January 16, 2026

To my dearest MJD,

The bells of St. Paul’s have just struck the midnight hour, their iron tongues dampened by a fog so thick it seems the very breath of the Thames has risen to shroud our sins and sorrows alike. I sit by a dying fire, the quill trembling in my hand, to mark the thought that has haunted my footsteps through the labyrinth of this weary city.

How strange and terrible it is to look back upon this past year—twelve months spent in a ghostly dance through places that are no more. I have been a solitary wanderer amidst the ruins of our shared geography, waltzing with your memory through rooms that have been razed and gardens, long overgrown. I have followed you through the Inner Temple, and the cricketing fields, the corridors of Blackheath and dusty rooms of Christchurch. I have shared your life - and death- as much as you allowed me.

I have spent this year painstakingly embroidering a canvas with the silver threads of facts and the dark silks of events, seeking the solid ground of dates and the cold comfort of records. It was a year of bittersweet labor; each discovery was a stitch that bound me closer to your memory, yet each truth revealed was a needle-prick to an open wound. I worked with the patience of a man carving a monument out of mist, finding a peculiar, aching hope in this dance—a belief that if I could but map the geography of your absence in these vanished spaces, I might finally find the road to your side.

Tonight, beneath the flickering, sickly glow of the gaslight, I saw you. Or rather, I saw the memory of you—a shadow cast not by a lamp, but by the aching void within my own heart. You were a silhouette of silver and blue, a flickering apparition that seemed forged from the light of stained glass and the leaf of forgotten gold, gliding with a silent grace along the damp masonry of the alleyways. I reached out, my fingers brushing the cold stone where your shoulder seemed to rest, only to grasp a handful of yellow mist and the stinging scent of English lavender and lilies—a fragrance so sharply sweet it pierced the heavy coal-smoke like a phantom’s blade.

“Wait,” I cried, but the word was swallowed by the implacable rain—that soft, black drizzle that falls like a mourning veil upon the world.

You did not turn, and yet you beckoned. With a gesture as light as a falling leaf, you invited me to step through the veil, to cross that heavy threshold where the air grows thin and the clamor of the streets fades into a hallowed hush. I followed, a ghostly pilgrim through a city of “almosts.”

And then, a strange mercy occurred. As the rain washed the grime from the cobbles, the tangled labyrinth of these London streets—those narrow, cruel ways that seem designed for the erasure of a man’s identity—began to unravel. The heavy chains of names, places, heartaches and duties that have long shackled my heart, corroded and crumbled to dust. The monotonous, miserable hum of the world stopped to ring again, louder, in my head.

Yet, do not think this the final period upon our story, for it is not yet the end. Though the flesh be gone and the shadow elusive, we shall meet again upon the page. In the ink that stains my fingers and the sentences that stretch across this parchment, I shall make our paths cross once more. I shall conjure the sound of your voice in the vowels and the touch of your hand in the punctuation, for this is the only power I possess—this desperate, ink-stained alchemy—to bring you back from the silence. If I cannot hold you in the world of brick and mortar, I shall hold you in the world of words, where the mist never fades and our names are forever entwined.

In that grey zone between the living and the lost, I finally understood. I cannot catch you, MJD, for you are the light that has moved on, and I am but the shadow it left behind. But in the chasing, the maze has been conquered. I am no longer lost in the streets, for I have found the map of my own grief, and it leads, at last, to peace.

Until the mist clears forever,

Your devoted and weary .