Even now, I cannot say what will happen to you, to me, to us. It has been years, darling, but we are still young and I am a coward. You left me behind, but I never stopped: even now I would not. I expected you to do what I myself am doing- planning a future without the other in it. Here is the truth: I have loved you for so, so long that I don’t know how not to love you. I love you, and I am angry at myself for not allowing myself to do it properly. I will never risk planning a future with you in it. I could never risk it. When I was a child I did not dream of love, or even quite expect it, as some do; I bumped into it, too young to understand precisely what it meant, and now I am caught in it. I don’t know what to do about that. Here are some more truths: I don’t know how to be in love. I don’t think I’m very good at it. I could understand you no longer loving me, as we drift apart on opposite ends of a continent. I could bear it. But I could not bear you looking me in the eye and telling me that you do not love me in the midst of a life we built together. I cannot take such a leap of faith, not for me, not for you, not for anyone. I am young, and I am a fool, and I am a hundred other things that you love despite it all, and I cannot ask you to come home, and you know better than to ask me. At my core, I have my pride, and my anger, and little else. I love you, I love you, but darling, is it enough for us? ……………….. Darling, It is snowing today. ……………….. I learned to love you around the same time I learned to love used paperbacks with torn covers and notes in the margins. I learned to love you when it was cold, in the mornings before the world had any right to be awake; I learned to love you in the smudged sunlight under mountains of blankets. I learned to love you while I annotated the dead poets’ declarations, and I do not regret it. Darling, I have never regretted you.
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