My dear friend,
Friend. I'll try to refer to you that way because anything else - dear, love, your name - will hurt me. Friend is what you must be, you must as the situation doesn't allow me much else. As you're not allowed much else.
By your relationship standards, are you even allowed a female friend?
I cling onto small things. Onto some phrases that I keep repeating in my head like some sort of spell, a mantra, to keep me sane and believing that I'm not inventing things. That this is what we're actually feeling. That I'm not alone in this.
I touch things. The postcards, the drawings in a book, the places you've touched on my face.
I kept rereading your words. These things are dear to me, warming and soft as if they smell of you and enter my nostrils from literally thousand miles away.
You wrote them.
And then deleted - for safety. I know.
And then wrote something again.
And deleted.
And then I read them for the 10th time and deleted them too so I would stop reading it over and over again until I memorised it all.
Is this good?
Tell me, is this really a good thing?
I can't stop feeling like nothing has happened, and yet I'm already a mistress. Because this is ten times worse than anything happening.
How do we - - - how do I navigate this? What would be proper, smart boundaries? What are you allowed and not allowed?
And then I answer to myself.
Nothing. Nothing is allowed.
I can't help but feel like I'm sneaking around. Being knit picked bone by bone like a rotting carcass by people I pass at work. It's stupid and I might be paranoid, but I know some of them know. You know some of them do.
I know my partner suspects.
How do we navigate this? Please, please turn into a good friend, please, because I cannot do this. I know you know this, and I know we're trying. I'm trying. And failing. And trying. And failing. Breaking down. Trying to build distance.
I thought me being away would make things easier. But we talk more. And I like it. And yet it's... Not good.
My head keeps painting these images - graphic, deprived, absolutely insane - of soft things that smell of your body. Of you. With me. Of me just tossing everything out the window and running away. And I indulge in them, sometimes for hours at a time: when I wake up way too early, before I go to sleep, on car, bus, train rides, when I'm daydreaming at work... Which now I do a lot.
But at the end of the day they're all dreams. And I forced myself to stop dreaming once. I can, I have to do it again.
I know I'm not going to leave my partner. I'm not going anywhere. However mad it sounds, I love him. And the truth is - however hurtful it might seem - that this... Doesn't have a future. Or at least one that you'd be happy with. I have an inkling of what you want. You told me. And even if we paint both our glasses magenta pink, I could never go back to a monogamous relationship. I could not pass up having kids.
My friend told me that this might be a lesson. Or that we found each other for a reason. Maybe we're teaching each other something. To love? To live? To be brave? To accept ourselves?
We struggle with the same things. I feel it when you write to me, even if you don't say much. I wish you could see what I see in you. I know it's hard. But all we can do is try.
All we can do is try to make this work in the only way it can. Cause I'd rather have that than not have you at all.
And the horrible, horrible thing is - and even worse to say it at the very end - is that I want you, and can't have you. And I'm afraid.