As I write this, I am sitting at my desk in the back bedroom, looking out your studio across the backyard full of blue evening snow, everything is slick and crusty with ice and it is very still. It's one of those winter evenings when the coldness of every single thing seems to slow down time, like the narrow centre of an hourglass which time itself flows through, but slowly, slowly. I have the feeling, very familiar to me when I am out of time but almost never otherwise, of being buoyed up by time, flowing effortlessly in its surface like a fat lady swimmer. I had a sudden urge, tonight, here in the house by myself (you are at Alicia's recital at St. Lucy's) to write you a letter. I suddenly wanted to leave something, for after. I think that time is short, now. I feel as though all my reserves, of energy, of pleasure, of duration, are thin, small. I don't feel capable of continuing very much longer. I know you know.

If you are reading this, I am probably dead (I say probably because you never know what circumstances may arise; it seems foolish and self-important to just declare one's own death as an out-and-out fact.) About this death of mine--I hope it was simple and clean and unambiguous. I hope it didn't create too much fuss. I'm sorry. (This reads like a suicide note. Strange.) But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.

Clare, I want to tell you ,again, I love you. Our love has been the tread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight, I feel that my love for you has more density in this world that I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

I hate to think of you waiting. I know that you have been waiting for me all your life, always uncertain of how long this patch of waiting would be. Ten minutes, ten days. A month. What an uncetain husband I have been, Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus alone and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes willy and sometimes just a plaything of the Gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. Of me,put me deep inside you and go out in the world and live. Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element. I have given you life of suspended animation. i don't mean to say you have done nothing. You have created beauty, and meaning in your art, Alba, who is so amazing and for me: for me you have been everything.

After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it.Every minute of his life has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young, I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve,like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you, i know i could not do it. But i hope, I have this vision of you waling unencumbered, with you shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hoe that this vision will be true, anyway.

....

Henry

source: Time Traveller's Wife. :)