My Dearest Shane,

It's when the melancholy and longing for what could have been get the best of me that I go to the drawer. I know right where to find the plastic bag with my hand without searching. Far in the back of the bottom drawer of my dresser on the right, that's where it lives.

I've done it a hundred times in the five years since that night in the hotel in Washington, D.C. It's a ritual that I repeat more frequently than I would like to admit to you my love.

It started with the question of what to do with my panties after that night. It was more a short-term need to hide the evidence of our lovemaking from my husband than anything else. They were a sloppy mess and smelled strongly of sex and your cologne. My husband would have figured it all out had he found them in the clothes hamper. Or so my conscious mind told me. But subconsciously there was another deeper purpose. A few days later I very deliberately placed them in the plastic bag. I realized that I simply could not destroy any remnant of that night. I could not, I would not erase what was left from our loving. And so it was that they found a permanent home in my dresser drawer.

I went there this afternoon. As is my habit, I gingerly remove my panties from the protective wrapper. The evidence of our night of lovemaking is still clearly there, our fluids intermingled and deposited there, so there's no mistaking, but no discerning just like the night when we became like one body and melted into each other for eternity. And we stay there, you and I, melted here together for posterity.

I clutch them and raise them to my nostrils, inhale the faint odor of our passion, and recall the sounds familiar sounds now etched in my consciousness. "Cum inside me my love," I moaned, "Give your all to me. I will take you deep in my womb and I will keep you there forever." And you did, again, again, and again.

But I could not keep my promise. An ocean separates us, but when given the chance, I could not leave. And now I live with that.

I place the tip of my tongue gently on the edge of the stain and savor its musky saltiness. Then, like always, the sobbing starts. I cannot help it, it just is. So I've stopped trying.

After a while, I place them back in the Ziploc bag and tuck them carefully into the drawer. As usual, slightly damp from the tears. Until the next time.

Love always,

Margot