Dear You,

I am so conflicted inside. So indecisive and confused - and with this unsteadiness comes great sorrow. All I want is to love and to be loved in the most organic way. Stripped bare of outside stressors and afflictions. A mute-to-the-world love. A blinding love. Love that deafens me to the harrowing sobs of my soul. But this distance between us makes that impossible. It turns these empowering feelings of a true connection into a query, is this real or just an illusion? You are my tears and my smiles. You make me and break me down, without intending to. I love you and yet I resent you because you’re not beside me.

What you did with her doesn’t help the situation. I know we weren’t officially together at the time and that’s something that, retrospective to when we clashed, I have accepted as not an excuse nor justification but simply a truth that should not go unrecognized. But it was her, Love, and that’s what breaks my heart and forces tears to sting my eyes. It was her. And for the rest of my life as I love you, I will also love her and know that something (anything) happened. I just wish you had told me. But most of all I wish I hadn’t stayed up that very night thinking (and rightfully so) that something was happening between you two. I wish I hadn’t told you about these speculations. I wish I hadn’t asked you over and over and over again to tell me what happened that night. I wish I hadn’t bared witness to the two of you discussing your activities in code. I wish I hadn’t seen her having a private conversation with you at night in the kitchen. I wish I hadn’t seen those messages. I wish I had been ignorant and unaware from the beginning. Because then it wouldn’t hurt so much. And then you wouldn’t have had to lie. But what hurts me the most, beyond the lying and manipulation is you told me you were falling in love with me that night. And just like that, the most unblemished of all things - love - became blemished. You tainted it before its birth and placed a question mark in its future before it had time to grow. I wish you had known then what you know now about love because I dare say you would never have uttered those words and defiled those words in the very same night, had you known.

No matter our struggles, you changed my life. You showed me love and in the most tender of ways lifted me on the back of this love until I was close enough to God to feel it, too. You were a gift from whatever higher powers lords over all and guides us over the peaks and through the valleys and I will be forever thankful. I have had my doubts about our relationship from the beginning; my age and immaturity has not helped in the slightest and I believe to be as big a flaw in our relationship. But I come back to you, sometimes in person but always in spirit, because as my gift from God, you are cherished beyond all else. And for that reason, whenever you doubt my love for you, from now until your final days, know that my love for you resides in the depths of my spirit and even in my pain, my heart’s song of you is the sweetest of all tunes and I wouldn’t dream to hear it fade away.

I love you with everything I am,
Me, age 21