halcyon days.
1:49 a.m. / Friday, Mar. 12, 2021
If, in the unlikely event you read this, my darling, then maybe think of it sort of like the email I would send you, if I thought for a moment you wanted to hear from me. Moving forward, I will leave a link to this page on my diary template somewhere. If you only read one thing I have ever written since you left me, I hope it’s this letter.

Dear Becky,

It’s already turning 02:00am, so please forgive me the grammar and syntax errors, and if this ends up long-winded, or nonsensical, or sounding pretentious. Living on your own, annual leave, and lockdown do not make a great combination. Too much free time to think with no distractions. This, in my case, inevitably leads to sadness as my mind inexorably drifts to and fixates on the subject of the only true love I have ever known: you.

I bring this sadness upon myself of course. Many people will lose the love of their lives at some point, but I doubt in most cases that love remains front and centre of their thoughts over eleven years later. Especially when it was the love of their life that initiated the separation and caused the resulting pain in the first place. Most people in these circumstances, I imagine, would move on. As I myself have tried to do on many occasions, only to be met with the terrifying realisation that you are completely irreplaceable, and that attempting to "move on" without you would be equivalent to leaving the most important part of my soul behind: you, my perfect soulmate. I would come out of the transition on the other side, but I wouldn't have anything left to live for afterwards.

I have just re-reactivated all the entries in your diary from here onwards, which includes the leadup to our first date right until the end, so I could reread them, for the hundredth time, even though I’d already long ago saved all of my favourite entries elsewhere for safekeeping. This rereading both during last night and tonight was an act of necessary sadness, tinged with a hint of happiness (though not nearly enough).

[As an aside, do you remember this? When your whole life was on pause while I was quite ill in hospital? This level of missing/wanting/needing you is all I have experienced ever since November 2009. It's soul-destroying, but it's all I have.]

Entry after entry of you telling me how much you loved me, reaffirming your complete devotion to me, asking me to stay with you, promising you would be mine forever. So many times, you would write of some problem you were experiencing in your life only to conclude with something along the lines of “but I have you, darling, and that’s all that matters”. It was impossible not to feel your love for me burning through each page, and impossible not to smile because of it. These are just a few of the entries from 2009 alone you need to read to remind you what you left behind. I could include countless more from that year and the ones before it. If not the rest of the diary, please at least read these again, for me?

January
February (1/2)
February (2/2)
March
July
August

A small sampling of the myriad reasons why I spend my days missing you. I cannot believe I was ever lucky enough to know anyone this perfect. Where did this girl go? Just as importantly, what on earth did I do to deserve to lose her? I’m sure I must have done something wrong, but eleven years of desperate, frantic introspection has repeatedly drawn a blank. You told me I’d done nothing wrong, at the last proper conversation we ever had, a lifetime ago. Honestly, I don’t know what’s worse: the possibility you were telling the truth, and that I was just an innocent victim of a violent and merciless crime, completely helpless against the injustice; or the possibility you were lying, and that I have to live with the knowledge that I might have ruined the best thing that ever happened to me without even realising how, and without the forewarning needed to prevent it before it got too much, or the wherewithal to fix it afterwards, whatever “it” may have been. What was so irreparably broken about our relationship that was worth leaving this lifelong burden on me?

Sure, you changed. I would have done fucking anything to change with you, whatever you needed me to do, whatever you needed me to be. Maybe I wouldn’t have succeeded, and a few weeks later you would have told me you needed to move on anyway, but I would have felt infinitely better that I no longer had you, had I at least been given the chance to make it work before it came to that. I don’t think I’m being aggrieved by this unrealistically (although I concede that maybe I would realise this is unrealistic, if I knew what I had done to wrong you). I had by that point spent years of my life making sure years of your life were worth living, and hopefully, something very special to you. Not that I’m complaining; it was an incredible honour and the greatest privilege of all to be your boyfriend. The only higher honour I ever wanted in life was to be your husband. But after four years of what I don’t think is unreasonable to call a perfect friendship and relationship, to not even be given one chance to fix a problem between us I wasn’t even aware of? That cuts very deep. A wound that will never scar, let alone heal.

I’ve always been a sucker for song lyrics that explain things in words I could never string together so elegantly. I just lack the creativity.

Your life, painted before you /
Stolen by the most uneducated of thieves /
Her smile’s intoxicating /
So let me make a toast, to revival.

I believe in Fate. I believe we were fated to meet. However, this also means I must believe Fate intentionally tore us apart again (despite us both believing we’d be together forever), and I have great difficulty comprehending why, although not through lack of trying. Maybe, I hope blindly to myself, Fate will bring us back together some day. Your smile was genuinely the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed. However, revival comes only after you have accepted the reasoning behind what happened. I have no idea what this reasoning was, and because of this, I have been unable to raise a glass to any form of recovery. I live in hope that maybe one day I will be able to, one way or another.

I often wonder how you feel. Do you regret the way things ended? Have you ever, even for a fleeting moment, regretted the fact it ended at all? Have you ever shed any tears for the boy who, in your own words, saved your life, but whom you cast aside like the proverbial ragdoll when his usefulness was outlived? Why was his usefulness outlived? Do I remain in your thoughts at all? Do you wish happiness for me, even if only passively? Or is your eleven year silence the product of complete indifference towards me? If you replayed our breakup again, would you do anything differently, the second time around? Would you, in fact, give me that second chance I so desperately craved, and, maybe naively, believe I deserved?

Will I ever know the answers to any of these questions? If not, why not? Do you mistakenly think the answers would hurt me more than I already have been? Do you, in fact, not know the answers? Are you worried that I would become too hopeful if I did hear from you again? Are you ashamed of what you did? Would reaching out to help me once more after all this time, as we did countless times in the past to help each other, be in your eyes an admittance you may have made a mistake to leave in the first place, even if I wouldn’t think of it that way? Do you care so little about me anymore that it’s not even worth your time to dignify this plea with a response, even in the unlikely event you do happen to read it?

Do you not even know this diary exists? Even if you do, do you read it and care what I have to say, and sympathise, maybe even empathise, with what I’ve been going through; or do you avoid it, both the contents and my emotional wellbeing as meaningless to you as most other things from eleven years into your past?

I often wonder how you would have dealt with things had the situation been reversed. Maybe at the exact point in time when you thought everything was going about as well as it possibly could, to just have your entire meaning for existence ripped away from you. It’s a testament to just how much you meant (and continue to mean) to me that I don’t consider this overly dramatic. (Not that I have the capacity to even think about doing something like that to someone, especially the girl who was the centre of my universe. Even if I did stop loving you, I would have made every effort possible to break it to you gently. Given you multiple chances to change for me. If that didn’t work, I’d make completely sure that I remained your best ever friend, if you wanted that, and it was feasible. Hindsight makes getting on a high horse very easy, but I’ll be damned if I don’t mean every single word of this, straight from the heart.)

Inevitably, the conclusion I arrive at is you would not have dealt with it very well. It took me many months’ worth of words of comfort to bring you back to yourself after Mat left. You were lost, but I saw your potential. I knew there was a girl worth finding, initially obscured behind the short responses and abrupt goodbyes on MSN. I knew that, with enough of my time and care, you’d be whole again, and I knew equally strongly that you deserved it, and that alone made it all worthwhile. I feel completely safe in the knowledge that, in the end, you loved me immeasurably more than you ever loved him. Even leaving aside the blindingly obvious parallels between what Mat did to you and what you did to me, if you had the same thing happen to you twice, from someone who meant as much to you as I did, I would struggle to envisage you recovering from that. After all, I haven’t recovered, and I’m utterly certain you loved me back then exactly as much as I loved you.

Incidentally, Mat died, in 2016, aged 26. I’m not sure if you knew this but I can’t imagine how else you would have found out, even though I am positive this news will mean nothing to you now, no matter how you currently feel towards me. I don’t believe in the balancing of karma, although I will admit his mistake in cutting you out led to the best four years of life I could have ever dreamed of. Hopefully, you feel the decision he made worked out well overall for you in the end, too.

I wonder if you have since experienced any sudden loss or permanent separation like I have. Wanting only one thing in the whole universe, something that once belonged to you at some point in the past, willing to sacrifice anything and everything else to get it back, but still being unable to have it any more, through what appears to be no fault of your own. It's a painful, helpless, all-consuming feeling that erodes you, destroying you from the inside out. I want you back more than all even the most carefully chosen words could possibly describe.

There are a few things I still have from you. My favourite emails, including for example:

“Hello, my darling ^.^

I wanted to email you so you would be happy when you get home, because you would get to speak to me. You know that I am always there when you need me.

I miss you, Alex. I don't like that we've been kept apart. I need to see you. I need the feel of your arms and the smell of your skin and the taste of your mouth. I want the silky feel of your skin on mine. I love showering with you, seeing the water on you, running my hands all over you. I love you smile, your laugh, your eyes. You are perfect.

I love the way that, when we lie in bed, we fit together, like a puzzle. Sometimes, I lie awake at night and remember the warmth of you at my back, the sound of your voice in my ear as you talk to me. I truly believe I was made for you.

And even though it hurts so much, I love the pain I feel when I'm apart from you, because it feels so right to be back in your arms again. Sometimes, I miss you so badly that it feels like I'm choking.

I have never loved so deeply in all my life. I wish we could just skip past all the parts where we have to be away from each other, just to the daily bittersweet pangs at saying goodbye, and the sweet bliss of returning.

I'm sorry if this email has made you upset. I know it's cliché, but my heart belongs to you. These words are from my heart. They are your words, from your girl.

Always yours,

Beckydoodle.

*huggles and kisses* <3”

I've felt that choking-with-absence feeling for what at this point feels like most of my life.

I still have all the physical letters and cards you sent me.

I still have my favourite memories of you. Lying on a bed in a hotel in Bournemouth on a geography trip from school, before we started dating. Wishing with all my heart, with a strength of emotion I have only experienced with you, that you would be by my side right then. Knowing then, it was love, pure and whole and absolute, completely filing me in a wave from top to bottom so that all I could think of was you for the rest of the trip. I realised I loved you more than I wanted to see the next sunrise, and that was before we were even in the relationship. I told you this afterwards, and I believe that was around the time of this reaction, the sweetest words of yours I could wish to hear or read.

The first day we met. Despite my reservations of shyness and thoughts of everything that could go wrong, you persuaded me to meet you on the pretence of giving me our first real hug, and we ended up kissing, as I wanted so desperately. Just knowing how special the rest of our lives looked, from the vantage point of that wall in Victoria Common, on that beautiful late afternoon/early evening on 9th May 2006.

The holiday we spent in Ireland, particularly the day at Dublin Zoo. Knowing this was our future and our destiny, to be alone with each other, and to each be all the other ever wanted. The sun lighting up your face as if to remind me it was the only thing I ever needed to see. What I would do to experience that level of happiness again for just one more day.

The only thing that ever brightened your face more was your smile whenever we were together. You may have experienced the same feeling, but whenever I was with you, and with no trace of hyperbole, I distinctly remember the background blurring into complete insignificance every time I focused on the beautiful face of the only person in the world I could ever need to be with to feel alive.

I also remember going downstairs one night to watch a hockey game after midnight only for you to come find me about shortly afterwards, because you couldn't sleep without me. I knew right then that the place I was meant to be was where I'd just left, and I went back upstairs to cuddle you to sleep. And now I can't sleep without you, and I can't find you anywhere to comfort me. What a viciously incomplete circle.

I never remember us arguing even once. I only ever remember us disagreeing about anything at all on two separate occasions, although I admit I might be able to remember more, if not for the nostalgic halo I view the past through. Even if so, it won’t have been much more frequent than that.

Have you found this amount of love again since then, and has it ever been as pure as ours was? If so, congratulations, as from my point of view it was very much a once-in-a-lifetime experience. An experience I wish more than anything had lasted for the rest of our lives, and it would still not have been long enough. If not, do you miss it, as a drowning person misses air, as I do?

One thing I do regret, of which I could and should have done more, was not always properly appreciating your writing. Obviously, I have never been one for poetry or prose, but you were clearly ridiculously talented at it as evidenced by your diary entries that didn't revolve around me, and I should have encouraged it more, rather than just letting you get on with it because it made you happy. For that, I am sorry. I often wonder if you're writing now, published under a pseudonym I could never decipher; not that I'm foolish enough to fruitlessly search. I would expect you are, seeing as writing was your passion. I often wonder how that's going for you. I often wonder about a lot of things, as you can see.

As mentioned previously, I sleep badly. I can get to sleep perfectly easily, but I always wake up at least a few times every night. Apart from last week, when I counted four dreams of you, all positive, all involving you coming back to me, or in which you’d never left in the first place. I slept soundly until morning on each occasion. I wish I knew what caused that phenomena; I would be sure to invoke it before sleep every night. If all I am ever going to have of you in the future are dreams, then let all my dreams be of you.

If, in the unlikely chance you do read this, and if nothing else, please let me know the secret behind how you can suddenly stop caring for someone who used to be your everything. I need to apply this mind trick on myself; maybe it will free me from the binds of the past. Maybe then, and only then, can I wake up one morning and convince myself I'm at peace with the fact that I no longer have you, or even know you, and go on with the rest of my life. Even if persisting in losing myself in thoughts of you is a self-inflicted torture by this point, I think eleven years grieving should be sufficient even for the devastating loss I suffered, but without this knowledge I believe this grief will be a permanent state, like a severely debilitating sickness I can't overcome. Even though I cannot imagine you will write to me, I left my email address in the happy 30th birthday message I wrote to you in here, just in case. I promise not to respond in any way, if that's what you're concerned about, other than to confirm I've received the email. Equally, I promise to reply back, if that's what you want. Please feel free to answer any and all of the other questions above which are still burning hundreds of holes in what's left of my heart. At this point, I am fairly certain whatever you say can hardly make it worse. Not that I believe I have ever done anything to warrant you feeling particularly negatively towards me, but even a "fuck you Alex, get a grip and move on"-type response would be more useful than this paralysing, haunting radio silence.

Luckily, I am pragmatic enough to have been realistic throughout this. I have not seriously thought you would change your mind and come back since about the time of my birthday after you left, even though to this day I have never stopped hoping you would. If I had been waiting for you all this time, I would be a wreck. And the sad, jarring juxtaposition is that the rest of my life is perfectly fine. Nothing amazingly special or worth writing in detail about, but all I could ever ask for. A family who loves me, great friends, a secure job which is interesting at times, and causes me no stress whatsoever. Everyone I care about is healthy and seems happy. When I’m not thinking of you, I am happy. I am fortunate enough to own almost all of my own home. I have pride in my education. I spend my time doing the things I want to do (discounting the possibility of spending my time with you, of course). I have no health concerns. I count my blessings.

But I would trade them all in a heartbeat, to have you back.

All the love in the world, and forever yours,

Alex

X X X

PS. More lyrics that mean everything to me, and nothing to you:

I hear your name in the wind /
My collapsible heart skips a beat /
You remain in my head, only as a bittersweet /
Memory.

This needs no explanation.

back
forth

boy
alex, 33. nostalgic, introverted.

likes
family and friends, the past, feeling wanted, being alone.

dislikes
the past.

Becky's entry
older / pictures
profile

links
last.fm

thanks
host