn manner and serialized politeness, the limits of which I imagine might shake loose even your most obtuse, benevolent gestures - and so I must warn you, having only just realized myself, that yours should be distinguished as my first refusal. I expect you understand and anticipate the imbalance implicit in having stumbled upon such a novelty. Such a disparity would beg for resolution on a more dramatic field than has been proposed up to this point. That said, I myself do stand guilty of such threat, idle or otherwise, and it is in this most callous and ungracious manner that I throw down this offer, this untoward mark of distinction, or of deference. It is with a mind toward this distance, toward the steadiness and consistency of these efforts that I let these words find their way, through spires and skyscrapers, around embankments and gates, winding or sailing, dropping or set to lift on gales, whose tone and eventual implication match perhaps the higher of my own.