Dear M,
Not a day passes when I don’t think about you. But as time goes by, the specific becomes abstract. I don’t remember exact details of every time we went out and stood in long queues in tiny pubs to get our pitchers of drinks so that we didn’t have to join the line every half-hour but I know that we had a lot of fun together.
We both were instinctively clear that we didn’t want to get into long distance relationships. In our case, it was imperative since we were from different countries and I had a visa with an expiry date only drawing closer. Chasing our respective half-baked notions of success, love and life… Somewhere we connected on a fundamental level. We got each other, we knew each other. You knew that the fix for my every bad mood was, in fact, a Nutella milkshake. I had an idea that maybe your Twitter feed was more interesting than mine.
You were yet another yin to my yin, we were very similar and it wasn’t difficult for us to be lovers and friends. Shy, introverts, we only needed each other to make sense of our lives. Like all good things, our time together was limited. What I didn’t anticipate was how much of that I would begin to love, get attached to and miss profoundly. What I didn’t anticipate was that while I was drowning in shallow waters you would still be insistent on being ‘good friends’. I honestly don’t know what that means. You’ll always be the ex who wants to be good friends with me, because, it is easier.
But I don’t want to be good friends with you. Because every day feels like a recovery from us, an acknowledgement of what could not have been. I am liking the distance, this moment of clarity and I would like for my weekends to not start with an errant ‘hi’ from you landing in my inbox. In my case, distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. It just helps the heart heal.
It is good for me, being unaware of the ins and outs of your life. I try my best to not stalk you on social media as well. Being good friends maybe an easy way for you to try to keep my hopes up, to keep me in your life, but it is not working for me… I hope you can understand.
This is not my way or the highway, I hold no grievance against you for falling out of love with me, but life moves on, right?
So long, my dear friend.
I love you and I like you, but I can’t have you in my life anymore.
Yours always,
A.
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