Tom
I've said it before and I'l say it again.
I am not an idiot.
Probably not the line you thought I was going to come out with. I don't know what you'd be expecting. I'm starting to feel like I never really knew you at all.
I wish I wasn't still so mental and bitter about the whole thing. I really wish I could look back on those years and remember the memories, but everytime I talk about something good that happened, everytime I remember something fun I shared with you, the stab of pain hits me almost instantly as my brain floods with how the story played out, and I realise that I messed it all up.
I know I shouldn't shoulder all the burden for everything that went wrong, it's just an assumption that as I don't know exactly what was going on it must be all my fault.
I'd love to think you were hurting as much as I am. If not now, at least at the time. But I also know that you weren't.... It isn't in your nature.
Yet 2 and a half years since I saw you last and here I am. Having panic attacks as I realise that I need to know what happened. I don't know why this is suddenly important. I don't know why the pain has suddenly come flooding back. I just know 2 things.
1) You were my best friend.
2) I miss you.
But like I said I'm not an idiot. I know that missing you isn't going to change anything. I've left it too late to change anything now. So I don't expect a change. I don't expect to contact you and have you back caring about my life or anything stupid. You're gone. I know that. You don't fit in my life anymore, and you wouldn't want too be there if you did. I have to respect that.
But.
See this is the problem. I really don't want to be e-mailing you. I don't want to have to contact you. I don't want to be the needy one who has to point out that after 2 and a half years I can't go more than a week without hearing a song, or remembering a place that still ties me to you. And once my brain gets a snatch of a memory it goes straight for the weakness, and the pain floods in again.
Nothing happened. Yet everything still happened. I never slept with you, yet I slept in your bed. It was never a relationship, yet you said we could try it. It wasn't even a month of confusion, yet the ripples made me question the whole 3 years I'd known you.
I think what hurt me the most was that when it all happened, I still had to be living in that flat. If I had somewhere else to go.... that would have made it better. But to come home and sit in my room in silence while you and your friends ignored me and shut me out..... well, loneliness doesn't help matters. They were never my friends, I appreciate that. We thought it would work but I was never going to be mates with them.
I'm skirting around the issue because I'm scared to ask the real question that I need too. Scared to get an answer about the thing that's giving me panic attacks... but I guess I just need to rip off the bandage and get it over with.
Did you ever even care about me? As a person, as a potential partner. Was it ever something, or was it really just because I was there?
I think I genuinely need to know.
Because seriously, the way it happened, the way you just dropped me out of your life despite the fact I still lived in your flat, it feels like you didn't. That you never cared. Otherwise, how could it have been that easy?
I couldn't tell you at the time that I needed a friend. My world fell apart in the months after you severed contact, but I never told you that, I never breathed a word, despite having the urge to knock on your door at 2 am just so you could talk me out of my panic... like you used too.... before everything happened. Family and work and friends were crumbling around my ears and the one constant I thought would always be there.... well that had disappeared in the blink of an eye. But no. I couldn't tell you. Not at the time.
But I need you to have cared. I need someone in my life to have cared.
Not that I can tell you that.
More than anything I just want to sit in your room talking random crap while you play WoW and I pretend to understand. It wasn't exciting, it wasn't magical, but I felt safe and I felt happy in a way I haven't found since then.
I know it can never go back to that. I knew it as soon as this started. I just wish I would have stuck to my instincts.
I've left it too late. 2 years of not talking is too long to suddenly ask for an explanation. I can't contact you. I won't contact you.
But I don't know how to make it stop. I need you to make this stop. I need you to have cared. Even if not now.... at least back then.
Help me
Sam.