Letter to a Neverlover
Title: Letter to a Neverlover
Summary: When I was fifteen and you were fourteen, I fell in love - but you never knew that, did you?
Warnings: mentions of self-harm and suicidal behaviour.
Rating: PG-13.
Dear Anna,
So I don’t hold out much hope that you remember me, but a name might jog your memory all the same: do you remember David A.? I was in your year at school; we met when you asked if the seat next to mine was taken, in the first week of the new year, in Mrs. Jones’ physics lab on the first floor. I’d just turned fifteen, and you were still fourteen, and I thought that you were beautiful - but that last part, I suppose I never told you.
This was my initial impression: you were a girl with that strange shy smile, because you had nothing to be shy about. You had your friends, and your group, and the respect of the others in our year. You weren’t conventionally all that pretty back then, but you were cute and you smiled at me, and when you said that you didn’t like physics, I’m afraid I lost my soul.
Wait. Back up.
I didn’t lose it yet, because you were right there. If it slipped free and swore allegiance to you instead of me, then what was the loss? It was only two feet away - less, if we had to share the textbook. And we did: my memory is not so poor as to forget every week.
Imagine my surprise when you found in me someone that you (seemed) to like to talk to. That was a rare thing in those days, and I don’t think you ever quite grasped that. Was it a concept in your world, that someone might be lonely? I hope that it wasn’t; I hope that you never understood how I felt, and that in the years between, you haven’t gained any capacity for it either.
I’m getting ahead again. Let me try to explain, at least a little.
I’m not writing to reminisce; I’m writing to apologise. I did a foolish thing, all those years ago, and its lurked in the back of my mind, where my soul used to live. You still have my soul; can I ask you at least dust it off now and then, and put it out of the way so it won’t get nudged? It’s too cracked to survive a fall these days.
Let’s rewind again.
Do you remember the way I was at fifteen? Awkward and shy, with no social skills, and always on the sidelines? I had to be walked through social interaction, and even though you welcomed me into your group when I was fifteen and you were fourteen, I was not so blind as not to notice when you discussed parties to which I had never been invited, or jokes to which I was not privy. I looked the other way on purpose when your friends criticised me, and kept my silence when someone would let slip there had been a day out to which I was not welcomed.
If I had had some self-respect, perhaps it would have bothered me - but I sacrificed my self-respect along with my soul to stay close to you. I daren’t question my luck; if I had some semblence of a friendship with you, then all was well.
And I must apologise again; I don’t mean to sound so bitter.
For a while, you were a friend. I enjoyed my time with you, what little of it I had, and counted up the moments to keep them. I remember when Chelsea scouted you, and you had to choose between football and university. I recall chemistry lessons, our mutual hatred of the ‘Welsh dragon’ binding us together. I remember your smile, as though I could turn and find it there beside me now, and I remember the way you frowned when you were uncertain of your own place in the world.
I wish that you had never had to be uncertain.
Most of all, I remember the day that you learned I was suicidal.
Here are the facts: during the time you knew me, I attempted suicide multiple times. My home situation was poor, and my school situation little better. I was outcast from the other students, as I’m sure you must have noticed. I was severely depressed for many years, and would have done anything to remove myself from that life. I was a repeated self-harmer, which you discovered for yourself in Spanish, on a sunny morning in the computer room. I still remember the flash of pain when you grabbed my arm; perhaps that was when the world came down.
But there was you.
Did you ever know how much you meant to me?
I don’t think you did, so let me explain now: you are the reason that I am here to write. It was the thought of you, with your sweet smile and your laughter and the way you thought, if only for a moment, that I was someone worth speaking to, that kept me tied to the edge of the world - without you, I would have fallen.
Without you, I nearly did.
Here are more facts: when we were both sixteen, and ready to go into the last two years of our schooling, they moved us all around. Do you remember the orientation days, when we could choose our new tutor groups, and group ourselves into friendships as we pleased?
Do you know how much I looked forward to that day - to being in a classroom with people who did not despise me?
Perhaps that was the sin: I hoped for too much.
Here are the facts again: on that day, I watched as you and your group - the people whose parties you attended without question - selected each other, calculating with mathematical precision how to secure the entire group in one classroom, including a new student you had met the day before.
And I watched as you forgot about me.
I saw my future in that moment. After two years, side-by-side in physics and English and chemistry and even, now and then, on the same team in PE, and grasping at the fluttering escape of my soul in your heart, you forgot about me as though I had never existed in the first place. And there I saw my future, if not my life, as the one who would be left behind.
And you did.
Here is another fact: it was only through the ‘wise’ decision of the new tutor that I was put into your classroom group. She assumed, so naive, that I must have been absent from the days, and that I was obviously meant to be with you. And I wish it could be true.
But you and I were not meant to be.
I spent that summer in isolation from you - from all of you. I was a ghost again, and now I knew the truth: I always would be. You had no idea who I was, and you would not be staying. Perhaps you would not have stayed at all, if I had not clutched for contact. My birthday passed, and I was seventeen years old without fanfare, and forced to accept the truth that would burn the heart out of me like a face from a photograph under the bitter embers of a cigarette.
I loved you, but like a ghost loves the living: without impact or hope.
Here are the facts: when we returned to school, I could see my own future in desperately crushing the knowledge that I had earned. I could foresee two years of hiding everything that I knew to be true, and playing the part of an actor on the stage when in reality I was the performer who had died years before, and lingered in pointless hope that someone would be attuned enough to the ether to see me. I could pretend that I never knew, could pretend that I was as accepted as you were, could plaster a smile and a joke over the cracks that everyone knew where there, but were too polite to trace.
What, then, could I choose between? Physical death, or mental abolition. I chose the former: I turned away from they who had turned away from me, and withdrew from the group with every intention of dying.
Only there you lingered, once again.
You had my soul, Anna, clutched into your unknowing hands, and I felt tethered you as though you’d wound a chain around my chest and held me back. In death, there would be no you - and it was a foolish notion. It was a ridiculous one: I am not religious, and I never have been. I believe in nothing after death; once dead, I would be incapable of longing for you, or missing you, or even loving you.
And yet...and yet that knowledge was not enough.
Once again, I endured for you - even though you were lost to me.
I fought with Lily and Alex. I’m sure you know that already; doubtless you talked about it in the usual fashion girls have in mixing and matching their stories and piecing them all back together over a round of Chinese whispers. None of you, though, would have heard the story from me; I kept silent from you all, tired - perhaps I had finally grown that self-respect, at seventeen and far too late to hold back the tide - of pretending that I was ever going to be anything but isolated.
For the first time in years, I was angry as well. I had spent so many years numb, but those days made me truly angry. I had almost forgotten the feeling; it was alien and overpowering. Perhaps I should thank you all, then, for returning at least one emotion to me.
But you and I never fought.
You and I never even said goodbye - one moment we were there, and the next we were not. I remember the last time I saw you: the day of our exam results, when your mother’s car turned the corner and you stared at me. You gave me a small smile, and I returned it, out of automatic courtesy drummed into me by then eighteen-and-a-half years of living in society.
We did not meet inside the school, or say goodbye then either. And then we were gone - I flocked north, away from the southern countryside and the hurt - and your light disappeared out of my line of vision for good.
My soul did not come with me.
This is what it has come to. Five years on from that first physics lesson, I still think of you and wonder how different my life would have been if my soul had listened to me and remained where it belonged instead of forgoing me for you. And yet I cannot blame it: I would have foregone me for you as well, if only it were possible.
Here is the most important fact: I loved you.
You were my light. You could do nothing wrong, in my eyes. Every inch of you was perfect, even the imperfections themselves - and I know that makes no sense, but that’s how it was. When you smiled, my day was made; when you didn’t, it was still alright because you were simply there. When I upset you, or made you cry the one or two times, I wanted to go down to the train tracks that ran along the end of my housing estate, and have my last view be the sky instead of you.
I loved you - and I still do.
Part of my heart belongs to you - the painful part, torn out just above the left atrium, and bleeding out inside. Some days I can barely feel the pain - some days I can smile, and almost forget about you, but then there will be a flash of fair hair and a sweet smile, and I will return to a physics laboratory on the first floor, five years in my history, and that missing part of my heart will throb.
I apologise for being stupid enough to fall in love with you when I knew - even then - that I would carry some unrequited burn for the rest of my life. I apologise even for telling you, except that perhaps now I have, the burn will not threaten my breathing and I can go about my life as though you and I - not we - never happened.
I will give in to one bitter thought, however. You once asked if you were a fairweather friend - one that stays in the bright times, and departs in the dark. I said no. On that matter, I was incorrect.
In the interests of honesty, I will say this: I still carry the pain and the anger and the passion that almost tore me apart. They still lurk under the surface, flashing out at random intervals and carving new paths into my psyche - but I am not so sick. That is what I was - ill - and now I am recovering from it. I will soon be twenty-one years old, and I will reach it with my heart still beating and the scars torn into my skin - and most of all, I will reached it wounded and with gritted teeth, but smiling and steady. I am not recovered, but I am well. Whether I will ever be truly better is another matter. It is, however, wholly thanks to those I met after leaving home behind.
So no pressure: your light is not what keeps mine going these days.
I have apologised for much - and rightly so - but I do not apologise for the following:
Here is a fact: no matter what else occurs in your life, or what hardships you encounter, or whatever dark things creep into your world, you must always know that I love you. You are loved, even from afar and in silence, with a sheer intensity I never thought possible. And you are worth that love: as much as I wish I didn’t have to carry it, I have never wished you away. While I hate my history and the school and even some of the people that we both knew, I have never hated you or wished you away. I am incapable, it seems, because my soul is too far away and my mind too occupied with taking out the memories of you, admiring them, and placing them back ready to be held again. You are loved, and if the last five years were anything to go by, then you always will be.
That is all I really had to say: I am sorry for the way things turned out, I love you, and while I have neither forgotten nor truly forgiven what happened all those years ago, it is no longer the danger that it was. Now that I have said it, after years of angry silence, perhaps I can begin to forget it.
Doubtless, you and I will now carry on as though I never wrote this down.
I apologise for the formal tone, but to speak it the way I would talk was too painful to do - and I needed to do this. I expect no response, and feel free to delete it and forget once more about the ghost in the background. I will certainly not be chasing this letter up or acting on any of this in any way - this is the last you will hear from me for all of my life, should that be what you prefer.
I wish you the best with your present and future, and hope for your sake that you never make the mistake that I did all those years ago.
Sincerely,
David.