My Margaret,

I write you a great many letters I do not send. This is another of them. I keep them folded into the breast of my coat, and I tell myself it is because the post here cannot be trusted, but the truer reason is that I cannot let you read the state of me. You would worry, and your worrying would change nothing here except to ruin your sleep, and I will not be the cause of that from this distance.

So I write the unsendable ones instead, and in those I can say it plainly. It is hard here. I will spare you the particulars. The piece of the day I hold onto is the very last of it, when the light goes and there is nothing left to be done, and I let myself picture you at the kitchen window with your sleeves pushed up and the apples coming on early in the garden behind you. I keep that picture far more carefully than I keep myself.

I am not a man who comes by these words easily, you know that better than anyone alive. It has taken a war and four hundred miles to loosen my tongue, and even now only onto paper I do not post.

I have loved you since the harvest dance, when you laughed at my poor footwork and did not let go of my hand on account of it.

If I come home, I will hand you this whole coat full of letters and let you read every last one. If I do not, then at least I will have said it somewhere, in my own hand, while I still had the hand to say it.

I am trying very hard to come home, Margaret. That is the whole of my plan and I have made no other.

Yours, always and entirely,