Sometimes they were great essays, pages scrawled and left beneath pillows. At first I thought it was too much, too soon, that there could be no honesty in such overwrought proclamations in those early days. I pulled away, walking the long way to work so that I wouldn’t have to pass your house. But I came to realise that you could only write truthfully. You found writing words so much easier than saying them out loud, the need to hold eye contact making you rub a nervous hand across one eyebrow. I took that hand and kissed it. Made it mine.
After we moved in together the letters continued. Sometimes it was a dirty limerick emailed to me at work, my cheeks burning as I fumbled to close my browser. Other times it was a love heart drawn in the steam on the bathroom mirror. As a wedding gift you gave me a copy of Love Letters of Great Men with a dedication: “This. A thousand times this. For when I forget. (But I won’t)”.
But you did forget. Three years in, after weeks of paperless silence I asked you about it over a burnt lasagne. You rubbed your eyebrow and laughed, kissing me and telling me not to be silly. That evening I found a post-it between the pages of my book, a hastily scribbled haiku. “Love is enduring. Like words through a stick of rock. Kiss me quick, my heart.”
I should have seen that note for what it was. The moment I started losing you. Your behaviour shifted. Unreturned phone calls, late nights, raised tempers. I shied away, tiptoed around the obvious because I wasn’t brave enough to ask the questions we needed to answer. Perhaps I should have used your language, written it down and tucked it away for you to find. But I was a coward. I see that now.
I still have your letters, including the last one you ever wrote. It was torn from the corner of the newspaper, a fraction of a recipe for an apple pie still visible. In the margin, two words. “I’m sorry.”
Every morning when I woke up and found that your smell had faded a little more, I used to wonder what I could have done differently, what I needed to do to keep you. But now that seeing your shoes in the hallway no longer makes me feel like the floor is dropping out from under me, I realise that I always knew that I was never going to be enough. Your path had been laid out long before I came along. Our journey was destined to be short.
I’ve never been good with the written word. I always thought I could say more with my voice and gestures. But you were your words, so I’ve written you a final haiku. I’ll leave it among the flowers.
We exchanged our hearts. The black dog barked too loudly. Unfinished story.