One email from Jarvis led to another, and another, and before long his messages were sustaining me like an umbilical cord. After a few weeks he dropped a bomb on me. Luisa, I have feelings I shouldn’t have. I knew exactly what he was saying, because I felt it, too. I weighed up the consequences overnight before typing my reply. I feel the same. It’s horrible and wonderful. Let’s not lose our heads. I have a son and I don’t want to do anything silly. I wondered whether I should leave the message at ‘I feel the same’, but it felt important to say the rest. I was a package; I had a lot riding with me.
In the following weeks, I told Jarvis I’d never imagined myself as an adulteress. He promised not to put pressure on me, and said he understood that I wouldn’t see him in person because I didn’t want to get physically involved with him. He said he’d wait for me; I could take my time. He said he knew that we were born to be together, that it would happen when the time was right, and if it wasn’t right yet he would wait.
Sometimes he didn’t say much at all, he simply sent me a link to a song, a quote from a book he was reading, an image of a work he was sketching. I truly became his the day he sent me a line from a John Donne poem: more than kisses, letters mingle souls.