Last night I had a dream that you were here and looking at apartments with me. We walked through them, and I was hyper aware of your presence, like a knife point at my back. I worried that you would want to move back in together. I could feel your disapproval and your pain, was keenly tuned in to the electricity in the air that forewarned a thunderstorm of emotions. We sat on the floor in the hall of the apartment building and talked, face to face and touching, my knee on your leg. I think the relief was palpable for both of us when I posited that one apartment might be better for you, and another for me, conversationally, as if it was a given that we would live near each other but not together.

I struggle these days with the fact that you think I’ve moved on, and that you probably also feel betrayed. It’s been two years since we embarked on separated, but not totally discrete, lives. I thought that time and space would give me a measure of peace, but all it has served to do is force me to survive alone. I am doing that, but it’s not easy. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

For many reasons, I was pretty stunned when you wrote that you had harbored hope that we might reconcile. You never asked me to stay, not once. You never spoke of those hopes in the last two years. I’ve said to you many times over the years that I cannot read your mind. As well as I know you, as profoundly as your feelings come through in my dreams as they did in our life together, I didn’t think you wanted to reconcile.

This makes me both angry and sad. Angry because you didn’t believe enough in my agency, in my autonomy, to make a decision that I perceived was the best one for me. Angry because you also thought it might be temporary, like I’m just fucking with you and your emotions or being manipulative to get what I want. Angry because you seem to think I made the decision to leave easily and without careful thought.

Sad, so very sad, because you let me go.

I imagine that the desire to re-couple is waning in you following your examination of my written posts, and maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know if I can ever live with anyone ever again. I definitely have no idea if I could feel anything for anyone ever again. All I know for sure, and I’ve said this a million times in my blog, to my friends, and to myself, is that I desperately miss my best friend.

Desperately.

It always takes two people to ruin a relationship. I didn’t just suddenly wake up one day and think, well what the fuck did I get myself into 24 years ago? I woke up and realized that I was a big part of the problem. I misled you for over two decades. I showed you a person who didn’t really exist. I was not true to myself, and therefore not honest with you.

You asked why I left, and I think the biggest reason is resistance. I felt like you resisted me on every front. You resisted my likes, my hobbies, my friends, my exuberance, my mildly dramatic nature. Your reluctance to have hard conversations like this one are another. I needed, many times over the years, to have deep heart-to-hearts with you, and most of the time I felt I couldn’t do that. It’s not your fault that you’re emotionally distant, and I think we both know that I well understand the foundation of that. In your last e-mail to me you said “I had the notion that authentic love didn’t need to be worked on, it just is, and what I feel for you is enough.” To some extent that might be true, I think our love for one another could have seen us through, if we’d just made the slightest bit of effort not to change one another, but to completely accept each other for who we are. For the record, I was bad at that, too.

You said so many incredible things to me in your recent e-mails. You said things I’ve needed to hear for 24, no, 26 years now. It’s so precious to me to hear your inner voice. Every tiny insight is like a sparkling and clear balm that soothes my thirsty soul. Your carefully crafted and deeply genuine thoughts are the most important things I’ve ever read. I hear you read them to me aloud in my head.

You write beautifully.

I hate my distance from you and I miss you. I can’t see the future, it’s like trying to look through glass blocks. I don’t know if missing you is just something I’m going to have to learn to live with or if it could somehow be made better, if there’s some compromise that would allow us to work toward something new or walk away, either way. I don’t know how you’re feeling right now, exactly, although my vivid imagination and deeply ingrained sense of guilt and shame paints me as the bad guy and you as the recipient of a million hurts, which sends me into a pain spiral all over again just like it did two years ago. That’s not a fair assessment, I know, but that’s how I feel.

I’ll say it again: I fucking miss you so much. Was ending the partnership worth losing my best friend? I ask myself this question over, and over, and over again. Not a day goes by and no experience slips past without my sincere wish that you were sharing it with me in some way.

And for the record, I will always go to PetSmart with you to look at cats.