It looks like nothing more than a Christmas card envelope, a bit thicker than most, but a boxy, standard card-shaped envelope bearing a cheery, seasonal return address label, and a Kwanzaa stamp (just for the sake of being different). It slides down the metal ramp into the blue mailbox standing sentinel outside the King Soopers store. Slides away and disappears from view. Out of sight. Out of control. Irretrievable.

It is, of course, a Christmas card envelope. Sealed inside is a card complete with hokey greeting, its front adorned by three grinning, glittering snowmen on an equally glittery sled. Inside, too, is the Christmas photo everyone receives: A woman, her son and off to the side, a dog who refuses to cooperate with the photographer, standing in front of a suburban split level home. The woman's arm is around the boy, reaching out to touch the dog. The gesture is protective, as though she is holding on to all the things she loves, right here, right now. As though by doing so, the boy, who stands just slightly apart and this year less than a foot from her full height, will never leave her side. As though by keeping a hand on it, the old dog will never die. It is a snapshot of a little family, one some might call nontraditional but a unit of a size and composition that, in 2007, is almost more common than not.

But what makes the envelope fat is the third piece of paper, one no other card recipient receives.

It is a love letter. It is, however subtly worded, an ultimatum. It is a confession. It is a plea, a paper hand extending fingers shaky with hope that someone will take them, shaky with fear and sad expectation that they will be left dangling. It is a goodbye. It is one of the bravest, most terrifying things the woman in the photograph has ever done.

Once it disappears down the chute, there is grocery shopping to be done. Regular, everyday life to live. Routine tasks to complete. With the letter released from sweaty hands, with an answer forthcoming either in silence or in a response, everything is for the next several moments off kilter. The lights in the grocery store are too bright. People's faces look almost cartoonish, comically warped. Sound has a brightness, a bizarre quality that nearly elicits laughter. To walk is to float. The senses are either on razor-sharp alert or dulled by a sudden wash of rarely released brain chemicals. All is surreal.

The world tilts so because now, after years of hope, belief and unwavering faith in a relationship, a man who has been silent for months and physically absent for more than a year, this letter pushes for an answer. If it comes in silence, the belief is no more than fantasy and wasted emotion. If it comes in the form of a response, faith is rewarded. Life will never be a fairy tale but it could be, just might be, something wonderful. A relationship built on commonality with a beautifully flawed, complex, brilliant individual. A person loved not for his gender, but for the complex mix of emotions and characteristics that make him human. A person loved, however cliche it sounds, for his soul.

Either way, the letter is a beginning. If only in the form of freedom from the not knowing that binds tight.

Three weeks later, the answer is surely here. The letter does not come back. The phone does not ring. The name that makes this heart race when it appears in the G-mail inbox did not appear.

This roller coaster ride began almost four years ago. It comes to a halt not with the screams of white-knuckled fright, cries of frustration or whoops of joy that marked its course, but with the loudest sound of all: Silence.