I have spent the day looking in an old keepsake box filled with letters. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I ever lived in a time when people corresponded by letters rather than email or text or WhatsApp.
These are actual letters, multiple pages long, hand written, dated, stamped and mailed. They are so very beautiful. Some are banal, capturing the everyday. But even those capture a time that would otherwise be lost forever. I would love to share them all with you — but there is one in particular that has transported me to a person I forgot about. Me. In my late teens/early twenties. And one specific line from that letter hit me so hard in the gut that it took my breath away. Strange how life repeats itself.
The backstory: I dated a guy five years older than me, for five years from the age of 18. During those five years he left me several times and broke my heart every single time. And yet I loved him, with that first love fierceness that is impossible to ever recreate.
He was the bedrock I thought I needed. Actually what I needed was to find my own strength. He recognised that and left for a final time. This was the letter he wrote to me after much back and forth about whether we had a future. It’s open, raw, possibly over the top, but like no other letter I have ever received. It made me cry then, and it made me cry again today re-reading it because strangely, I find myself in a very similar place to my 23 year old self. So here it is, edited by cutting back unnecessary pages:
15/12/96 — Danville, Pennsylvania
To my dear Melissa
Well here I go. I’ve been putting off writing this letter for some time in a sort of vain hope that I could set my thoughts down on paper once they had started to settle in my head.
Let me begin my apologies to you:
I firstly never wanted to hurt you ever and if I ever allow myself a regret in this life, the hurt which I have given to you now but also in the past five years will always be a burden my heart will have to carry. I’m sorry for always having been so terribly selfish, for never really being there for you despite your being so overwhelmingly there for me. I apologise for every missed Christmas, birthday, Valentines Day, anniversary etc, etc, etc. I make no excuse for my behaviour and take total responsibility for everything on myself. It wasn’t the job and it wasn’t you. It was just my own childish self-centredness.
I apologise and this time ask you to try and forgive my behaviour over coming over here. I have acted without integrity and even worse, without any courage, but please try to believe me that my lack of courage stemmed from my hatred for seeing you hurting.
(cutting out a big chunk here)
It has seemed to me that there is a part of you that does/did not belong to me, it was the part you so unselfishly suppressed all those years to make us work. It’s the young 18 year old who I fell so head over heels in love with, watching you dancing at those parties so long ago. I feel that I have stolen from you your frivolous youth. It always seemed I could never party and go crazy when we were together and that stifled you so. It often seems the whole relationship was me stealing your youth and me giving nothing back. I tried to buy your love with gifts and holidays and things but I let you down by never giving truly of myself.
You taught me how to love. You loved me without any demands and you cared about me completely and all I seemed able to do was give this protective big brother type love and you deserve so much more.
The tragedy for me is you met me when I was so completely confused and that I met you when you were so young and full of life and so un-needing of an intense 5 year relationship.
I’m just trying to tell you in this garbled, confused letter that I’m truly sorry not only for hurting you so badly this last year but for messing up your life so much over the last 5 years.
Now let me thank you:
Thank you for loving me so completely for so long.
Thank you for believing in me though I did not deserve it.
Thank you for the most wonderful 5 years of my life.
Thank you for trying to understand why I am haunted by demons which make me do things to make my soul survive.
Thank you for trying to love my family.
And finally thank you for being so beautiful and sexy and wonderful and brilliant and intelligent and just generally awesome and for being all those things in my life.
I’ll so miss kissing you goodbye in the morning when you are still asleep and I’m going to work and you’re all snuggled up with your bear.
I’ll miss your face lighting up when I surprise you with lunch at work.
I’ll miss drinking red wine and eating pasta and going home tipsy and making love.
I’ll miss everything about you so, so much.
I wish you all the happiness this life can offer you, because I know no-one on this whole earth who deserves happiness and love more than you.
I hope you can find someone to love you as much as you can love them back. It will take someone very special to deserve you so please take care and take your time.
I hope you do all the things you always wanted to do as a youth that I didn’t let you do.
And most of all, I hope you can keep and hold onto a bit of love for me and make me a good and lifelong friend.
Love B
We didn’t stay good and lifelong friends, reader. We drifted apart. He married. I married. I somehow married another man who wouldn’t join me on the dance floor of life and who eventually chose a different path than one with me.
Perhaps I am the common denominator here. But look at that paragraph in bold. That’s what sucker punched me today.
Now aged 47, for the first time in my life, I truly feel like the person that 18 year old was meant to become. It’s taken many years and a failed marriage to realise it, but I am fully capable of standing on my own two feet. I don’t need anyone. That’s doesn’t mean I don’t want anyone. But from now on, I will only enter into a relationship in which I can be wholeheartedly me and that the person I am with, loves — and wants — me for that.
I may be too much, too full on, too honest, too open, too much of an over-sharer, too crazy, too energetic, too much of a pain in the arse — but that is me. And somewhere out there, I’m hoping there is someone who can love me as much as I know I am capable of loving them back.
I am so pleased I kept those letters. And I’d like to thank that guy who wrote those words in bold for the reminder. You didn’t realise it then, but you gave me a gift 24 years later.
