Dear Natalie,
I know it has been some time, and I know my absence has most likely burned an irreparable hole in your heart, but I am here now. I’ve decided that I’m done running. Losing you was the most difficult and heart breaking experiences of my life. You drove me crazy, many would say to the point of madness. Your demands seems unattainable and as much as I wanted to feed every expectation you had of me, for us, I was incapable of doing so, and I knew that. I left you because I loved you too much. I loved you too much to watch you wait around for me to man up, to mature. I loved you too much to hold your hand in your time of need, all the while knowing my presence as your partner could never mend your broken soul. I loved you too much to watch you give me more than I was able to give you. When thinking about our relationship in the present tense, leaving you was the best thing I could have ever done for myself. I was finally free of the all-consuming love I had for you, I was unchained from your brokenness, finally allowed to live for myself.
You know that feeling when you get off a rollercoaster? A rollercoaster that has just shaken your insides to a state of chaos and convolution. You get off that rollercoaster and a sudden sense of relief floods your veins as your vision begins to straighten and your posture becomes aligned. This is a state of normalcy, of complacency, of comfort; this is the state I have attained in leaving you. I may be happy, and I may be stable, but when my footing leaves the present tense, when I wander into the past or beam into the future, I know I will never experience the complete combustion that was our love.
And so I write to you today, not to resurface the past or ask for a second chance, but to say thank you, something I should have said a long time ago. Thank you for loving me so hard I couldn’t keep up. Thank you for reeling me into your emotionally intertwined world, for allowing me to become so close to the core of your existence, that in holding tight you managed to slip through my hands. And thank you for trusting, in me, in us, and in our existence; I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to see it to fruition. And this is why I have been away. This is why I wasn’t there during the hardest time of your life, your mother’s death; not because I didn’t care, not because you are my past, but because I wish with all my heart I would have had enough love for you to make you my future.
Love Always,
***
Final Remarks:
Some may say that in creatively imagining a situation, with arbitrary emotions and blank statements, that I am manipulating my brain, allowing fictitious information to swarm it, and thus losing grasp of reality. While that is a good argument for some less sensible, it is not one for me. I believe that in using my mind to create a detour around unanswered pains I have been able to confront otherwise untouched feelings. Often times we sit with a feeling, sometimes related to a situation, other times not, and we feel it so hard, we allow the feeling to penetrate our heart, temporarily or permanently hardening us.
I've sat with this feeling for a while now, and I can surely attest that it has begun to metastasize as I believe my mental capacity has hit its threshold while this disease travels to more and more parts of my body, impacting my functionality and presence. I realized that this feeling wasn't one I could fix, not because of my inability, but simply because it is unfixable in nature.
And so I sat, and felt, and hurt, and hardened.
Then I thought, what if things were different?