This is not a goodbye. It is a confession, and hopefully a catharsis. I promised myself that I would never let this happen. I promised that I would be different, and better, and stronger than I used to be. That I would not get attached to anybody this time around, because it is never safe for me. Then I broke like that promise; I always, inevitably do.
There are parts of how I feel about you that I will never show you, that I do not understand. I think it is because I may never know what I was to you. I will never really know how you regarded me: if you loved me, if you will remember me. I wanted you to see me differently. I wanted you to want me around, not only as a lover but also as a friend. And maybe you did, maybe I’ll never really know—but even in the best of our days, it just never felt that way to me.
But these are not things that you “should” have given me. These are simply things that I needed—perhaps irrationally, perhaps unfairly, but that I needed all the same. And there is, as it was once written, a world elsewhere, where I can and will find these things. You were never obligated to be the one to give them to me.
There are days when I don’t know if you are lying, or if you are even real. But there was one night when I was certain that you weren’t, and that you were. There was light on the water, and your skin—everything glistened. And I knew you so well: every crevice and contour of your body, all the chaos and radiance of your prismatic, engaging mind. You told me that you loved me, and in doing so you gave me a glimpse of my own resurrected potential to love, to endure. It has been a long time since I have known, however dimly, what that felt like.
I will not soon find your equal. No one can make me laugh the way you do: you made me feel like I was worth something. I am afraid that when I am drunk, or dissociating, I will want you more than I want to, or should. I am afraid that if you asked me now for another chance, I would still say yes. I have to be better, more stable, than that. Sometimes all I want is to be close to you, and you do not want the same, and I simply cannot get my head around that.
You gave me some of the best days of this uncertain life: learning to read the language of your body, the inflections of your voice, the subtleties of your temperament. And I am eternally grateful for that alone—you were the clandestine wonder of this long and trying year. Consequently, I also have one final night to thank you for: a half-drunk, silent taxi ride, a kaleidoscope of city lights, New York’s sleep-dimmed skyline. I felt as close to you then as ever I have.
There is no right way to read this. It is, for me, as much of an artistic endeavor, as it is an effort towards communicative empathy. As you painted me, so I hope to write you: all of the indecisive beauty and subtle conflictions. If I had the skill and the perseverance and the pretension, I think I would want this piece to read like poetry. But I only managed these pages.
A day will never pass when I will not love you in my own confused and confusing way. But I am realizing now that I have a lot left to learn about myself, and that much of it will have to be on my own. But I feel good about that, almost confident, because I am starting to let go of this horrible fear of isolation that I have been harboring for so long. I will love again, because I can love, and I know that now. And I have you to thank for that.
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