This is an age of disillusion, and I am told that love doesn't exist anymore - maybe, even, that it never existed. I am supposed to believe that there is nothing to believe in; I am expected to invest all my faith in the principle that faith is groundless. There is logic in it, I admit, and in moments of frustration I convince myself that behind every enigma lies a web of undeniable reason and irrefutable fact. In moments of despair, I am assured that mystery is only the manifestation of man's current incapacity to interpret the answers proposed by science.

But this is consolation for the hopeless, and that is one quality that I have not dispensed with in my old age; see, Delia, that is the way I think of myself: as an old man. I'm not old, I know, and only the least generous of observers would even deem to describe me as "middle aged" - but I am no longer languishing in the ephebic splendor of my twenties, with all my potential yet untapped and my future still optimistically unclear. While many would consider my current age - the double-digit pairing that confers no special privileges and bestows little in terms of wisdom - as comparatively young in the multitude of decrepit, arthritis-ridden seniors, whose tenacity is compounded by the ingenuity of modern medicine, I nonetheless feel I have finally been drained of the vitality and youthfulness that is specific to those who have not seen thirty. I pay taxes; I get heartburn; I resent my neighbors for playing loud music; I sneer at sitcoms and listen to National Public Radio. I have a propensity to fill any idle silence with inane small-talk and analysis of the weather, and Delia, I can be dreadfully boring.

What I am trying to say, in words encumbered by circumspection, my insecurity, my lackluster articulation, is that that the quality of irrational hoping - a characteristic particular to children who have yet to learn that there are repercussions for even the most innocent of hope- has persisted into my adulthood. My hope is inexhaustible and illogical. It transcends the boundaries erected by common sense and acquired knowledge. In fact, it is only in hope that I have ever possessed a capacity for recklessness. In all else, I am plagued by cautiousness and indecision, which you are surely familiar with as  the essential components of my character.

But these are all things you know, Delia, all things you have learned through your experience and that, doubtless, you  comprehend more than I do.  But I am new to writing letters, and this act of expressing myself on paper seems to call for some sort of introduction, however unnecessary. So forgive me my redundancy; I'm afraid it can't be avoided.

I hope, for instance, that after writing this letter I will search the drawers of my desk, locate the necessary stamps, fold these ink-laden pages and place them in an envelope marked with your new name and address, neither of which I know, and deposit it in some mailbox brimming with a hundred other letters bound for a hundred other destinations. I hope that you will receive this letter, even as I feel it changing, shifting beneath my pen from a restrained exercise in formality, an inquiry dutifully purged of any phrases betraying my own desperation and uncertainty, to a rambling epistle heavy with self-indulgence. I hope that you'll read this letter, Delia, this letter which is no longer a letter but an emanation of my own desultory thoughts and meditations, my worthless sentiments and self-pity. I hope that you will be glad to receive it, despite my prescient understanding that the letter will never leave this house, perhaps even  this desk.

Onwards, then. The cold theorizing of cynical intellectuals is attractive to those who see no merit in the abstractions of love, religious faith, and even, on a lesser note, superstition.  They are not compelled by the romanticisms that have inspired men for generations, and this man in particular. I feel it it is in the nature of people is to be quixotic, even naive, and to award credence  to what comforts; if we were really to devote ourselves entirely to reason, forbid all that does not adhere to modern standards of logic and plausibility, we would be condemning ourselves to misery.

I understand that my hope is illogical and that this love is unreasonable. I am advised not to devote so much of my thoughts and my time, my sanity, even, to what my superiors have deemed as nothing more than a chemical reaction, a physical and psychological response that the recklessness of youth has lent an illusion of intensity. I should recognize love for what it was, in addition to what it wasn't, to what it never could have been. By analyzing my past, rationalizing it, I should be able put it behind me, where it belongs, a chronological occurrence that should have no lingering effect on the present. I should be able to dismiss it as a period of my life that is long completed, long over; I should be able to grow up.

I was young then - we both were, Delia - and now that aforementioned youth seems like an illness from which I cannot entirely recover. Everything in my life seems so dull by comparison to those bright years in my twenties, illuminated by the incandescent quality which I have described earlier as the defining trait of the years preceding the initial onset of middle age. It's as if the entirety of my life  played out between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine, and now all I've left is a number denoting the remainder of my lifespan, of time separating me from my promised grave. I can't move on, Delia, if there is nothing to move on to, nothing but bills, taxes, neighbors, work, the rudiments of ordinary, loveless life. I don't think it's wrong for a man of my age to be overly-concerned with an aching in his joints or the sudden recession of his hairline (which is not so sudden, in hindsight, but merely an impression of suddenness formed by the acknowledgment of an incremental process); it is not so absurd for a man to be appalled at the proposition of his own aging, not if there is nothing and no one to accompany him on his journey into wrinkles and weight-gain.

This, I am told, is a desirable alternative to the precariousness of young love, this sanitary, mundane tedium of financial and emotional security. Things are predictable here, in this clean house and cleaner neighborhood, where my neighbors have the good grace to manufacture false smiles and stiff waves for my benefit as I leave for work every morning. Anyone in their right mind would prefer this sedate comfort to our cross-county drives in that uninsured pickup truck over stretches of endless road, pouring over creased, coffee-stained maps delineating borders long crossed and long forgotten, searching for some unfamiliar city name to appoint as our destination while black asphalt merges with black midnight sky.

That is not a way of life, I'm to believe; that is a way of escape, a childish flight of fancy leading only to dead-ends. Now, as a paradigm of middle class mediocrity, I have long since recovered from that year-long lapse of judgment and established myself as a mature and competent adult. I have built a successful and satisfying life as a professional man with a professional wife, with whom I have colluded in establishing a semblance of affection, of safe, logical, spurious love.

But this is not a love letter, Delia, and like I said before, in all likelihood it is not a letter at all. It is not meant for you, though it is you I have in mind while I write it, you who I refer to amid my tangents. It is only my sorry attempt at reconciling with my own realizations and my platitudinous observations of a remote and detached relationship. What I have gathered about love - or rather, the absence of love- is that you suffer less, but that you suffer alone. There is no unendurable pain in banal remarks traded with pleasant next door neighbors; there is nothing intolerable about wearing a tie to work and driving a mid-priced car. There is nothing, I admit, insufferable in living with an attractive, intelligent woman whose only fault is her blindness to her own emotions and her unknowingly false affection. All of this is comfortable, all of this is safe - to some, even to most, all of this is desirable. But in my case, all of this has driven me to write letters to a woman who has moved on, who has dismissed me, like I know I should dismiss her, as a fleeting infatuation.

I am sorry, Delia. Your name doesn't belong here; not on this paper, not in my mind, not in my life. I will not send this letter, but that is something I promised you. The cynics are right (but aren't they always?), and I have been put to shame.