Preface:

     The skies are gray, the rain has  hardly stopped all year--the heavens weeping for remembrance of a time long ago when poets still wrote and lovers still laughed in a world without regret and pain. With the heavens I, too, have longed for a world where love lives on despite disaster and sickness and poverty. I send these epistles to every heart-sore man, woman, and child in hopes that something might be stirred in the depths of their soul to make them remember how to truly live. How to love, or even to be loved. And if my letters touch even one soul I shall not have toiled in vain, for the knowledge--even the hope--of a changing world will be my reward.

      Therefore I beg you, look inside yourself for that bit of your heart that has not been captured by this our society of greed and lust. Try to find truth within yourself. Try, once more, to be human.

A Gentleman's Correspondence:

To my darling love,
   
       I have valued myself as nothing and thrown my affection around where neither they nor I deserved and you have shied away because of it. But before I go on remember this: I do not write this letter with the object of your forgiveness in mind. Pray, don't melt and fall at my feet after these words, but only listen awhile and hear my struggle.
      I have felt, before, of my own insignificance, but never have I been less than as I now am without you. Others have compared their love to flying, but mine is a weight that grips me to the earth so much that a single step is a labor on my heart. Never are you gone from my mind, and while my thoughts are filled with you, I know I am ever absent from yours.
      My heart is gone to you, love, and I know I must learn to be content to live without it. But, oh, my plight is not a hopeless one and I live with the ever present longing for you to see me as I am and share my heart back with me, not for your pity for me at these words, but for your own heart's relief.

           Ever waiting,
      Your adoring servant.


Thomas leaned back, took one more surveying glance at the letter, and threw it in the fireplace.

A Conversation with the Lady:

      "Love at first sight," she sighed. "Why can't it be true? I mean, maybe everyone else just saw all the wrong things first--like they were looking for all the wrong things to begin with. Of course, if you're talking about it superficially it could mean anything. For example, what if the first time you saw someone you noticed only his wristwatch, or his hairdo. All my best wishes to whoever that couple is, the 'in love at first sight--with your neck-tie' type," she said with no little amount of sarcasm. "And yet, what if he never does his hair the same way, or wears whatever it was ever again? Does that mean you stop loving him, or do you just pick something new each time you see them, so that you love a hundred different things about him but never more than one at the same time? And even if you are content loving a different thing every day, would it really be love? Would you really love him or just his suit jacket?"
       Now this is where her friend interrupted her. "I'm confused, I though you said you believed in love at first sight."
      "Oh, and I do." She replied. "Just as long as we're talking about the same 'sight'. When I say love at first sight, I mean that time when you first see the person, not their appearance, not the way they talk, just who they are. It's that moment when you first catch a glimpse through their eyes to their soul and it shows you the secret you've been dying to know; that moment when you can see their personality and passions and the things they are adamant in believing come to life; that moment when you see them go to any and all lengths for someone who's been crying all day to laugh; that moment when you first see them and you feel something tugging your heart and feel like you're falling from a great height and praying there is something at the bottom to catch you--that's what I call love at first sight."