I know you read this. In same strange way I feel your presence, your critical eye cast over my writing, careful dissemination of the style, vocabulary, sentence construction.

I’m sure you know this quote:

 

To look life in the face, always to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is, at last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then to put it away [...] always the years between us, always the years, always the love , always the hours ...

 

Just wanted you to know that I know, and that I’m glad of your presence, even such a distant one.  You may not like all this “mushy” stuff, but i don’t care anymore, i have the comfort of saying what i want to say: i miss you.  At the time, i couldn’t have done anything different, and neither could you.  We both fell victims of the circumstances, the timing, the need to familiarise ourselves with the sudden monumental changes of our separate lives.  Why did it happen simultaneously?   Now, after all this time, i feel deeply sorry that this was the situation.  No part of it was your fault – and had i to live through the same time again, i would have done what i did, i would have asked you to leave me.

 

I just hope that wherever you are and whatever you do, you are happy.  This is why i couldn’t bear to have you stay: because I knew that see me descending into increasingly worse pain, dependency and inabilities, yet not being able to do anything at all to ease it, would not make you happy.  Yes, i was selfish in that:  i knew that in the future, being the obvious reason of your unhappiness was, would be, is too much to cope with. 

But it doesn’t change the basics. I miss you, miss talking to you, being with you, miss air-crossing of our texts, seeing you coming in to the house, i miss your cooking, miss the throw on the kitchen floor, the stars above the front of your hose.  So many things have changed since.  You have no idea – nobody has – how much i would like to share all of that with you.  But you are somewhere else, hopefully happy, and – fortunately or not – one remains the same: there are” years between us” and within us, there is “always the love” and “always the hours” and i can’t be “just a friend”.  I still love you, despite everything.  Always will, i suppose.