He Met Me in the Margins (#6)
Mid-May 1912. A violet between pages, and something softer between the lines.
It was waiting on my writing desk this morning.
No card. No note. Just a book I hadn’t seen in years — one I’d once mentioned in passing over a half-finished cup of tea, the kind of reference a person makes only to fill a silence. I remember the moment now only because I’d said, “I used to read it aloud, just to hear the way the sentences curved.”
And here it was.
The same edition I knew as a girl — leather-bound, with corners softened by use and gold lettering just beginning to fade. I ran my fingers over the cover as if it might tell me something. It did not.
I opened it, and a violet fell into my lap.
Pressed. Pale. Almost ghostly in color. Still whole, though barely. I held it by the stem and didn’t breathe. I hadn’t seen one like that since the garden bloomed last spring. And even then — they don’t grow that exact shade here.
It wasn’t from the garden.
I turned the pages carefully, and it wasn’t long before I saw them — the marks.
Tiny notations in the margins.
Not underlined passages, not corrections. Just… responses.
A short line beside a passage I once loved. A star beside a metaphor I’d forgotten. A single word — yes — scrawled next to a sentence about women who think too much and speak too little.
And then this:
“This reminded me of something you said once — about how silence can be a kind of music. I hadn’t understood it then. I think I might now.”
No signature. No flourish. Just ink in the margins and a violet folded into chapter twelve.
He had been reading where I had once read.
Seeing what I had once seen.
And somehow, instead of claiming it — he’d chosen to meet me there.
I don’t know how he knew which book.
I don’t know how he knew it mattered.
But he did.
And I, who am so practiced in restraint,
who have turned the art of swallowing emotion into something almost sacred —
sat in the stillness of my study and felt something loosen.
Not a thread. Not a vow.
Just the grip I’ve held around my own softness.
The book is still on my desk.
The violet now rests in the small silver dish where I keep pins and forgotten buttons. I have not returned it to its chapter. I don’t think I will. It’s already memorized.
There are no rules for this.
No etiquette for how to respond to a man who never writes to you directly — only in the spaces where your thoughts have already been.
But tonight, I will leave my window open a little longer.
And I will not pretend the breeze doesn’t smell faintly of violets.
—L.B.
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The Violet Letters Continue…
Stillness has its own math. It does not ask for totals. It asks for presence.