I fell in love with you 18 months ago.
I fell in love with you 18 months ago. We were talking about something, wrestling or movies or our favourite author James Baldwin, and I remember it felt like the clouds had parted and the sun was shining right upon me. It was that moment where I felt everything for you, where I knew that I loved you and that I wanted to be with you, that it would be worth whatever struggles that we’d go through. I fell in love with you through a screen and hoped that there would be a future where the screen would transition into reality, and I’d love you with all the passion that I imagined. I envisioned a future where we got together and stayed together, where I moved to the U.S and lived in your apartment, looking after your dog and writing books while you went to work, doing the important things you fought so hard to be able to do. I envisioned a future where we’d have a kid or two, you’d deal with the changing and the puking, I’d deal with literally anything but those things. I envisioned a future where the singular grey hair in my beard transformed into hundreds, where my blonde streaks turned silver and the bags underneath my eyes were consumed by wrinkles, yet you were by my side. I dreamed about cuddling you, fucking you, loving you. I told you I loved you after we’d been dating for about two weeks. Your uncle had just passed away and it was my stupid way of trying to put a smile on your face. You told me you loved me too, and the second I heard it in your voice that night, I almost cried with happiness. We talked on the phone every night, for hours at a time. We played games, booking fantasy wrestling cards, talking about our favourite films of the 2010s, talking about some of the things we were going to do when I got to New York. I wanted to go to the Brooklyn Bridge and quote the opening monologue of the 2018 film Gotti, you looked at me like I was fucking crazy for wanting to do that. I remember consoling you during a rough night, and you consoled me through the rest of the nights. I opened up to you about things I’d never said to anyone and you made me feel safe. I listened to your trauma and I made you feel safe. We were a perfect couple. I couldn’t wait to introduce you to my best friend, to walk around next to you with my hand in yours, showing you off to my world and my city. You were the only person I’d ever known who could rival me in knowledge of everything, movies weren’t your first interest but you were closer to my level than I’d have ever expected. We bonded over the 2018 version of A Star is Born and Last Year at Marienbad, it always made me really happy to know about the poster of it on your wall. You knew more about wrestling than anyone I’d ever met, and your knowledge and passion for the dastardly sport of American Football was so detailed that I couldn’t help but be impressed. You had databases of knowledge on punk rock, jazz and rap, so much that I was staggered. You collected Langston Hughes poetry and loved the show Six Feet Under. You knew more about Lady Gaga than one human should ever have known, it was terrifying at times but in that perfectly adorable way that made me love you more. You were fascinated with the Mafia and I mocked you for it. I suspected you were secretly half Italian but I never told you that, it’s one of the few things I regret not telling you. We made playlists for each other, one that I kept updating months after you were gone. I used to listen to both until it made me too sad, to hear the love songs through a new lens of heartbreak. We planned on watching every WrestleMania together, but you disappeared on the first night we were going to watch one live for the first time.
We’d only been dating for two months when you got sick and it changed everything. Nightly phone calls turned into biweekly texts, expectations of going to see you in New York transformed into desperate pleading that you were still alive. I prayed for the first time in my adult life, begging that you wouldn’t die, that you’d be with me for as long as I lived. You always used to say that you’d love me till the day you died, I didn’t think either of us could have imagined that it would come so close. I don’t know if you’re dead. I haven’t heard from your family, I haven’t heard from you, I haven’t heard anything for months. I’ve done everything I could do, but there’s only so little you can find out 4000 miles away and without a marriage certificate. It has been nine months since I last texted you. It has been almost a year to the day since I last heard your voice on the telephone. It was my birthday. You called me in the facility you were staying at to deal with COVID complications, you managed to convince the nurses to let you call me for an hour. I don’t remember what we talked about and that’ll haunt me for the rest of my life, since it’s likely to be the last conversation I ever had with you. You’re supposed to remember those conversations, that’s what everything says. The last talk you have with your father before he passes or your grandmother or the final words you say to a pet you put down. These are the things you remember, that stick with you forever. I didn’t know it was the end and it didn’t feel like it was. The last relationship I was in, there was that silent acknowledgement between us when we said goodbye at the airport that it was going to be over. It didn’t end for a few months after, but I think we both knew that it would be the last time I touched them, the last time I got to feel their tears against my skin. With you, I expected that it would be the first conversation out of hundreds of thousands, the new beginning to our relationship as COVID started to disappear from your body and the path to our life together seemed to reveal itself. I knew we could make it work. A few months of terrible communication due to a life threatening virus was horrible, but I could deal with the pain of waiting for you. Because I always knew you’d come back to me, that within a few weeks, I’d hear your voice notes and see your texts and the world would be okay. But you didn’t come back this time.
It’s been nine months and I’ll probably never know if you’re dead. If you’re in a coma. If you just didn’t wanna come back to me after the third hospital stay. That last idea breaks my heart into a million pieces but I’d crave that reality any day over you being dead, I’d rather you be alive without me than dead as my partner. I don’t know if I’ll ever find closure with this, with you, with the memories of the girl I loved for a year and a half. The girl that I’ll always love in a capacity that cannot be erased. If the world was perfect, you’d never have gotten sick. It makes me so angry to think about all that was taken from us, all that we’ve lost because of this virus and if it’s killed you, then I will be angry for the rest of my life that a beautiful, kind woman died for nothing. I often think that it should have been me that got sick. That I’m the one who should have been in a hospital bed fighting for my life. You were smart, you were doing things, you were better than me. I still don’t know what you saw in me, a poor film writer from a country you’d never seen with your own eyes. It should have been me to go, but I am still here, haunted and overwhelmed to hold the memories of you. If I am the last person to love you, I am grateful that I got to be that, that I got to make you feel adored and cherished and needed as you left this world. I wish I could have been there to hold your hand, even if it would have killed me too. If I’m the last person that you loved, then I will live on for you, try to see the love in myself that you saw in me, and continue to love others with the passion that I loved you. That doesn’t change the fact that I turn 20 in a few weeks and I have already experienced what it’s like to grieve a partner. I feel so old, even though my life is supposed to just be beginning. I have acknowledged that the likelihood of good news gets smaller every day and I have given up hoping for it to be different, because that’s the only way I can save myself. I feel terrible that I’ve failed you, that I have to move on with my life. I can’t stay hoping for a ghost forever. I have changed permanently because of the last year. I am tired, more cynical, less optimistic and irrevocably traumatised by everything that’s happened to me. I am not the same boy you fell in love with 18 months ago. I can’t be. I have to live, I have to step forward into the future because if I spend the rest of my life waiting in my room for a text that won’t come, I’ll shatter into a million pieces. I love you. I will always remember you. I will always keep you close to my heart. I will tell every person I ever meet all about you. If I have the kids that I dreamed of having with you, then they will know your name. I will keep your memory alive, I promise. But I can’t die baby. I can’t go away too. So this is my goodbye. For all the pain that we’ve gone through, I wouldn’t have given you up. If I knew when I told you that I loved you the first time that you’d be gone forever so soon, I wouldn’t have stopped myself. I’d still tell you, still love you, even with the knowledge that you’d be gone, because the love we had was worth it. You made me feel like I wasn’t broken. You made me feel human. You gave me the love that I’d hoped so desperately to find and it was even better than I ever imagined. I wish I could give you a better goodbye, I wish I could touch you, tell you all the things I love about you one last time. But I can’t. I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance. That’ll never be okay. I’ll never be able to deal with that. It makes me want to die just to think about. But I can’t live in imaginary futures anymore.
I have your voice notes saved on my phone. There are over 500 of them, ranging from 2 seconds long to 26 minutes. I used to listen to them every second of the day, drowning out music in favour of hearing your beautiful voice. Now I have to put them to the side so I don’t cry anymore. I will always cherish knowing that they are there, that I’ll never forget what your voice sounds like. I will cherish that I have so many of our texts, so many photos of you, that I can remember how we spoke and remember how beautiful you were. I don’t have anything else to cling onto that’s yours, so these will be my beacon whenever I need to process my grief again, whenever I need to remember the woman that taught me how to breathe. I remember that I was gonna write you a diary, a handwritten book containing poetry and messages and honest expressions of my thoughts while you were in the hospital. I never finished it because writing it made me too sad. This is my letter to you, to make up for all those pages that were never written. One day, I’ll write something more about our unlikely love story, the successful college graduate who worked in politics falling in love with the young writer with an affection for red hoodies, being separated by COVID but still finding a way to make it work. Still loving each other through it all. Maybe I’ll give it the happy ending that we weren’t able to have. Maybe I’ll reckon with the pain that your absence has scarred me with. Or maybe, it’ll remain an unfulfilled idea, something that hurts me too much to make into anything more than a concept. So much of my life is uncertain now because you were my future. In a sense, you always will be. I don’t know what or who I’m going to be without you. But it’s time for me to go, to try and love someone else the way I loved you. Maybe one day, I’ll see you again, somewhere in the stars. You are my thousand and I love you with the love greater than love. Goodbye, my rose.