Kaushick,

If this email has arrived when I intended it to, then today is exactly one year since you kissed me for the first time.

I started writing this almost two months ago. Right now, I don’t know what our next conversation would be. I don’t know whether we would find some strange new version of each other afterwards, whether we would still be speaking by now, or whether I would finally tell you that I couldn't do this version of friendship anymore and you would say that you understood, and that would be it.

You, reading this now, know something that I don't. There is something strangely fitting about that, because exactly one year ago, neither of us knew anything either.

If you're reading this, we probably haven't spoken for quite a while. I don't know what we are to each other by this point, or what has happened between us since I wrote this in September. I just wanted you to know the things I kept hiding from you. The things I kept shoving away, swallowing or softening so they would be easier for you to hear.

I know I had that conversation with you for hours where I told you about every loving moment I had never told you about before. Now I am going to tell you about (almost) every moment of pain I hid because I was so afraid of losing you. I think you deserve to know. Not because I want to blame you, but because I am tired of hiding parts of what happened just to make you feel better or make you think I’m easier to love.

Also, this is ridiculously long. Don't be daunted by the number of pages - please read them all. I don't have the brainpower to shape everything I want to say into perfectly connected prose. I know it is super fucking long, and it might get repetitive at some point. It is hard not to repeat yourself when you write 50 pages.. But please bear with me and read everything. TBH I have a hunch you’ll lose out patience and never finish this, but alas, at least I wrote it.

So, to the beginning.

The night of November 10th. I was injured, exhausted and sitting much too close to my colleague on the balcony at the Park Hyatt. I remember being close enough to hear your heartbeat through your shirt. We were definitely sitting too close together for two people who supposedly weren't dating, although I was in enough pain from my knee that I don't think I was particularly interested in overthinking any of it. And then you kissed me. I remember thinking, almost immediately, What on earth just happened? It felt unreal. I hadn't kissed somebody in ages. I certainly hadn't expected the next person I kissed to be my colleague from my first case at my first proper job.

I remember lying in bed afterwards thinking how bizarre the whole thing was. Him? Really? My colleague? At work? This is how this happens? And I have to admit, I was embarrassingly excited to go to work the next day. There was something so fun about having this tiny secret between us. Everything around us looked exactly the same, except I could look across the office and know that something had happened that nobody else knew about. I was excited for work to end because then I could see you again.

I've thought so many times about how nice that story would have been to tell. Not to you, but to people who loved both of us. Sitting around a table years later and having somebody ask how we got together and getting to tell them about my injured knee and the Park Hyatt and how I could hear your heartbeat through your shirt. It would have made such a nice story. Maybe in some absurdly distant version of life, we'd tell our kids.

Obviously, that isn't what happened. But you know the story. You were there. And I suppose now it can only live in this letter.

The night before you left Australia, I wrote you another letter that I genuinely thought might be the last thing I would ever write to you. We had already had our proper goodbye the night before. Hours in the car crying, talking. Looking through photos. One more kiss, one more hug, one more song, one more thing we suddenly needed to say because apparently neither of us was very good at saying goodbye.

And then the next day, the actual night before you left, I asked if I could see you again. Just for an hour, just for 15 minutes, just 2 minutes. I don't think I ever told you how hurt I was that you didn't really want to come out and see me again. Even then, though, I barely let myself feel it before I started explaining you back to myself.

You've already said goodbye. He's leaving tomorrow, he has things to do. You can't keep asking for more. Don't force him. Understand him.

So I did. I wanted to give you our polaroids. I wanted you to have something physical from us. And, because apparently there had not already been enough writing, I wanted to give you one more letter. By then I had written so much to you that I could probably reconstruct our entire relationship through the things I wrote. Emails, cards, handwritten letters, long messages after arguments, things I wrote when I was happy, things I wrote because speaking never seemed to give me enough time to arrange everything properly.

That last one, though, I deliberately kept short. I remember thinking that if it really was the last thing I ever wrote to you, I wanted you to see nothing but love. I told you that if you ever forgot how much I loved you, you could ask me again and again. I told you that despite everything, despite how much it had hurt, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. I meant it. But apparently I was wrong about that being my last letter.

But this one is different. I don't need to write you another letter proving that I loved you. You have enough evidence of that to last a lifetime. Everything I wrote about how proud I was of you, what I admired in you, what you gave me, what I would miss, how much I loved all your quirks and habits and joys and frustrations and worries, was true, and still is.

This letter is for the other half: the things I didn’t write. The things I softened, the things I swallowed, and the things I translated into your perspective before I ever allowed myself to experience them fully from mine.

Because there is something I don't think you ever completely understood.

Loving you became so fucking hard for me.

And perhaps part of the reason you don't fully know how hard it was is that I was so terrified that, if you knew, you would leave me faster.

That is one of the saddest changes in our relationship when I look back at it now. At the beginning, one of the things I loved most about you was how safe I felt explaining myself to you. You were receptive. You listened. You were perceptive in a way I hadn't expected, and there were parts of my inner world I was used to worrying would be too much for somebody that you seemed genuinely interested in understanding. But somewhere along the way, the person I once felt unusually safe sharing all my thoughts with became the person I was most frightened to explain myself to.

If I missed you, I would first ask myself whether I had already asked for too much of your time. If something hurt me, I would calculate whether that night was a good night to bring it up. If we finally had a date after barely seeing each other, I would think, Not tonight. Don't ruin tonight. If you were exhausted, I would tell myself to wait. If I was crying, part of me would worry that if you saw the full extent of it you would look at me and think, I can't keep doing this.

There were so many times when what I actually wanted was comfort from you, and instead I found myself managing your experience of my pain. You knew I was hurting. I don't think you knew how much, because I was always trying to make my pain easy enough for you to stay.

There were so many times, both while we were together and after we ended, when I cried until I felt completely broken into pieces. I would be so fucking miserable, and in those moments I would think about the person I fell in love with at the beginning. And I would sit there and wonder what would that Kaushick feel if he could see me like that. Would he be horrified that he had allowed himself to treat me in a way that eventually left me this broken? Would the person who had held me so tenderly at Brighton Beach, at the vineyard, who had his arms around me at Bondi, feel any pain knowing that I was now on the floor crying because of him? Would he believe that he would one day be the reason I was so broken?

More than anything, I wanted to run into the arms of that version of you. I just wanted to tell the Kaushick from the beginning what had happened to me, how much everything hurt and how completely shattered I felt, I just wanted to whine and cry and complain to him, and have him gently hold me, kiss my forehead and let me cry until I felt safe again. I wanted comfort from the person I had once felt safest with. I wanted the version of you who had been so gentle with me to look at what I had become and care that I was hurting.

But that was the most horrible part. The person I wanted to run to was you, but not the you who actually existed anymore. I was longing for an earlier version of you to protect me from the pain the later version of you had caused. And every time I imagined going back into his arms, I eventually had to remember that I had nowhere to go, because that person did not exist anymore.

--

Sometimes I think you could chart the deterioration of our relationship through my Notes app. At first it contained nice things. Places I wanted to go with you. Things we had talked about. Little plans. Conversations I wanted to remember.

Then slowly it became drafts. Long-ass messages explaining why I was hurt. Notes about conversations we needed to have. Different ways of phrasing the same feeling because I was trying to find the version that would make you understand without making you feel attacked. Things I wanted to say to you but wasn't sure I should.

And I remember looking at it at some point and thinking:

Wow.

This sucks.

Because I had promised myself something before you. I knew what it felt like to become consumed by a relationship until I barely recognised myself. To spend more time thinking about the relationship than living my own life. To be so preoccupied with whether somebody loved me, wanted me, would leave me, was upset with me, that the rest of myself slowly disappeared. And I had told myself:

If I ever feel like that again, I am leaving.

If a relationship consistently makes me more unhappy than happy, if I stop feeling like myself, if my entire emotional world starts revolving around somebody else's behaviour, I am leaving.

Guess I never learn.

Perth is actually one of the strangest periods for me to remember because I've told you before that it was one of my favourite periods of our relationship. And that is true in the way I loved the routine. I liked knowing I would hear from you in the morning. I liked knowing we'd speak at night. There was something reassuring, repetitive, and just, well, normal.

And I know you tried. I need to say that because I don't want you to read the rest of this as me rewriting you into somebody who made no effort. You worked ridiculous hours. You flew back and forth. You called me when you were exhausted. I know our arguments hurt you. You told me there were times you cried afterwards. I know Perth was hard for you too. My pain does not erase your effort. But your effort does not erase my pain either.

Perth was fucking hard for me.

I felt like I was constantly negotiating for things that, to me, felt so small. I wanted to see you for more than a couple of hours. I wanted time with you that didn't feel squeezed into whatever remained after everything else. I wanted to stop feeling like every other part of your life got placed into the calendar first and then I got whatever shape of space was left.

I remember Fridays in the office. I would actually look forward to going into work because you were finally back in Melbourne.And then sometimes I would barely see you. You would tell me you were so busy that you didn't have time to come over to my desk and say hello. And I would tell myself, Of course. He's busy. We worked at the same place. I knew what our jobs could be like.

I didn't really want five minutes. I wanted you to think:

Soph's here.

I want to go see her.

That was what I could never explain properly. So many of the things I asked you for weren't actually about the thing. It wasn't the message. It wasn't the five-minute walk. It wasn't the date being planned three days earlier. It was the desire underneath it.

I wanted to know that you remembered me without being reminded to remember me. I wanted to know that you wanted to see me without me first having to establish that I wanted to see you. And yes, you could do those things after I asked. I know you tried. But then I would be left with this horrible little question:

Would this have happened if I hadn't asked?

I also remember the garden party with Gavin. God, I hated that day.

I wanted you to come over and say hello. I wanted to play badminton with you. I wanted to go for a walk with you. Instead I watched you talk to everybody else while barely coming over to me, practically ignoring me, and I felt so fucking stupid for caring as much as I did.

I wanted to leave early. And then that became another argument because I wanted you to leave too, and you didn't want to.

We've already gone over that argument. I don't need to prosecute it again.

Looking back, I can see my side differently too. I didn't have the work friendships then that I have now. I didn't have my own circle of people I genuinely wanted to spend the evening with, so of course I was orienting myself towards you. If the same thing happened now, I would probably be off with my own friends having fun and care much less about whether you came to have conversations with me or wanted to stay longer than I did. That's something I needed to learn.

But I don't think learning that now means I have to humiliate the girl I was then. She wasn't asking to be the only person in the room you cared about. She just wanted to look across and know that the person she cared about was also happy and keen to spend time with her, which I didn’t feel.

Even becoming your girlfriend somehow carried the same feeling. By February I remember thinking, What are we actually doing? When are you going to ask me? I didn't need anything grand and I wasn't waiting for some ridiculous gesture. I just wanted a moment that felt like you had thought about it. Something I could remember, a date that belonged to us, where I could feel that you had put thought into preparing it.

Then we had that conversation after QueenVic Market. I was telling you that if we were genuinely going to attempt the MBA, we needed some foundations before you left. We needed to be more integrated into each other's lives. People around us needed to know. We needed some kind of support system around the relationship rather than keeping it in this strange little bubble.

And then, in the car, after I'd essentially just raised the issue myself, you asked whether I wanted to be your girlfriend. I was quite gobsmacked. Really? After the serious conversation in which I had essentially just explained why I was upset that we weren't properly established as a couple, while I was still clearly upset? The whole thing felt so forced.

I wanted the desire before the request. I didn't want the question because I had successfully extracted it from you. I wanted the stupid little gesture. I wanted to feel pampered for five minutes. Cared for, chosen. I wanted to know you had thought about it when I wasn't there shoving it down your throat and had decided: I want to ask Soph to be my girlfriend. Side note: EVERY TIME you asked me had been horrible. The one other time was literally in the back seat of your car at midnight. I was so disappointed. And what’s worse, when it came down to it in May, AFTER you said you were unsure about me, I would’ve tried anything to keep us. I literally told you, if you asked me then, I would say yes. That was in the least ideal, least romantic, horribly degrading situation there could be. And you still couldn’t open your damn mouth.

Anyway, I digress

Even the week before Singapore, we argued. I remember being so upset. And then telling myself:

It’s okay.

Put it away.

We're going to Singapore.

We're finally going to have proper time together. Don't ruin it.

So I swept all my feelings under the rug. And Singapore was beautiful. One of my favourite things about the entire trip was so embarrassingly basic that it almost makes me sad now - I could hold your hand - that was it. I could walk around in public holding your hand and hugging you without first looking around to see who might recognise us. I could stand beside you like I belonged beside you. People could look at us and simply think:

They're a couple.

I had never really had that before. And somehow I could only properly have it with you in another country.

And there's one other thing about Singapore that I don't think I've ever told you. Do you remember when I asked you what your favourite part of the trip was, and the first thing you said was visiting NUS with me?

I don't think you realise how much that meant to me. To be frank, I really hadn't expected that to be a highlight for you. We were both so exhausted that first day (not to mention you were also sick), and for me, going back to NUS was just something personal and nostalgic. But for you, it was just a university you'd never been to before, nothing particularly fancy or exciting compared with everything else we did in Singapore.

And yet, that was the first thing you thought of.

I think what made me so happy was that it made me feel like you genuinely cared about seeing a part of my life you hadn't been there for. I got to show you where I used to live, tell you about the things I'd experienced and struggled through, and share a little piece of who I was before you knew me. And somehow, getting to know that part of me had become one of your favourite things about the trip.

I don't know if you remember saying that, but I do. It made me feel so incredibly seen and cherished. I think it was one of those little moments when I felt that you didn't just love being with me, you genuinely wanted to know me. And I want you to know that that made me feel so loved.

Then, at the hotel, we told them it was our anniversary to get the free dessert, and they put “Mr and Mrs Maheshwaran.” I remember laughing. And in my head I also thought:

I don’t know if we’re ever going to get there, so I suppose it's kind of nice to borrow it for a few days.

And there was something else around that time that I want to own because I don't want this letter to become a version of our relationship where I was always reasonable and you were always wrong. The argument when you were at the pool before you went to Rich’s with your brother was stupid. I can see that now.

I was upset that you were having a nice time with your brother when I wanted to see you that weekend. I knew I wouldn't see you for two weeks. I wanted more care and attention from you, and somehow that feeling attached itself to whether you answered a message at the pool. That wasn't fair. I could have handled that differently.

There were plenty of moments when my fear made me push harder than I should have. There were times I should have given you space. There were arguments I prolonged because I desperately wanted resolution now when you needed time. There are things I would do differently. I have told you that before.

But I think I spent so long after the breakup looking at everything through that lens that I lost the other half. I became so good at asking what could Soph have done differently? that I stopped asking what was it actually like to be Soph?

After Singapore, there was the dinner with Rich and Lawrence. I remember thinking about that dinner so much because I wished you would tell them about me. I've told you that already, so I won't go through it all again. But what mattered was what came after. You messaged me and told me you genuinely thought there were ways we could make the MBA work. You talked about how we could find times to call. You talked about the fact that you might actually have more flexibility than we assumed. How we can see each other at Thanksgiving.

You told me that when you came back from Perth, we would sit down and make a concrete plan. A plan for long distance. A plan for integrating each other into our lives. A plan for people around us knowing. I don't know whether you remember that promise with anything close to the significance with which I remember receiving it. To you, perhaps it was just:

We'll talk about it later.

To me, it became somewhere to put my fear. Whenever I panicked about Philadelphia, I could tell myself:

We haven't figured it out yet because we haven't sat down yet.

He said we'll make a plan.

He said we'll work it out.

Then you came back to Melbourne. And the conversation never happened. I don't even remember exactly why. I think partly because we finally had dates again, and our dates were so fucking scarce that I became afraid to bring up anything serious during them. I didn't want to ruin the mood. How sad is that? The conversation that was supposed to determine how we would survive the next two years became something I was afraid to discuss because I didn't want to ruin one of the few evenings I actually got with you. But then again, for reasons that I may never know now, you didn’t bring up all the things you promised to talk about either.

And then there were all the little plans. Remember the cabin in the woods? The hot springs? There were so many things you mentioned that probably lived in your head as passing ideas. They didn't live that way in mine. You know how my brain works. I remember. I anticipate. I start imagining the thing before it happens.

So when you said we should do something, I stored it away as something that would exist in our future. And then so many of them never happened. I don't think you knew how often I was disappointed by things you had probably forgotten you ever promised.

And then there was the scholarship. We have talked about this period so many times that I almost don't want to write about it again. But there is something about those weeks I still don't think you fully understand. I was fucking terrified. Those two weeks in Sydney was horrific for me.

I kept asking you for something to hold onto. Anything. Not a guarantee that two years of long distance would work. Not a demand that you turn down Wharton. I was just begging you for some faith. Some sense that you and I were going to stand on the same side of what was coming.

And what I kept getting back was:

I'm sad too.

I knew you were sad. I could see that you were sad. I never doubted that the thought of losing me hurt you. But inside me there was this increasingly desperate response:

And then what?

You're sad. I'm sad. We love each other. Philadelphia is far away. Okay.

What are we going to do?

Give me something. Give me a plan. Give me a sentence. Give me anything that tells me your instinct when faced with this problem is to reach for my hand and say:

I don't know how, Soph. But let's figure it out.

Even during those weeks in Sydney, when things between us were already going so badly, I was still trying to figure out how we could make it work.

I know I told you that I was even reaching out to a friend of mine who was in a long-distance relationship, asking her how they made it work. I told her there was someone I was seeing, that I really wanted things to work out between us, but that I was so scared and didn't know how. She shared her advice with me, and I remember feeling so alone, trying to figure out how to hold on to you when I couldn't feel that same commitment from you.

I also remember that weekend in Sydney when we took the ferry to Rose Bay. You didn't want to get off the ferry, and all I could think was, Please, I just want to see this place with you. This might be the only chance in our lives we’ll get to see it together.

Eventually, you came off with me, and we stood along that walkway overlooking the water, watching the waves crash against the rocks. I'd been there before and had done the coastal walk. It was beautiful, and if I'd had my way, I would have asked you to walk it with me. But you didn't want to.

I remember looking at you there, and throughout the ferry ride back, thinking about our first boat ride back from Manly. And I kept thinking, This might be the first and last time I ever get to be here with you.

Even while we were together, I was already afraid I was living through moments I'd never get to have with you again.

On the uber ride back from the airport when we returned to Melbourne, I told you I needed you to give me faith. I needed confidence from you. And you said yes. You told me you would.

Then Sunday came. And instead of giving me the confidence you had promised me, you told me you didn't know whether we should do this anymore. I cannot describe how much that felt like being stabbed in the heart. I had spent weeks asking you to help me believe we could survive the distance. And your eventual answer was that perhaps we shouldn't even try.

Then you left me there with that. I went to a wedding to witness and celebrate someone else’s love while I was still bleeding from the knife the person I loved had just stabbed me with and twisted. I remember being at the wedding, and I watched the people dancing on the dancefloor, and I wondered if we will ever have the chance to be each other’s Plus One in the future. That night, you flew back to Perth. And I was left in Melbourne trying to understand how we'd gone from we'll make a plan to maybe there shouldn't be a we.

Those final weeks before we actually ended are probably the part I have sanitised most in my own memory. There were moments when I would lie beside you and think, How am I lying next to somebody who has already told me he thinks we should end? Every bit of distance became enormous because there was no longer a secure relationship underneath it. A delayed response wasn't just a delayed response. A night when you seemed less affectionate wasn't just a tired night. An argument wasn't just an argument. Everything seemed capable of becoming evidence in the larger case for why we shouldn't be together.

That is what I meant when I kept telling you I didn't feel safe. I wasn't asking you to reassure me more convincingly inside a relationship that remained permanently under review. I wanted the relationship itself to stop feeling permanently under review. I wanted to know that a bad conversation could just be a bad conversation, that me being upset didn't automatically make our entire relationship less viable, that I could tell my boyfriend something hurt without wondering whether saying it would make him want me less.

And through all of this, time became its own problem. I want you to understand this because I think, from your side, it probably looked as though there was simply no amount of time with you that would ever satisfy me. Another twenty minutes. Could you come to my house half an hour earlier? Could we have this Sunday? Fifteen more minutes before you went home. One more hour before you left? But I hope you understand now that the level of engagement wasn't my natural baseline for how much time I needed from somebody.

Time with you had become scarce. In one sense, it had always been scarce. We knew you were leaving Australia. For most of our relationship, that wasn't necessarily an expiry date on us. I didn't know what would happen after you left, and for a long time I believed we might try long distance. But it was an expiry date on this physical version of us.

There were only so many months when I could fall asleep beside you. Only so many Fridays when we would be in the same office. Only so many times I could get into your car after work, sit beside you in a park, spend a Sunday with you or reach across and touch you without first getting on a 24-hour flight. Even if the relationship continued, that version of it was ending. Then, in roughly those last two months, another layer was added. I wasn't only counting down until you left Australia anymore. I was living with the knowledge that you weren't even sure whether you wanted the relationship itself.

Of course time became intense for me. I remember literally negotiating with you over whether you could come to my house thirty minutes earlier and feeling pathetic even while I was doing it. Thirty minutes. Why did thirty minutes matter so much?

I wanted twenty minutes with you at night in the Sheraton. I used to ask for this all the time. Not twenty minutes while you were working and I happened to be sitting beside you. Not while you were stretching, checking something on your laptop, replying to somebody, getting ready for bed or doing something else at the same time. I wanted twenty minutes where neither of us was doing anything else and I could just talk to you. And somehow that felt so hard to get.

I knew how ridiculous our hours were. I knew you were exhausted. I knew sometimes it was midnight or one in the morning and you still needed to stretch or sleep or finish something for the next day. I would hear about other couples at BCG who still managed to protect a little bit of time for each other and then immediately tell myself I shouldn't compare. Every relationship was different. Maybe I needed to understand you better.

But another part of me kept thinking: those couples, as far as they know, have time. There will probably be another Tuesday. Another month. Another Sunday when work calms down. We knew there was a date coming when I wouldn't be able to sit beside you anymore, not because of long distance, but because you didn’t even want this.

You knew I used to set my alarm fifteen minutes earlier when we slept together. I told you about it enough times. Even if we'd argued until two or three in the morning and I desperately needed the sleep, sometimes I would still wake myself up before you because I wanted those fifteen minutes.

I didn't need you to talk to me. You didn't even need to be awake. I just wanted to feel you beside me. I did the same thing at night. You were always much more eager than I was to turn the lights off and actually sleep, which may have been the more sensible thing to do when both of us were chronically sleep deprived. But almost always, after you fell asleep, I would make myself stay awake in the dark and hold you, because I couldn't quite bring myself to let the night disappear.

I would lie there on the right side of the bed, where I always slept, with my arms wrapped around you and my head resting against your shoulder or your chest. Sometimes I would tilt my head up just enough to look at the silhouette of your face illuminated by the faint light of the alarm clock. I would lie there looking at you, trying to remember exactly what you looked like from that angle. The shape of your nose, your forehead, the way your face looked when you were completely asleep. Sometimes I wanted to move a little closer, or lift my head so I could see you better, but I was always afraid of accidentally waking you up. So I would stay as still as I could, with my head against you, looking up whenever I could, trying to carve the sight of you into my memory.

And there was one thing you used to do that I loved so much.

After you'd finished all your stretches and finally got into bed, just before we turned off the lights, you would lie down, extend your right arm towards me and say, Come here.

I don't know if you realise how much I loved hearing those two words from you.

And I would move towards you, tuck myself into your arms and rest my head against your chest. I loved how, after an entire day of work and exhaustion and whatever else had happened, there was this one tiny moment when you would reach for me and ask me to come closer.

And I felt so safe there.

Sometimes, after you'd fallen asleep, I would think about how much I wanted to remember those moments. I wanted to remember how your arm felt around me, how your chest rose and fell underneath my cheek, how your face looked in that faint light. I wanted to remember what it felt like to be invited into your arms and know that, at least for those few minutes, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

And I would lie awake there for as long as I could, even when I was exhausted, because I knew that once I closed my eyes, another night beside you would be over.

I do not think you ever realised how much of my loving you happened through all these tiny calculations that you probably never even noticed. There was one night when you said you needed to wake up early the next morning to iron your shirts before work. So the next day, while I was waiting for you to come home, I ironed every single one of your shirts, just so you could spend an extra ten minutes with me the next morning.

It was not necessarily ten more minutes of lying beside you. I just wanted ten minutes when your eyes could be on me instead of your shirts. Ten minutes when talking to me could be the only thing you were doing, rather than something you fitted in while you ironed, worked or thought about everything else you needed to do. I wanted ten minutes when I was not something in the periphery of your attention. I just wanted your undivided attention for ten minutes.

I remember being so giddy at the Sheraton before you came home, I would look through the peephole and wait to see you turn the corner at the end of the hallway, just so I could open the door and see you a little earlier. If I had it my way, I probably would have waited for you outside the elevator, because then I could have spent the thirty-second walk from the elevator to the room with you too.

Sometimes you would message me to say you were leaving the office, and I would calculate how long it would take you to get back. I would make sure I had my robe on before you arrived. Because a) I could hug you without letting your dirty work clothes touch my pyjamas. But b), and much more importantly, I wanted to be ready to hug you the moment you walked through the door. I did not want you to come in and stand there while I put on my robe, because that would mean I could not hug you the second I saw you after I had spent the entire day waiting for you to come back to me.

I would literally wait the entire day for those ten minutes between you walking through the door and opening your laptop to get back to work. I wanted to have my robe on already so that I could go straight to you, wrap my arms around you and bury my face in that little nook between your collarbone and your neck. I would run my hands through your hair and breathe in that cologne of yours that somehow, miraculously, still smelled so strong at the end of the day.

I have smelled that cologne elsewhere since you left, but it has never smelled quite the same. Even on you, it smelled different when you first put it on in the morning compared with when you came home at night. By the end of the day, it was no longer just the cologne. It had mixed with your skin and your warmth and somehow become your smell. I do not know how else to describe it. It just smelled like you.

I would bury my face there and breathe you in, and for those five seconds with you in my arms, I felt so completely safe. For those five seconds, I felt like I had everything I needed right there around me. I had spent the entire day waiting for you, and then you were finally home and I could hold you.

Sometimes I would even have this tiny debate in my head about whether I should hug you immediately or let you put your bags down first. I wanted to hold you the second you walked in, but even in that moment, part of my mind was thinking about your back. I did not want you to have to carry your bag for even a few seconds longer than necessary. I wanted you to put it down and let your back rest. But at the same time, I did not want to wait those extra five seconds before I could have you in my arms.

And I loved how, sometimes after I hugged you, you would give me those three little kisses. You would kiss my forehead, then my right cheek, and then my left cheek. At night, I usually would have already done my skincare, so I would feel a little bit awkward and would not really look you in the eye. And then, when you did the same thing again in the mornings, in my mind I would be like, Don’t kiss my makeup off. But I loved it either way. It was just this little piece of you, this little ritual you did. I don’t even know if you still remember it.

Sometimes I dialled all of that down too. Instead of waiting by the door, I would already be in bed by the time you got back. I remember how you would come over to me and, because your back meant you could not bend down properly, you would kneel beside the bed until your face was close to mine. Then I could reach for you and hug you from where I was lying, with your face right beside mine.

Those moments were so small. Sometimes they only lasted five seconds before you had to put your things away or get back to work. But I had waited the whole day for them. They were the moments I thought about while I waited for you to come home, and they were what kept me going.

Oh God, I did so many stupid things when I was loving you. Do you remember that letter I wrote you in Perth? I think some part of me already had a hunch that it might be the last time we would ever both be in Perth. I did not have much confidence that we would last. Mainly, I just could not tell how much you wanted us, and I did not want to pressure you by constantly asking. But Perth had been such a significant part of everything we had gone through, and I had this feeling that I needed to take it all in because I might never get to experience it with you again.

On one of my last days there, I took myself around the city and wrote that letter to you everywhere I went. I wrote it on the bus. I wrote it outside the apple strudel shop. I wrote it in the city centre, and I wrote it at Kings Park while I was chasing the sunset. It was so stupid, but in some weird way, it felt like I was actually seeing Perth with you. You were not there, but the entire time I was seeing Perth, I was thinking about you. So somehow, in my head, that meant I was seeing it with you.

I remember sitting at the top of the hill at Kings Park and watching the sunset. There was a couple sitting in front of me on a picnic blanket with their dog, and I just started crying while I was writing the letter. I watched the sun go down and did not want to leave, because I had this horrible feeling that I would never, ever get to see Kings Park with you.

I was listening to The Garden by JJ Lin. If you ever care to look it up, you can find the English translation. There is a part about how the love somebody gave you slowly made your whole body feel lighter and happier, and how that person came into your life and took away the loneliness you had felt before. Then there is a part about the golden light reflected in the lake looking like the warmth of their smile, and how they slowly made you a better person. Your heart becomes bigger because of love. You laugh, you cry, you feel almost drunk sometimes, but somehow it also makes you feel awake. It feels like they landed a kiss on your heart.

I know that is probably not the best translation, but when I was listening to it, I kept thinking about how I had felt during the months we had been together. I thought about this enormous amount of love I felt for you and how light and alive it had sometimes made me feel. But at exactly the same time, I also had this feeling of, This is not going to last. I was sitting there feeling all of the love I had for you and grieving the end of it at the same time, even though it had not ended yet.

And then I wiped my tears away, took the bus home and gave you the letter. You read it for about five seconds before you went to bed. I do not even mean that in an angry way (or maybe a little). I just think it is a little bit sad and almost funny that I had carried that letter around the whole city with me. I had written it on buses and outside shops and while crying at Kings Park, and then I handed it to you, and you had no idea how much had happened inside me while I was writing it.

I did something similar when we were in Sydney in April and I wrote you that other letter that I eventually emailed to you. That night, I finished my BD early and decided completely on a whim that I wanted to chase the sunset again. I ran to Darling Harbour because I wanted to sit there and write the letter. I wanted to take a photograph of the sunset and show it to you because, during all the time you had been working in Sydney and throughout the two weeks I had been there, we had never watched a sunset together.

So I ran to the harbour. And, like so many other times when I have tried to chase a sunset, I did not make it in time. Even when I got there, it was not as pretty as I had imagined it would be. I still took a photo of it. I just never showed it to you.

I do not know. That is just how I loved you. I wanted to take a photograph of the sunset and show it to you because then it would feel a little bit like I had watched it with you. I kept trying to bring you into all these moments you were not there for, because the whole time I was experiencing them, some part of me was wishing you were beside me, but really, a bigger part of me grieved the fact that what I wanted may never happen.

I think the part that breaks my heart now is that I was so carefully collecting those tiny seconds because the larger pieces of time I actually wanted felt almost impossible to get from you. By the end, I was literally fucking begging you to spend more time with me. I would have given anything to have one weekend with you in Sydney again. Not some grand holiday or elaborate plan. I just wanted one uninterrupted piece of time when I did not have to watch the clock or wonder when you needed to leave.

Even when I waited alone in the cold at Melbourne Central after Drummond’s farewell, I was not angry that you had gone. I just wanted you to perhaps just leave thirty minutes earlier so that I could take an Uber home with you. Thirty minutes sitting beside you in a car felt worth waiting alone in the cold for. Later, when I started attending some of those farewells myself, I realised that anyone could go. People who barely knew the person would come along and hang out. Nobody had ever told me that, and you had never asked whether I wanted to come.

I also remember you telling me that you and Angus were planning to go to a club after Josh’s farewell, and I thought, Okay, you want to spend that night with Angus. It was only when I actually went to Josh’s farewell that I realised everyone there had been invited to the club. Random people who did not even know Josh very well asked whether I was coming. But you had never asked me even before we ended things if I wanted to come along.

It was not that there was no room for me, or that my being there would have taken the night away from you and Angus or Josh or Drummond. There was room for everyone. You just had not thought to include me. I remember having this horrible little realisation of, Oh my god. I am trying so hard to find any possible way to spend a little more time with you, and even when I could so easily be beside you, it does not occur to you to ask me. I did not want to force myself into your plans. I just wanted to cross your mind.

I remember that last Tuesday in Sydney too. It was the first and only night during that entire case when you asked me to have dinner with you, and it happened to be the one night when I could not because I had a team dinner.

That night, you and Mia went to Fabbrica, and when I was upset at missing out on dinner with you, you said, “Well, it’s just dinner. These things happen. Why would you be upset?” And yes, it was just dinner. But by then, nothing felt like just anything to me. In my mind, it was probably the last chance I would ever have to eat dinner with you in Sydney. I could already feel our relationship falling apart, and I was so desperate to grasp onto whatever was still there. To you, it was one dinner that did not happen. To me, it felt like the last dinner we could ever have had together in Sydney for the rest of my life.

That was why I still sat beside you for the rest of that Tuesday night while you tried to finish your work. Simply being next to you while you worked was still more time with you, and I wanted whatever time I could have.

That is the contrast I keep thinking about. I would iron every one of your shirts for ten minutes of your undivided attention. I would stand at a peephole for the chance to see you ten seconds earlier. I would calculate your journey home and put on my robe because I could not bear to waste the first few seconds after you arrived. But when I asked for something larger, one more night, one weekend, one dinner or even one hour, it felt so difficult for you to give me.

I do not say that because I want to prove that I loved you more or better. I think the much sadder truth is that I loved you so much, and I had become so uncertain of how much time you would willingly give me, that I started gathering whatever scraps I could find. Ten seconds here. Ten minutes there. Thirty minutes in an Uber. One dinner. One hour sitting beside you while you worked. None of it was what I truly wanted, but I treated every piece as precious because I did not know how much more I would be allowed to have.

You could not give me the security I needed to believe that our relationship would last. And even when it became clear that it would not, I never felt secure that we would protect the little time we still had and make as much of it as we could.

That is what makes me so fucking sad when I think about that girl now. She was not asking for every second of your life. She just loved you so much that, when she could not have the time she truly wanted, she taught herself to survive on whatever small pieces of you were left.

--

Sometimes I think back to the night we had that massive argument, when you still had to work after you showered and ended up working until 2 am. We both got so riled up and it brought out the absolute worst sides of both of us. In the heat of the argument, you accidentally hit my arm. I know you did not do it on purpose, and I knew that even in the moment, but my body did not understand the difference. It took me straight back to lying in the bed of someone who had abused me and hit me. I started shaking uncontrollably and I had never been triggered like that since it happened, and I did not even realise I could still be taken back there so completely. I was so fucking scared. My mind was mush, and all I could feel was that horrible feeling of someone I believed would never hurt me suddenly hurting me.

I wanted to leave and go back to my own room. I felt so traumatised that for once, I genuinely did not want to be near you. But even then, my instinct to love you and stay close to you was somehow stronger. I remember thinking,

“Hang on, if I go back to my room, I won’t get to wake up next to you tomorrow. We don’t have many more mornings left.”

That is how much the scarcity of time with you had altered my perception. Somehow, my desire for just a little more time with you overrode even the part of me that was terrified and telling me to leave.

Looking back, I am honestly shocked that this was the decision I made in the middle of such an intense trauma response. Of all the things that happened between us, that was the one moment that made me feel as though I did not want to spend time with you. Yet even then, my overriding thought was still that if I returned to my room, I would lose one more morning waking up beside you. That was how desperately I was holding on to every remaining moment.

That is why the argument we had on the last Sunday before we broke up still makes me angry when I think about it. You had four Sundays left in Australia. Potentially, logistically, I only had one that would work because I could be staffed again and travelling on Sundays. I asked you to protect one Sunday for us so we could go to the beach, somewhere you had already told me we would go.

One Sunday.

I wasn't asking for all four. I wasn't asking you not to see your friends. I knew you were leaving them too, and of course I wanted you to spend time with them. I just wanted to know that one of those days belonged to us.

Instead, you wanted to leave it open because you needed to find out when Tejas and his brother would be free. And I remember trying so hard to explain why that hurt without making it sound like I expected to come before every other person in your life. That wasn't what I wanted.

I just couldn't understand why it felt as though everybody else's availability had to be established before I was allowed to know whether I got yours. Why did I always seem to be waiting for somebody else to get back to you? Why couldn't somebody ask you whether you were free that Sunday and you say, No, I'm spending it with Soph? Especially then. Especially with four Sundays left. And afterwards, you saw Tejas and his brother again anyway, which is what hurt me even more because clearly that one Sunday you could’ve had with me wasn’t the only time he had free too.

That is why, looking back, I don't think I was wrong about how it felt. You kept telling me that you prioritised me, and I kept trying to reconcile that with the fact that I almost never felt prioritised in the latter half of the relationship. I didn't need to be first above everything. I didn't need you to give up your friends or family or career or sleep for me. I just didn't want to feel like everything and everybody else got to place themselves into your life first and I received whatever remained afterwards.

And towards the end, whatever remained felt so precious to me. Even after we broke up, I would notice weekends. A bright sunny Saturday or Sunday would arrive and my first thought would sometimes be, Fuck, how nice would it have been if we could spend today together? I would imagine the beach, getting food, driving somewhere, doing one of those completely ordinary things I had spent the final months trying so hard to fit into the calendar.

After you first told me that you’re not sure if we should have a relationship and i practically begged you to reconsider. Then you needed time. And more time. And another week. And another week. I know people need time to think. I know now, probably more than I did then, that somebody needing space does not automatically mean they don't care.

But I need you to put yourself in my shoes for a second. You once told me how horrible it felt when your ex said she needed a break. I remember thinking about that during those weeks. Because there you were. Still in my life, still talking to me, still sometimes behaving normally with me. Except I knew that somewhere inside your head, you were weighing whether you still wanted the relationship.

Imagine sitting beside the person you love and knowing that while you're looking at his face, part of him is calculating whether his life would be better off without you. Imagine him messaging you normally and your brain whispering:

He wants to leave

Imagine having a nice conversation and then remembering:

We are not worth him choosing us.

Imagine waking up and having three seconds before consciousness catches up and then:

Oh.

He doesn't know if he wants me.

That was my life. Every day. I cried every single fucking day. Literally every day. And then I’d put on a better face before seeing you again, in case my misery made you feel that loving me was so hard you might as well just stop.

How ridiculous. And I don't think I told you the full extent because, again, I was scared. If you knew how badly your uncertainty was affecting me, would that become evidence that the relationship was unhealthy? Would you think:

Look what this is doing to her. We should end it.

So even my pain became dangerous information. I was devastated because I thought you might leave. And I was afraid to show you the full devastation because I thought the devastation itself might make you leave. Do you understand how impossible that felt? I was waiting to be decided upon while trying to make myself pleasant enough not to influence the decision against me.

Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. I begged you to just give me an answer. You drove to Celynn’s house and picked me up.

Sometimes I still wonder when you knew. Had you decided before you picked me up? Were you driving beside me already knowing you were going to end our relationship? Was I sitting there still looking for some sign that things might be okay while you already knew they weren't going to be? I don't know why that detail still bothers me. Maybe because that entire period felt like sitting centimetres away from somebody whose internal world could completely alter mine and having absolutely no access to it.

Then two days later, I went to Sydney. You had broken up with me. And two days later I flew to another city to keep fighting for us. I came to your hotel room with a letter that I wrote while literally weeping on that stupid flight there.

Of course I had a fucking letter. And I read it to you, holding your hand. I sat in front of somebody who had just told me he didn't want our relationship and gave him every reason I could think of for why I still believed there was something worth trying. And you listened to the whole thing, and still said no. I don't think I have ever let myself remember that scene properly from my own side. For so long, I automatically moved into yours.

This must have been so overwhelming for him.

It must have been horrible watching me cry.

He must have felt so guilty.

He probably feels trapped because I'm asking him to reconsider.

I could explain you endlessly. I spent so much time standing in your shoes that I stopped standing in mine. Now, when I picture that hotel room, I see something much simpler. There is this girl. She's two days out from being broken up with. She's flown to Sydney. She's sitting in front of somebody she loves reading him a letter about why she still wants them. She is offering him everything she knows how to offer. And he still says no. And now when I look at her, I don't think:

How embarrassing.

Or why were you so needy?

Or you should have given him more space.

I just feel so fucking sorry for her. Not because she was pathetic. She wasn't. She was loving somebody with everything she knew how to give. I wish I could sit beside her and tell her:

You don't need another argument.

You don't need another letter.

He knows.

And his choice is still no.

And somehow, after all of that, I still stayed. From mid-May until we actually ended in June, I don't think I've ever told you how degrading that period sometimes felt. I don't mean that you were deliberately degrading me. I mean what it did to my sense of myself. I would wake up beside somebody who had already told me he thought we should end. I would look at you and think:

How am I lying next to somebody who doesn't want to keep me?

Every bit of distance from you became enormous. Every delayed response. Every moment you seemed less affectionate. Every time I felt you pull away. Because there was no longer a secure relationship underneath any of it. There was no floor. And whether or not you ever thought these words, this is what your decision began sounding like inside me:

You're not worth the difficulty.

You're not worth the two years.

You're not worth the emotional work.

You're not worth the uncertainty.

You're not worth everything I would have to learn or change or sacrifice to continue.

I know that may not be what you meant. But that is what it felt like to be the person you weren't willing to try for. And I still stayed. I had my own work. My own exhaustion. My own life. And somehow so much of my energy went into convincing myself to be better for you.

Give him more time.

Give him more patience.

Don't pressure him.

Don't bring this up tonight.

Try to understand.

Try differently.

Hold back.

Let him breathe.

I kept negotiating with myself on your behalf because I loved you. And meanwhile I could feel you loosening your grip.

There is one tiny sentence I don't think you even remember. On the second-last Friday of my case, we had been crying together in the cab on the way back from the airport.

You kissed me. You told me it wasn't going to be our last kiss. I remember going home and feeling something I hadn't felt in a while. Relief.

Oh my God.

Maybe he's going to try for us.

I held onto that sentence. Then the next day, you pushed me away again, straight out of the little relief I had found the night before.

I asked how many times we would see each other before you left Australia. And you said:

At least once.

I don't remember exactly what I said after that. I remember the feeling.

You’re fucking kidding me.

I had spent months imagining how we could maintain a relationship across fourteen hours and two years, and suddenly I was trying to work out whether my boyfriend wanted to see me more than once in the 4 weeks before leaving the country. There are heartbreaks that arrive as enormous events. And then there are heartbreaks that arrive in three ordinary words. That was one of mine. Do you even realise how fucking cruel that was of you, how ridiculous it was for you to jus promise the night before that you would try for us, and the next day to immediately say that you may only want to see me ONE MORE TIME in the next 4 weeks, potentially the last 4 weeks I would’ve gotten to see you for god knows how many months.

--

Our final proper date is strange to remember because I'm grateful for it. Neither of us knew it was the last one. I'm glad. If I had known, I probably would have spent the entire night mentally photographing everything instead of actually being there. We had dinner. We walked to get ice cream. And at some point I kissed you on the cheek. It was such a tiny thing. I wanted to be giddy with you again. I wanted to feel like the version of us before everything became about Philadelphia and long distance and capacity and whether we should keep going.

I wanted to be the girl who kissed her colleague at the Park Hyatt and then couldn't wait to see him at work the next morning. So I kissed you. You didn't do anything back. Not until I asked. I noticed. Of course I noticed. By then, I noticed everything. Later we went to the park like we always did. You wanted to go home. I asked for fifteen more minutes. Then one more hug. I remember hugging you and crying even though nothing had actually gone wrong that night.

We hadn't argued. We'd had a good night. But I had this horrible feeling:

I don't know how many of these I have left.

How many more times will I sit in this car? How many more times will I hold your hand? How many more times will I get to bury my face in you? How many more times will I be allowed to ask for fifteen more minutes?

Fuck, I don’t know if you even noticed I was crying then. I had to even hide those tears because I didn’t want you to feel like I was harder to love than you already feel. Maybe you did see my tears, maybe you chose to ignore it.

When you dropped me home, I remember holding your hand, looking across at you and grabbing your hand like I was grabbing onto a lifeline, and I begged:

Please.

Please make me feel safe.

Please show me more affection.

Please show me some care.

Please speak to me nicely

I was begging you for that constantly near the end. Not extravagance. Just safety.

And then that Sunday, when I finally struck up the courage to tell you how long I had felt unsafe, your response was essentially:

What did you expect? Look at the state our relationship is in.

At the time, I accepted that. I thought:

He's right.

We've been fighting.

He's under pressure.

I'm putting too much pressure on him.

Man, read that yourself.

Your person came to you and said that she felt really unsafe, that she hadn’t felt safe in months. She shared the most vulnerable part of herself and her deepest fear in the relationship.

And you shut her down by saying, Well, what else did you expect?

You know for weeks after we broke up and I think back to that night I used to still tell myself - I shouldn’t have told you I was feeling unsafe - that it was my fault for sharing how I felt. I was to blame for telling the person I love that I feel so utterly unsafe.

How messed up is that?

And even after that conversation, even after you hung up on me again, despite knowing how much being hung up on hurt me, and after you literally said there is no us anymore, do you know what I did? I decided I needed to fold again. I told myself:

Okay.

This goes against every cell in my body that aches for certainty and security, but I trust that he won’t hurt me like that.

Give him a day.

Don't message him constantly.

Don't chase.

Give him space to think.

I was still trying. Even then. I thought if I could just become less frightened, less demanding, more patient, perhaps I could make the relationship safe enough for you to want it again. Then Tuesday came. I asked to see you. You said yes. And we know what happened after that. I don't need to reconstruct every minute of the ending again. But I do need to say something I don't think I've ever said without immediately cushioning it for you.

Those weeks were fucking cruel to live through.

Not because I think you woke up wanting to hurt me. I don't. But because of what the situation did to me. And I am done pretending that understanding why you behaved the way you did means I have to describe the experience gently.

I don't know what those first weeks after the breakup were like for you. Maybe you were devastated. Maybe part of you was relieved. Maybe Wharton and work and moving and your family and everything else gave you no room to process it. Maybe you distracted yourself. Maybe you thought about me. I genuinely don't know. But I know what they were like for me.

You saw some of it. The messages. The desperation. The way I kept trying to understand what had happened. But even then I don't think you knew the full extent. And there is a part of me that used to be desperate for you to understand it because I thought if you understood how much I was hurting, maybe that would prove how much the relationship mattered. I don't think that anymore. My pain does not obligate you to come back. My suffering isn't an invoice.

But I also don't want to keep sanitising what happened just so that the ending can remain beautiful for both of us. I don't need to reconstruct the breakup minute by minute. But I do want to stop calling those final weeks merely “difficult.” There were parts of them that felt deeply humiliating to live through. I don't mean that you were deliberately humiliating me, but rather what the situation did to my sense of myself. I kept choosing somebody who had already told me he wasn't sure he wanted to keep choosing me.

And still, somehow, my response was to love you harder.

Then there were your farewell drinks. I have softened that night every time I've spoken about it since, and I don't want to soften it here. That night was fucking horrible for me. I know we'd already broken up. With the benefit of distance, maybe I shouldn't have gone at all. It was fresh, everything was messy, and neither of us knew what we were doing. I don't think you set out to hurt me. But I was there because part of me genuinely thought it might be the last time I ever physically saw you.

And once I was there, I wish you had considered what it might feel like to be me for even a moment. You apologised afterwards about her, and I did what I had become very good at doing with you. It's fine. I understand. Don't worry. It wasn't fine. She was going to Wharton with you. Throughout our relationship, you had said things to me about wishing I was your age, wishing we were at the same stage of life, wishing I could come with you. Those words already sat inside one of my deepest insecurities about us.

Then, on a night when I thought I might be looking at you in person for the last time, there was somebody right in front of me who seemed to represent exactly the life I couldn't follow you into. She was going to Wharton. She was entering the same next chapter as you. And I watched you be close and comfortable with her while you barely spoke to me or looked at me the entire night. Then you went to dinner. I wasn't invited. I felt like a joke.

I couldn’t celebrate the career of the person I cared deeply about, a career that I’d like to say I played a somewhat important part in.

I know, intellectually, that the night probably looked completely different from your side. Maybe you were trying to navigate being around an ex two weeks after a breakup. Maybe you thought distance from me was the kinder or safer thing. Maybe you were overwhelmed and genuinely had no idea what to do. I can understand all of that. It still hurt like hell. I was there feeling like a piece of trash, even Anthony, and heck even Luke Everson who I’ve never spoken to could tell I was so off and asked if I needed anything. I had to clutch onto Brielle feeling absolutely helpless while I watched you smile and laugh and put your arms around her shoulders. And I took all of that because I thought if it was the last time I saw you, I wanted to see you for even just five minutes longer.

I was standing there as the person you were leaving behind, watching you turn towards the life you were leaving me for, and I don't think I have ever felt smaller. So when you later wrote about how beautiful our ending was, that felt so demeaning to me.. There were beautiful moments at the end. There absolutely were. But our ending was not beautiful for me.

For weeks I had been asking you to choose me, trying to find a way forward, crying, negotiating, explaining, trying to make myself easier to love. Then eventually I came back to you and essentially said, Okay. I accept it now. I'm not going to fight you anymore. And suddenly I got so much of you back. You could tell me you loved me. You could hold me. You could cry with me. You could be tender. We could talk for hours. We could listen to Ed Sheeran and sit in the car and remember what we'd been. I finally got to feel close to you again once I had agreed that I was losing you.

I understand why. Once I stopped trying to change your decision, perhaps affection no longer felt dangerous. You didn't have to worry that every tender thing would be interpreted as you reconsidering. But God, that hurt. There was a part of me thinking, So now I get you back? Now that I've agreed to lose you? I don't want to erase those final days. I know how real they were. I know you felt my love, and I know there was tenderness in what you gave me too.

I just don't want the beauty of those days to rewrite everything I had to go through before we reached them.

Then you left, and I don't know what those first weeks were like for you. Maybe you were devastated. Maybe part of you was relieved. Maybe moving, Wharton, your family, your brother, everything happening at once gave you no room to process any of it. I don't know, and I don't want to write your internal experience for you anymore. I know what mine was like.

It was hell. And I don't say that because I think my pain makes you responsible for fixing it or because suffering somehow earns me a relationship. It doesn't. I just want there to be one version of our story where I don't immediately make what happened easier to hear. I spent so long standing in your shoes that I stopped standing in my own.

There is something else I have come to understand about us, and I think it matters when I look back on just how fucking miserable we both became towards the end.

For a long time after we broke up, I was so quick to blame myself for the pressure I had put on you. I thought about all the times I had pushed for more time together, all the conversations I had insisted on having, all the moments when I could have given you more space. I kept thinking that perhaps I had simply been too insecure, too demanding, too afraid of losing you. That perhaps if I had been a little more relaxed, a little less anxious, a little easier to love, things would have been different.

And I do think there were things I needed to learn. I still do.

I think about Perth, for example, and how much of my emotional attention I had placed on you when I had so much time to myself. I think about how I sometimes made you feel as though you were constantly being assessed, or how I wanted to resolve conflicts immediately because sitting with the uncertainty felt unbearable to me, without recognising that you might have needed more time and space. I think about how I struggled to let you love me differently from the way I wanted to be loved.

Those are things I can recognise now. Things I could have done differently, and things I want to do differently in any relationship I have in the future.

But I think the last few months of our relationship were different.

Because the more distance I have from what happened, the more I realise that so much of the pressure between us came from something that, in hindsight, I think we could have addressed so much earlier.

I never really knew where I stood in your life.

And I don't think I fully understood at the time just how much that uncertainty affected everything else.

We had spent months growing closer. We had built something that felt, in so many ways, like a relationship. We cared about each other. We spent nights together, took care of each other, made memories, and became people who mattered enormously in each other's lives.

And yet, somewhere underneath all of that, I still didn't know whether I was actually your girlfriend.

I didn't know whether you saw a future with me after you left for Wharton. I didn't know whether you wanted to make a plan for us. Sometimes I didn't even know whether I had the right to ask for one.

And I didn't want to have to beg you to make me your girlfriend. I didn't want to convince you to give me a place in your life. I wanted you to want to give me that place.

But then you would do something so loving, so tender, so unmistakably caring, and I would think, Surely this means something to him too.

And I would be right back in that uncertainty.

Because you made me feel so loved in some moments, and so unsure of where I belonged in others. It often felt as though you had one foot in our relationship and one foot outside it, and I never quite knew which way you were going to step.

I think about April in particular. You were leaving in a matter of months. We had already become so attached to each other, and I still didn't know what was going to happen to us.

So when I wanted to spend every possible weekend together, when I got upset that we weren't making more plans, when I kept asking you to make time for me, I don't think it was simply because I was someone who could never be satisfied with the amount of attention you gave me.

I was frightened that we were running out of time.

Every weekend that passed felt like one fewer weekend I would ever get to spend with you. Every opportunity we didn't take felt like something we might never get back. I was desperately trying to make the most of the time we had because I had absolutely no idea whether there would be any time for us afterwards.

And I think that changed the meaning of everything.

If I had known that we were committed to each other, that we had a plan to try long distance, that I had a place in your life beyond your departure, I genuinely don't think I would have felt the same urgency to fill every remaining weekend.

If I had known that your friends and family knew about me, that you saw me as someone you wanted to bring into your future rather than someone who belonged only to your present, I don't think every competing commitment would have made me question where I stood.

I would still have missed you. I would still have wanted to spend time together. We would still have had disagreements, and long distance would still have been difficult.

But I don't think I would have been nearly as frightened.

And I think that fear became the beginning of a cycle that neither of us really knew how to stop.

The more uncertain I felt about my place in your life, the more I pushed for reassurance, for time, for plans, for something that would make me feel secure.

The more I pushed, the more pressured you felt.

The more pressured you felt, the more you pulled away.

And the more you pulled away, the more it seemed to confirm the very thing I had been afraid of all along: that perhaps you didn't really want me in your future.

So I pushed harder.

And you pulled away further.

And eventually, we were both so fucking miserable.

I think it's very easy to look at that dynamic and call me anxiously attached and you avoidantly attached. I was certainly quick to identify with the anxious side of it, and I can recognise some of those tendencies in myself. But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that putting us into those categories explains everything.

Because I don't think I was simply an inherently insecure person who would have behaved that way regardless of the relationship I was in.

I think there were things about the uncertainty between us that made me deeply insecure. And I think there were things about the way I responded to that insecurity that made you feel increasingly overwhelmed.

We were triggering each other's fears, over and over again, until those reactions almost became the relationship itself.

And that is what makes me so sad when I look back.

Because I really don't think all that pain was inevitable.

I don't think we were destined to make each other miserable simply because of who we fundamentally were as people.

I think we failed to establish some of the foundations that might have allowed us to feel secure enough to love each other without so much fear.

I think about what you said in your birthday letter, and the things you recognised you could have done differently. The love you had to give but sometimes held back. The ways you could have made me feel more certain of my place in your life. And I think about all the things I now recognise in myself, all the ways I could have responded differently if I had understood what was happening between us.

And I can't help thinking how much unnecessary hurt there was.

Not because fixing one thing would have magically solved every problem. It wouldn't have. We still would have been two different people, with different needs, different ways of communicating, and a very difficult geographical separation ahead of us.

But I think so much of what made us miserable was compounded by the same few fears, feeding each other until we could barely see anything else.

And I wish we had understood that sooner.

Because when I imagined a different future for us, I wasn't imagining that we would suddenly become perfectly compatible people who never disagreed or disappointed each other.

I imagined what might have been possible if we had started from somewhere more secure.

If I hadn't had to keep wondering whether I had a place in your future. If you hadn't felt that every moment together came with another expectation you were frightened of failing to meet. If we had known that we were on the same side, trying to work through the problems together rather than reacting to each other's fears.

I think we could have been different.

I don't know whether we would have made it work. I don't know whether the difficulties ahead of us would eventually have been too much anyway.

But I look back at how much we loved each other, and at how much of that love became buried beneath anxiety, pressure, guilt and fear, and I find it so fucking sad that we never really got to find out what we could have been without all of that.

Because I don't think the fact that we hurt each other so much necessarily meant that we were fundamentally incapable of making each other happy.

And I think understanding how that happened is different from believing it was always going to happen.

--

There is something else I keep thinking about, and I know we've talked about this before. Do you remember that Sunday when you didn't want to see me because you were seeing Kendall and Angus? And then, on our date the following Saturday (which was also our last date), you told me about how Kendall had been talking about his fiancée, Angus had been talking about Anita, and you'd thought about me.

I remember hearing that and immediately thinking, I wish you'd told them about me.

I wished that when they were talking about their partners, you could have talked about us too. I wanted to know that I existed in those conversations, that when you were with the people who mattered to you, I was somebody you wanted them to know about.

And then, after we'd broken up, you told me that you actually had told them about me.

I know I've told you how upset that made me, but I don't think I've ever properly explained why. That weekend, I was already so hurt that you hadn't wanted to spend time with me. I was counting the remaining days we had together, feeling increasingly uncertain about my place in your life. And all along, you'd been talking about me with your friends. I wish I could go back to that Saturday and ask you, Did you tell them about us? Because you have no idea how happy I would have been to hear you say yes.

And then there was Angela. Hearing later that you'd told her when you guys were in Perth that you were seeing somebody gave me that same bittersweet feeling. These were such small things, but at a time when I was desperate to feel like I belonged in your life, knowing about them would have meant the fucking world to me.

And I think about that alongside something else you've told me since we broke up.

During those final weeks together, I remember feeling so hopeless because, from where I stood, it seemed like I was the only person still trying to find a way to make us work. I was constantly thinking about what I could do differently, trying to give you space, trying to find some way forward, while believing that you'd already decided there was no future for us.

But afterwards, you told me that you actually had been trying. You'd been journalling. You'd been talking to Josh. You'd been reflecting on us and what you could do differently. You just hadn't told me because you were afraid that if things didn't work out, you would have given me hope and let me down.

And I remember thinking, But that's exactly what I needed to know.

I didn't need you to promise that everything would work out. I just needed to know that you wanted to try, that I wasn't the only person still reaching for the relationship.

It's almost ridiculous when I think about it now. You were afraid to tell me you were trying because you didn't want to disappoint me if it didn't work. But because you didn't tell me, I was already living with the disappointment of believing you weren't trying at all.

And the less I knew, the more frightened I became. I pushed harder for reassurance, for answers, for some indication that you still wanted us. Perhaps that made you even more afraid to give me hope you couldn't fulfil. I wonder whether, if I'd known about the effort you were making, I might have felt safe enough to give you the space you needed, and whether that would have made trying feel less overwhelming for you too.

I don't know if any of that would have changed your eventual decision. But it makes me so fucking sad to think that sometimes you were doing the very things that would have made me feel loved and reassured, and I was becoming increasingly convinced you didn't want me because I couldn't see them.

You were so afraid of letting me down that sometimes you held back at the exact moments when I needed you to step towards me the most.

There's something else I've come to understand in the months since we ended, and I think I owe both of us a little more grace for it.

I think I've finally begun to understand that love is fluid.

When we were together, I found it almost impossible to comprehend how you could love me and still reach a point where you weren't sure you wanted us anymore. I remember thinking, How is that even possible? How can you love somebody and consider giving them up? To me, your uncertainty felt like something catastrophic. I took every doubt you expressed as evidence that your love for me was disappearing, and every time you needed space to think, I felt as though I was one step closer to losing you.

But I've realised that love doesn't always feel the same, even when it's still there.

I've felt that myself in the months since we broke up. There have been days when I would have done almost anything to have you back in my life. When I missed you so terribly that I just wanted to know what you were doing, how you were feeling, whether you were happy, whether you ever thought about me. I wanted to hear your voice and feel close to you again, even just for a little while.

And then there have been days when I've felt so fucking exhausted by everything that happened between us that I wished I could somehow erase you from my life altogether and just stop carrying all the hurt that came with them. There have been moments when I've felt so angry with you that I couldn't understand why I still wanted you in my life at all.

And then, somehow, a few days later, I would miss you again.

I've come to think of love as something that has its own waves and tides. Sometimes it feels enormous and overwhelming, and sometimes it retreats so far that you begin to question whether it's still there. Sometimes affection is the loudest thing you feel. Sometimes it's anger, disappointment, resentment or just complete exhaustion. And I've learned that those feelings can coexist. I can love you and be furious with you. I can miss you and not want to speak to you. I can remember something beautiful about us and, five minutes later, remember something that makes me wonder why I ever wanted to stay.

I think I understand now, in a way I couldn't when we were together, that having doubts doesn't necessarily mean that the love is gone. I had doubts about us too. So many of them. There were times when I questioned whether we were right for each other, whether we could give each other what we needed, whether loving each other was enough to make any of it work.

And perhaps I should have allowed you to have those doubts without immediately interpreting them as a sign that everything was falling apart. I know my fear of abandonment made uncertainty feel almost unbearable. When you told me you needed time, I didn't just hear that you needed time. I heard that you were preparing to leave. I became so frightened of what your doubts might mean that I sometimes lost the ability to see them as something we could work through rather than something that would inevitably destroy us.

I wish I had understood that better then. I think I would have been gentler with you, and probably with myself too.

But there's one thing I still believe.

Even when my love for you was at its lowest tide, even when I was so fucking angry with you that I could barely remember why I wanted any of this, something in me always came back. I would question us. I would question you. I would question whether I was being ridiculous for wanting to stay. But when all the anger and fear and exhaustion settled, I would find myself returning to the same place.

I still want him. I still want us to try.

That didn't mean I never doubted us. It just meant that underneath all those changing feelings, there was something I continued to choose.

And I think that was what I wanted so desperately from you. Not for you to never have doubts. Not for you to always feel completely certain about us, or to promise that loving me would never become difficult. I wanted to know that when things became difficult, when the excitement faded or we had another horrible argument or the distance ahead of us felt impossible, there would still be something in you that wanted to come back to me, too.

I understand your uncertainty better now. I don't think it was wrong of you to feel it, and I don't think it was wrong of me to feel frightened by it. We were both trying to understand something neither of us knew how to navigate particularly well.

I just wish we could have found a way for your doubts to exist without making me feel that I was constantly about to lose you.

Because I never needed you to love me with the same intensity every single day.

I just needed to feel that, even on the days when loving each other was hard, you still wanted to find your way back to me.

When I first received your email, I thought it was one of the most loving things anybody had ever written to me. Now, sometimes, I think it might have been one of the worst birthday presents I have ever received. And the strangest part is that none of the words changed. I did.

By the way, I remember specifically telling you to please send it to me before my birthday, because I knew it’d probably wreck me. But thanks, I got it ON the day, after 5 days of you repeatedly ignoring my messages. It was my fucking birthday and I had to leave the conference room at training to go cry in the bathroom from your email, and also leave lunch early because I felt so horrible I needed to cry in my room by myself.

Back to the email.

You told me how deeply loved I made you feel. How cared for. How deserving. How enough. You told me how special my love was. You told me you never lost sight of it. You told me you knew how hard I tried. That I gave us my all. You told me you wished you had shown me more tenderness. That you wished you had given me more. That you were sorry you held back. You told me you wished you could have made me feel secure in the way I needed. You told me you had thought extensively about everything you would do differently. You told me that you had reflected deeply and that you know how you need to change so that you don't repeat the same mistakes.

The first time I read those words, I felt so loved. It was everything I had spent months wanting you to understand, finally returned to me in your own words. I read it again. And again. And again. And somewhere along the way, the question changed.

What the fuck is the point of telling me all of this?

I don't mean that in a rude way. I genuinely want to know. The point is not that I wish you had known all of this in May. Obviously I wish some things had been different, but the past is the past. You cannot go back. Neither can I. I wasn’t sitting there furious that you didn't somehow possess September's understanding in May.

What hurts is that you possess it now. Now. I am still here now. You are still here now. You know how special my love was now. You know how hard I tried now. You know you held back now. You know you could have made me feel safer now. You know what you would do differently now. You know how you need to change now.

And if after knowing all of that, you still don't want to take one step towards me, then why are you telling me? What the hell am I supposed to do with it? Am I supposed to feel comforted that hurting me taught you something? Am I supposed to be grateful that our relationship contributed to your personal development?

Am I supposed to think:

At least he'll know how to do it better next time?

Because I don't. I don't want my pain to become part of a beautiful story you tell yourself about your growth. I don't want everything I suffered through merely to be painted afterwards as:

We loved each other, things were difficult, we learned, ended it beautifully with love and gratitude, and now we're better people.

I know you suffered too. I know there were times you cried. I know you felt overwhelmed. I know our arguments exhausted you. I know leaving me was also painful for you. I am not claiming that I was the only person in pain. But because you became overwhelmed, you withdrew. And because you withdrew, I became more frightened. And because I became more frightened, I reached for you harder. And because I reached harder, you felt more overwhelmed. And while we were trapped in that cycle, I was in so much fucking pain that I became afraid to even show you how much pain I was in.

That was not “personal growth” while I was living it. That was my life for months. So months later, when you tell me:

I know now.

I've reflected.

I know what I would do differently.

I know how I need to change.

There is part of me that wants to say:

Okay. And then what??

Not why didn't you know then?

What are you going to do with knowing now?

Because if the answer is nothing with me, I genuinely don't understand why you needed to place all of that understanding in my hands. Truly I want you to know that, it was very very messed up for you to tell that to me, and it may have been one of the most inconsiderate things you’ve done to me, and quite honestly, that is already a very tough list.

I don't want an account of how loving me changed you. I want to know whether anything you learned changes the way you are willing to love me. If it doesn't, why tell me? If you're not going to use any of that understanding to treat me differently, what exactly am I supposed to do with the knowledge that you now know how?

I don't want the consolation prize for everything I suffered to be the knowledge that it made you a better man for somebody else. Maybe it will. Maybe one day another woman gets a version of you who communicates before he withdraws. Maybe she gets somebody who knows that being overwhelmed doesn't mean disappearing. Maybe she gets somebody who understands how to make her feel secure. Maybe she gets the proactive messages. The protected time. The affection without asking. The person who understands that a difficult conversation does not automatically mean the relationship itself has to become uncertain.

Maybe you never repeat with anybody else the things you now regret doing with me. I cannot control that. But I do not need to experience that as the redeeming meaning of my pain. I don't want to sit somewhere on the sidelines of your life thinking:

How lovely. At least everything I went through taught him how to love somebody else properly.

No. You were the one person I didn't need a personal-growth report from about how much better my pain made you. Especially on my birthday. Maybe that sounds harsh. But that is where I am now. When I first read your email, I thought:

He understands.

And that felt like love. Now I read it and sometimes think:

You understand.

So what are you going to do with the understanding?

Because understanding that remains entirely inside your head doesn't change my experience of you.

There is one line in your email that hurts more now than it did when I first read it.

“Oh Soph how I felt your love those few days, and how I hope you felt mine.”

When I first read it, I wanted the answer to be yes. I think I needed the answer to be yes. For months, I collected evidence that you loved me. You cried. You held me. You kissed me. You were sad. You told me losing me hurt. You told me how much I meant to you. I would take every one of those things and place it against the fact that you had still chosen to end the relationship.

See.

He loves me.

Look how sad he is.

Look at how hard this is for him.

Look at the way he's holding me.

This has to mean something.

I don't think I need that story anymore. You asked whether I felt your love. Looking back now?

No. I fucking didn’t

I felt your tenderness. I felt your sadness. I felt your attachment. I felt that losing me hurt you. I felt that you cared. I felt that I mattered to you. But I don't think I felt loved. And I know that sounds contradictory. Maybe you read that and think:

How can you say that? You know I loved you.

Maybe you did. Maybe you felt an enormous amount of love for me. I'm not interested in reaching inside your head and telling you what you did or didn't feel.

But I don't think feeling love for somebody and loving them are always the same thing.

For me, that was not love.

Because love is a verb. It has to go somewhere. It has to do something. It has to reach the other person. It has to become time. Consideration. Repair. Effort. Change. It has to make room. It has to inconvenience you sometimes. It has to affect decisions. When the way you're loving somebody isn't reaching them, love has to make you curious enough to ask:

What else can I try?

I don't think love means staying forever. I don't think it means endless sacrifice. I don't think anybody should tolerate anything indefinitely just so they can say they loved hard enough. But I also refuse to define love so abstractly that nothing you actually do can ever contradict it. Because then what does the word mean?

If you can make somebody feel unwanted and unsafe, withdraw from them when they need you, decide not to attempt the relationship they are asking you to attempt, and then say but I loved you deeply, where does the person being loved exist in that definition? I can't live inside your feelings. I can only live beside your actions. And words cannot make me feel love when your actions are telling me the opposite. You cannot make me experience love retrospectively by writing beautifully enough about how much you felt it.

You cannot tell me how much I mean to you and expect that meaning to remain completely separate from the way you make room for me in your life. You cannot tell me you know how to love me better now and expect me not to wonder why you still don't want to. I don't want to be loved as an idea. I don't want to be somebody you think about tenderly from Philadelphia. I don't want to be the girl whose emails you reread and whose love you describe as unforgettable while the actual girl remains somewhere at arm's length.

I don't want to be deeply valued in retrospect and barely chosen in the present. I don't want to keep saying:

He loves me, he just doesn't think to message.

He loves me, he just doesn't make the time.

He loves me, he just withdraws when he's overwhelmed.

He loves me, he just can't give me reassurance.

He loves me, he just doesn't want to try long distance.

He loves me, he just isn't choosing the relationship.

At some point I have to stop putting “he loves me, he just…” in front of things that make me feel unloved. You felt my love in those last few days because I was still giving it to you. You never had to wonder whether the feeling inside me would become action. I was there. I was choosing you. I was writing the letters. I was asking for another hour. I was flying to Sydney. I was trying to find another way. I was saying:

I don't know how either. Let's try.

What I experienced from you was tenderness while you were still leaving. Sadness about losing me while still choosing the loss. Affection while maintaining that we should end. Tears over saying goodbye to somebody who was asking you not to choose goodbye yet. Maybe all of those things came from love. But they did not make me feel loved.

Not anymore. Not ever.

For a long time, I couldn't understand something about myself. If I was this unhappy, why did I keep loving you more? If I was crying so much, why didn't I detach? If I felt so unsafe, why did the disappointment not slowly exhaust the love out of me? Why did every sign that you were moving away seem to make me want to move closer? And recently I realised something that I don't think I understood at all while I was with you. It wasn't always you making me love you more.

A lot of the time, it was me. I don't mean that there was nothing in you to love. You know that isn't true. I've written enough about what I loved in you. I mean that once I decided I was going to love you, I became incredibly committed to the act of continuing to love you. I learned you. I paid attention. I remembered. I gave things meaning. I made excuses. I supplied context.

He's tired.

He's overwhelmed.

Perth is hard.

He's leaving soon.

He's scared.

He's trying.

He loves differently.

I took every painful thing and turned it around and around in my hands until I found the angle from which I could understand it. And every time I understood you, I found another reason to stay. I remembered our best days when the current one hurt. I remembered the person who listened to me so carefully at the beginning. I remembered Singapore. I remembered the Park Hyatt. I remembered the way you could make me laugh. I kept feeding my own love with memory and meaning and hope.

I think I am just very good at loving somebody once I decide that I will. I know how to make a home for somebody inside myself. I know how to remember them. I know how to keep looking for tenderness after disappointment. I know how to learn somebody's inner world. I know how to keep choosing.

I wasn't only trying to detach from you after we ended. I was trying to undo months of my own deliberate practice of loving you. I had trained my mind to turn towards you. Of course it didn't know how to turn away simply because the relationship ended. For so long, I thought the enormous size of my love was evidence that you must be extraordinary enough for me to keep fighting for. Now I think some of it was evidence of something extraordinary in me.

I know how to love somebody very deeply. That doesn't make what we had less real. It actually makes me feel strangely protective of that part of myself. Because if some of the love I experienced came from my own capacity to love, then I didn't lose that capacity when I lost you. You don't get to take it with you. It is still mine.

There's something I've been wondering about you, too. I don't know whether any of this is true, and I don't want to pretend I understand your inner world better than you do.

But I wonder whether knowing how much I loved you sometimes made you feel pressured in a way I never intended.

You knew how much I wanted us. You knew how much I was willing to try. You knew how deeply I cared about you, and I always thought that knowing those things would make you feel more secure. Surely it must be comforting to know somebody wants you that much, that somebody is willing to keep choosing you even when things are difficult.

But I wonder whether it sometimes had the opposite effect.

Because alongside all that love, there were also all the times I was hurt. All the conversations about what I needed from you. How often you messaged me. Whether you called. Whether you came to see me. Whether you planned something without me asking. I didn't think of these things as assessments, but perhaps that was what they started to feel like to you. As though there was some invisible standard you were constantly being measured against, and no matter how hard you tried, you kept falling short.

And perhaps the strangest part was that even when you fell short, I kept wanting you.

I kept telling you how much I loved you. I kept trying to find ways for us to work. I kept offering you more of myself, even while telling you how much certain things you did were hurting me.

I wonder what that felt like from your side.

I wonder whether, instead of simply feeling loved, you sometimes felt that you were being given something incredibly precious that you didn't know how to take care of. Whether seeing how much I loved you, alongside seeing how much I was hurting, made you feel increasingly responsible for my happiness.

And I wonder whether there's something deeper underneath that, too.

You've told me things about growing up and feeling that you had to prove yourself, to be enough and do enough for other people who have sacrificed things for you. Sometimes I wonder whether that feeling followed you into our relationship. Whether some part of you felt that love was something you had to keep earning by being good enough, attentive enough, considerate enough, by getting things right. And my love increasingly felt like a burden that you had to carry.

And if that was how you experienced it, perhaps all the times I told you I was hurt didn't just make you think, I've disappointed Soph. Perhaps they made you feel, I'm not good enough for her.

Perhaps, at some point, the love I was so desperate to give you began to feel like something you couldn't live up to.

I remember when you first decided we should end things, you asked me something along the lines of, How am I supposed to live my life in the US knowing that I make you sad all the time?

And I remember thinking, Well, then don't make me sad.

I know that probably sounds simplistic. But I genuinely didn't understand why the solution had to be ending things. If you were so afraid of hurting me, if knowing that I was unhappy was genuinely so unbearable to you, then why couldn't we work together to change the things that were making me unhappy?

But I wonder whether there's another layer to that question that I didn't understand at the time.

Perhaps it wasn't that you didn't want to make me happy. Perhaps you were afraid that you couldn't.

Maybe you looked at all the things I needed from you, all the conversations we'd had, all the times you'd tried and I'd still ended up hurt, and thought, What if I just can't give her what she needs? What if I keep trying and keep disappointing her? What if this is what the rest of our relationship is going to look like?

And perhaps, from that perspective, ending things felt like the kinder choice. If you couldn't figure out how to stop hurting me, maybe you thought the only way to stop was to let me go.

Maybe you thought you were protecting both of us.

I don't know. Maybe none of this is how you felt. Maybe your reasons were much simpler, and I'm doing that thing again where I think about something so much that I construct an entire explanation for it.

But if there's even a little truth to it, there's something I really wish you had understood.

My decision to love you was mine. My decision to stay was mine, too.

You didn't have to carry the weight of how much I loved you as though it were something you were responsible for repaying. I didn't want you to call me because you thought, Fuck, she loves me so much, I owe her a phone call. I didn't want you to spend time with me because you felt guilty about everything I'd done for you. I didn't want you to treat me well because you were afraid of what would happen if you didn't.

I wanted you to do those things because you genuinely wanted to. Because you loved me, because you cared about how I felt, because making me happy was something that mattered to you in its own right.

And of course, that doesn't mean you had no responsibility towards me. Being in a relationship means caring about how your actions affect the other person. I needed you to take my feelings seriously, to be considerate and to make an effort when something was hurting me. Those weren't things I should have had to earn by proving how much I loved you.

But there's a difference between taking responsibility for how you treat someone and feeling responsible for the fact that they love you so much.

I chose you knowing that you weren't perfect. I chose you knowing there were things about us that were difficult. And yes, there were things I desperately wanted you to do differently. But my willingness to keep trying wasn't a debt you had to repay. You didn't have to match the intensity of my love just because I was giving it to you.

I just wanted us to be two people who genuinely wanted to care for each other, and who were willing to learn how to do that better.

Because maybe you genuinely didn't know how to stop making me sad. Maybe some of the things I asked for felt much harder to you than they seemed to me. From my perspective, it sometimes felt so straightforward. I was telling you exactly what I needed. Surely we could just try to do those things?

But perhaps it didn't feel straightforward to you at all. Perhaps every request carried the possibility of another failure, another argument, another moment when you'd have to confront the fact that somebody who loved you so much was still unhappy.

And I wish I had understood that possibility better. I wish we could have talked about what felt difficult for you, rather than allowing every difficulty to become another reason to question whether we should continue.

I think both of us might have got caught in something neither of us knew how to escape. The more uncertain I felt, the more reassurance I needed. The more I asked for reassurance, perhaps the more you felt that you were failing me. And the more you withdrew, the more frightened I became, until something that began with two people loving each other started to feel like two people constantly disappointing each other.

And what makes me sad is that, through all of it, I think we both might have lost sight of something very simple.

What if you didn't know how to love me in all the ways I needed yet?

What if I didn't know how to love you in all the ways you needed, either?

What if we were allowed to be two people who didn't have it all figured out, but who wanted to learn together?

I wasn't asking you to promise that you would never hurt me again. I wasn't asking you to become someone entirely different overnight. I just wanted to believe that when we hurt each other, when something wasn't working, our instinct would be to try to understand it and figure out what to do differently.

And perhaps sometimes we would fail. Perhaps we'd have the same arguments again. Perhaps we'd discover that some things were genuinely harder to change than we'd hoped.

But I wanted us to have the chance to find that out together, rather than deciding in advance that we would inevitably keep making each other unhappy.

I didn't need you to be perfect. I didn't need you to get everything right. And I didn't need you to know exactly how to make me happy all the time.

I just wanted to know that you wanted to keep learning how to love me, the same way I wanted to keep learning how to love you.

And yet there is another version of you that I think I have been carrying around since we ended. Not a completely different person. Still you. But you with everything you understand now added in. You after the reflection. You after the regret. You after knowing how you would make me feel secure. You after understanding what withdrawing did to me. You after realising you held back. You after everything you told me in your birthday email, and actually putting those things into practice. You after understanding that perhaps so much of what made us miserable came from patterns we had gotten ourselves caught in, things that might have been different if we'd both learned how to approach each other differently. You learning that when I was frightened, I didn't always need you to solve everything. Sometimes I just needed to know you were still there. Me learning that you needing space didn't have to mean you were leaving. Both of us learning how to make the other feel safe without feeling like we were constantly giving something up.

Sometimes I can see it so clearly.

You in Philadelphia. Me visiting. New York at Christmas. Trips around America. Me moving somewhere closer for my temp transfer and eventually joining you in the US. All the airports we'd meet at, the excitement of seeing each other again after weeks or months apart, getting to wrap my arms around you and bury my face in that familiar little space between your collarbone and your neck. And the goodbyes, which would probably still make me cry, but perhaps this time I'd know when I'd get to see you again, knowing that there was another visit to look forward to, another Christmas, another stupidly expensive flight we'd complain about booking and then be ridiculously excited to take.

I imagine a photograph of us somewhere in your room in Philadelphia. Maybe on your desk, or beside your bed. Maybe a silly photo booth strip, or one of our Polaroids. Your friends coming over and knowing who I am, knowing that you have a girlfriend back in Melbourne. (In fact, I did have a digital photo frame that I had bought for you as a present, something I had hope you could put up in your apartment, where we can both upload photos of us together. I never got to give it to you.) Me slowly getting to know the people in your life, recognising their names and faces when you tell me about them, and eventually meeting them myself. Not feeling like Philadelphia is a separate world I only occasionally get to hear about, but somewhere I have a little place in, even from fourteen hours away.

You going on trips with your friends, seeing something beautiful or funny and thinking, Oh, I have to show Soph this. Sending me a photo because you want to share it with me, not because I asked. Me doing the same in Melbourne, telling you about the people at BCG, the things happening with our friends, walking past places we'd been together and reminiscing with you about them.

I see calls where you're exhausted and busy but I still know that I exist somewhere inside your life. Me having my own friends, my own plans, my own life here, and not treating every delayed response like evidence that something is wrong. You being overwhelmed and telling me instead of disappearing. You being able to say, Soph, this week is going to be horrible. I might not be able to call much, but I love you. I’ve planned time for us to bond and talk properly on Sunday. And me being able to say, Okay. Good luck. You've got this. And actually meaning it. Not spending the next three days wondering whether I actually had a place in your life. Me being scared and being able to tell you without worrying that my fear itself might make you leave. Neither of us having to constantly guess where we stand.

I imagine getting to be there through everything Wharton brings you. The recruitment, the interviews, the internship, the days you're excited and the days you're stressed out of your mind. Hearing about the people you're meeting and the things you're learning. Your internships, the first days. Watching you figure out what you want to do afterwards, where you want to live, what kind of life you want to build. You at 27, 28, 29, 30, getting to know each new version of you as he comes along, instead of having to wonder from a distance what your life has become.

And I imagine you knowing the new versions of me too. Me moving overseas, perhaps for my transfer, or perhaps even a business school, and telling you about all the things I'm nervous and excited about. Us suddenly being closer than fourteen hours apart. Being able to plan a weekend together without spending a whole day travelling. Me having my own experiences and ambitions, and you being happy for me, just as I would be for you.

And sometimes I imagine being at your graduation. I would have loved that.

I imagine watching you graduate from Wharton, taking far too many photos, feeling so ridiculously proud of you. Remembering all the way back to the beginning from the ride to the Ampol office, brainstorming about what case study you’d use for your interview, to being on the other end of the call at 3am when you got your offer, to editing your scholarship application essay and stressing alongside you before your interviews. And then looking at you two years later, knowing I'd gotten to see everything that happened in between. Not just the exciting moments, but the ordinary, difficult, uncertain days too.

I would have loved being able to look at you and think, I was there. I got to see all of this happen, and we held each other’s hands through it all.

I know none of it would have been quite as lovely or straightforward as one could imagine. We'd still have argued. There’d be days when we'd be tired and impatient, when the distance would feel absolutely fucking ridiculous, when we wouldn't have the energy to be particularly good partners to each other. But in the version of us I kept imagining, those would have been things we dealt with together, rather than reasons to question whether we should be together at all.

Us getting something wrong and instead of asking whether the difficulty means we shouldn't be together, saying:

Okay.

This way isn't working.

What else can we try?

I think part of me has been waiting for that relationship without admitting that I was waiting. And imaginary relationships are horrible things to grieve because nothing can disprove them. There is always somewhere else to move the hope. Maybe after first semester. Maybe after recruiting. Maybe when Wharton settles down. Maybe after enough time apart. Maybe when you come home. Maybe when I move overseas. Maybe when you've changed. Maybe when I've changed. Maybe when you miss me enough. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I could spend years living inside maybe.

But I can't. Not because I know with certainty that none of it will ever happen. I don't. Maybe there really is another version of us. Maybe you've thought about it too. Maybe you're scared that we would get back together and then Wharton would overwhelm you and we'd fall straight back into the same cycle and hurt each other even more. Maybe you haven't considered it at all. I don't know. And I am so tired of constructing entire relationships out of things I don't know.

I cannot keep my heart reserved for a future that exists only in my imagination. If you want that future, you have to come and build it with me. Until then, it is only a picture. And if, by the time you read this, I have told you that I cannot be your friend, this is why. I cannot be friends with the real you while quietly waiting for the possible you. I cannot sit at the edge of your life hearing about Philadelphia and New York and recruiting and trips and everything you're becoming while keeping a parallel universe alive where one day you finally turn around and say:

Soph. I understand now. Let's try.

That isn't friendship. That's waiting. And I don't want to turn my life into a waiting room for a relationship you aren't choosing.

There is something I told you towards the end that I used to feel almost embarrassed saying because it sounded arrogant even inside my own head. I don't feel embarrassed by it anymore.

I don't think you will ever find my love again.

I know you know it was rare. You've told me yourself. You called it tender, intense, beautiful and unforgettable. You told me how loved I made you feel, how much I believed in you, how hard I tried and how special my love was to you. So I don't think I need to convince you. But I think there is a difference between knowing something and actually having to live with its absence.

Right now, perhaps you know my love was rare because you remember it. You can reread my letters. You can open an old email and find pages of somebody trying to understand you. You can remember having somebody who cared how every interview went, who wanted to hear the tiny details of your day, who was so proud of you when things went well and wanted to sit beside you when they didn't. Somebody who remembered things you had forgotten saying and carried them around anyway.

But I think one day you will feel it differently. I think you will meet people and sometimes you will look for something in them that you once had with me. Maybe you won't even realise that's what you're doing. It might be in how closely somebody listens, whether they remember something you told them months ago, how they respond when you're overwhelmed, whether they want to know every stupid detail of something you care about, or what happens when loving you becomes inconvenient. Sometimes you will look for me. You won't find me.

I'm not saying nobody else will love you, or you won't meet somebody wonderful or fall deeply in love. You may meet somebody whose life fits yours more neatly than mine did. Somebody at the same stage as you. Somebody geographically closer. Somebody whose career moves in the same direction as yours. Somebody whose needs fit more with what your limited capacity could give. Maybe some things will be much easier.

But you will not find me in her. There was only one person who loved you in exactly the way I did, with all of my particular intensity and loyalty and ridiculous attention to detail. There was only one person who could be so excruciatingly hurt by you and still wake up every morning choosing you with conviction and asking how the two of us could do better. There was only one person who set an alarm fifteen minutes earlier because fifteen unconscious minutes beside you somehow felt like fifteen minutes wasted.

And when I say I loved you through difficulty, I mean that literally. I was with you during one of the most fucking difficult periods of your life. You were trying to hold down an incredibly demanding professional job while being in a relationship, something you had never had to do at the same time before. You were busy, stressed, preparing for a life-changing move, and dealing with a back issue that affected almost everything you did. I never ever wanted your back to become another thing that made you feel worse about yourself because I knew how much it already affected you, so I trained myself to protect it without even thinking.

It became instinctive. Every time I touched you, some part of me was calculating whether I was hugging you too tightly, leaning on you too much or placing my hand somewhere that would hurt. Who the fuck has to be scared of hurting her partner by hugging him? I knew I couldn't ask you to carry things. There were times I needed physical help and simply stopped myself from asking because I knew you couldn't give it. Whether you sat down, stood up, had a difficult day or looked even slightly uncomfortable, my first instinct was always, How's your back? And I was genuinely happy to care for you that way. I never treated it as a burden or wanted to made you feel as though your body made you harder to love.

But, fuck, I need you to understand what that says about the way I loved you. I did not meet you during some easy, settled version of your life. I loved you when you were exhausted, overwhelmed, physically hurting and standing at the edge of one of the biggest changes of your life, and I stayed beside you through all of it. Maybe one day you will meet somebody who loves you when you are settled, healthy and easy to be with. But I loved you when loving you required constant attention, adjustment and care. You may be loved again, but you will never find this exact kind of love again.

Do you remember how much I loved kissing your eyes? Remember how you would get a little annoyed when I kissed them while they were still open, and you would wince or pull your face away, but I still loved doing it. I loved closing your eyelids with my kisses and tracing my fingers along the bone around your eyes. I loved kissing your forehead, your eyebrows, the side of your face and your nose. I loved poking your belly, even when you tried to stop me, and pressing my fingers into that one muscle in your shoulder that was always so tight. I remember holding you so, so tenderly and wanting to kiss every part of you that I could reach.

I think what I have realised is that I did not love you because I had separately decided that every single part of you was lovable. I loved every part of you because it was yours. Once I loved you as a person, everything that made up that person became precious to me too, including the completely ordinary, insignificant and sometimes annoying things. It did not feel fair that I could only kiss your mouth when I loved so much more than just that. I wanted to kiss every part of you because, in my mind, every part deserved to feel loved. I think all I ever wanted was to hold you close enough that I could somehow envelop all of you in how much I loved you.

For a long time, I was almost ashamed of how much I loved you. I thought it proved I was too attached, too emotional, too willing to stay, too frightened of losing you. There are things I would absolutely do differently now. I would protect myself sooner. I would not keep shrinking what I needed to make myself easier to keep. I would not spend so long persuading somebody to choose me.

But I will never again be ashamed of the love underneath it.

Because, fuck, you were lucky.

You were so incredibly lucky to be loved like that. I can finally say that without immediately adding something to make myself sound more humble. I know what I brought into your life. I know how genuine I was with you. I know how fiercely loyal I was once I decided you were my person. I know that when things became difficult, my first instinct wasn't to look around and ask whether somebody else might fit my life more conveniently. It was to look at you and ask whether there was another way for us to become better for each other.

My love wasn't perfect. Sometimes it was frightened. Sometimes it held on too tightly. Sometimes I asked for things in ways I would change now. But it was rare. And I know you know that. I just hope one day you actually feel it. Not because I want you to suffer. Not because I want you to regret every decision you made. But because I think there are some things you cannot fully understand the value of while some version of them is still within reach.

You will fill your life with people I will probably never know and build memories that have absolutely nothing to do with me, and I still think there will be moments when something is missing in a way you recognise because, once, you knew exactly what it felt like to have it. For so long, I behaved as though being chosen by you was the prize. I spent remarkably little time considering what it meant for you to be chosen by me.

Now I know. I think being loved by me was one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to you. And losing that love wasn't something that simply happened to you. Whatever your reasons were, however complicated and understandable they may have been, you chose to let the relationship go. You chose to give up having this version of me in your life. There is nothing triumphant about saying that. I lost you too. But there is a strange dignity in finally being able to look at everything I gave you and stop asking whether it was enough.

It was.

Remember how you used to tell me that whoever got to date me would actually be the luckiest guy in the world, and that I would make him so happy. Whenever you used to say that, all I could think was, “Then why can’t you be that guy? I want you to be that guy.” If you really believed somebody would be so lucky to have me, then why couldn’t you just pull yourself together and fight for us? Why couldn’t knowing what my love was worth make you want to fight to keep it?

But now I realise that it was never my responsibility to teach you what I was worth. It was never my responsibility to make you understand that I was worth keeping, or to convince you to become the person who wanted to stay. I think, after all this time, I can finally confidently say that you were actually right all along, without all the questions that used to come after it.. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I will truly make somebody the happiest, luckiest guy in the world by loving him.

One day, somebody is going to get all of my ordinary Tuesdays. He is going to get my quirks, my nagging him about wearing slippers in the showe and my messages asking when he will be home and telling him that I am waiting.

He will get the version of me who calculates how long it will take him to get home and becomes giddy at the thought of seeing him ten seconds earlier. He will get me massaging his neck and running my hand through his hair as he drives and looking at him from the passenger seat as though he is made of pure gold.

He will get to call me beautiful everyday and see that stupid face I make when I’m too shy to say anything even when I loved hearing them. He will get to give me three kisses, one on my forehead, then my two cheeks. He will get the long-ass messages and letters I will write for him out of the blue filled with all the moments that I cherish about him and some random and very extra` song analysis about how it reminds me of us.

He will get to see the wrinkles at the corners of my eyes from all the years he has made me laugh. He will see the mother I become and the way I love our children. He will get all the times I stand beside him, pick him up and fight with him through whatever we face, with unwavering faith in him and in us. He is going to receive all the small, tender and ridiculous ways that I love somebody when I love them wholeheartedly.

One day, somebody will get all of that, and I will never have to convince him that I am someone worth keeping because he will already know. One day, somebody will get all of me, and he will thank you for the rest of his life for letting me go.

-

If, two months from now, we have ended up as strangers, I hope you know I didn't leave because I suddenly stopped caring. I didn't leave because my old letters became untrue. I didn't leave to punish you. And I didn't leave because I hoped losing access to me would frighten you into taking me back. I don't want to be chosen because I threatened to disappear. If you ever choose me again, I want you to arrive there yourself. I don't want to engineer it.

I don't want to find the perfect amount of distance. I don't want to create some casual reason to speak to you and then wonder whether you would ever have spoken to me if I hadn't. I don't want to manufacture the answer anymore. If you ever want another version of us, I want you to look at me, look at everything that happened, look at Philadelphia and the distance and the work and the uncertainty, and decide independently:

I want her.

I want this.

I don't know exactly how, but I want to try.

Because anything less puts me straight back in May. And I cannot live there again. Your birthday email actually made me realise something I should probably have understood much earlier. There is nothing left for me to prove to you. You know my value. You know how special my love was. You know how hard I tried. You know where things went wrong. You know what you would do differently. So if you know all of that and still don't want to choose me, there is no better letter I can write.

There is no more persuasive version of myself I can become. There is no final argument. There is just your choice. And mine.

(This is the last section - if you made it this far, honestly really good job, I would not have expected it…)

I don't want our relationship to become too beautiful in retrospect. I know how memory works. Eventually the sharp edges soften. A night when I cried for hours becomes “we were going through a difficult period.” The weeks of waking up terrified become “things were complicated before he left.” The missed calls disappear. The negotiations for time disappear. The Notes app disappears. The girl lying beside somebody wondering whether he wanted her disappears.

And what survives are the beautiful things. Singapore. Brighton. Ed Sheeran. Sydney. Sunday nights. The drives. The jokes. The Park Hyatt. Your heartbeat through your shirt. Those things were real. I never want to erase them.

But the other girl was real too. The girl who held your hand in Singapore and thought how nice it was that strangers were allowed to know she belonged beside you. The girl storing cabins and hot springs in her head that never happened. The girl waiting for the MBA conversation because she thought the word we was something she could actually stand on. The girl coming home from Sydney begging for faith and being told days later that perhaps there shouldn't be a relationship at all. The girl waiting week after week for you to decide. The girl crying every day. The girl sitting in your Sydney hotel room with yet another fucking letter. The girl asking for fifteen more minutes. The girl holding your hand outside her house begging:

Please make me feel safe.

The girl who asked for one more hour or one more minute before you left and then, when you didn't come, wrote you a card that contained nothing but love anyway. She was real too. For a long time I spent so much energy standing in your shoes that I stopped standing beside her. I don't want to do that anymore. And strangely, after writing all of this, I still don't think I would stop her from kissing you. If I could go back to that balcony one year ago and sit beside her, I don't think I would warn her.

I think I would still let everything happen. I would still choose the first case. I would still choose the kiss. I would still choose Singapore and Mornington and the music and the nights in cars and the stupid arguments and the conversations that went on too long. I would still choose knowing you. I would still choose loving you. But I would tell her a few things. I would tell her that loving somebody with everything she has does not mean she has to keep proving it indefinitely.

I would tell her that being able to understand somebody is a beautiful thing, but she should be careful not to try and justify him so much that she stops listening to herself. I would tell her there is no prize for being the person who can tolerate the most uncertainty. I would tell her that asking for love more perfectly will never create willingness where willingness isn't there.

Most of all, I would tell her something I think it took loving you to teach me. Love is not only what somebody feels. It is what the feeling is willing to do.

I don't know what I want you to feel when you finish this letter. For once, I don't think I want to decide that for you. Maybe you disagree with parts of it. Maybe you remember things differently. Maybe there are things I still don't understand about what was happening inside you.

I'm sure there are. This isn't the objective history of us. It is mine. It is what loving you felt like from inside me. And for a long time I was too frightened of losing you to let you see all of it. So if this really is the last thing I ever write to you, I don't need it to be another testament to how much I loved you. You know. God knows I've given you enough written evidence. I just wanted there to be one place where I stopped softening the other half.

There were periods when I was so unhappy and so frightened and so consumed by our relationship that I barely recognised myself. There were things I accepted because I thought asking for more might cost me you. There were feelings I hid because I thought expressing them might make loving me seem too difficult. There were weeks when I felt like I was watching somebody slowly loosen his grip on me while I held on tighter with both hands. And I don't want to romanticise that anymore.

But I also hope you knowed that I loved you.

I really, really loved you.

Even though I just wrote like 50 pages of all the reasons why loving you sometimes just fucking sucked, all the letters that I wrote you on the positive things of how much I cared, how much I appreciated you, and how much you meant to me, still stands. I don’t want this letter to erase all of that.

But I understand now that the enormous amount of love I was capable of giving you, some of that love belonged to you. And some of it was mine all along.

If there is another version of us, I don't want to write it into existence by myself. I don't want to make the plan. Create the opportunity. Find the perfect words. Choose the perfect timing. Keep interpreting every tender sentence. Keep wondering what your silence means. Keep pulling you towards me and then calling the movement mutual.

I want you to come towards me because you want to. And if you don't, then I think I finally understand that my job is not to stand here forever proving that I would have stayed. You already know. I would have stayed while we learned how.

I didn't need you to already know how to love me perfectly. I didn't need you to promise that we would never fail. I didn't need you to know how two people in Melbourne and Philadelphia were going to make two years work before we'd even tried. I needed you to want us enough to learn.

And perhaps that is why your birthday email still sits so strangely inside me. Because now, in so many ways, you know. You know the things I once wanted you to understand. You know what you would change. You know what you would do differently. You know how much I meant to you. You know how much I loved you.

And I don't need another beautiful description of any of it. I just need to know what all that knowing is willing to do. Maybe by the time you read this, I already have my answer.

And whatever the answer is, there is one thing I know now that I didn't know when I was lying beside you trying to steal another fifteen minutes from the morning.

You were incredibly lucky to be loved by me.

I was lucky to have loved you too. But you were, Kaushick. You really were.

And perhaps one day, when my love is no longer something you can reach for in a letter or find waiting somewhere at the edge of your life, I think you will feel the difference between knowing that and actually understanding what it meant. Maybe you will look for me sometimes. I think you will.

But you won't find me.

And so,

For the last damn time,

Soph