Pictures of You

They weren't lying when they said you're pure of heart.

I know I told you I didn't want you reading what I write, so the chances of you ever seeing this are slim. Maybe that's why these words feel safe. There is a peculiar freedom in addressing someone who will likely never hear you. It feels less like writing a letter and more like leaving flowers at the site of an old cathedral. Not because the cathedral no longer exists, but because the congregation has long since departed.

I've always known you were intelligent, despite what you believed about yourself. That was obvious. What wasn't obvious was the extent of it. Reading your writing feels like stumbling upon a hidden chamber inside a house I thought I already knew. Every time I think I've reached the center of it, another corridor appears. Another door. Another layer. You write with an almost frightening level of sincerity. Most people spend their lives constructing disguises. They sand down their contradictions, polish their narratives, and present a bastardization of themselves that is easier to consume. You seem constitutionally incapable of doing that. You expose every insecurity, every contradiction, every absurdity, every tenderness. There is nowhere to hide in your writing, and somehow you invite the reader to stop hiding too.

To be honest, you've inspired most of what I write. I don't mean that in the sentimental way people usually mean it. I mean that sometimes I catch myself arranging a sentence and realize the architecture of it belongs to you. Sometimes I find myself dwelling on a memory longer than I otherwise would have because you taught me that memories are not events but living organisms. They grow. They decay. They mutate. They haunt. Sometimes I write something and think, "God, she would hate this paragraph," and then immediately start rewriting it.

Reading your blogs has become a ritual. I refresh the page. I make tea. I smoke. Then, for ten minutes or twenty or an hour, I get to pretend that distance is a negotiable thing. I get to pretend that separation is merely geographical and not something much larger. It's strange. People talk about hearing the voices of the dead in old recordings. I hear yours in text. Every joke lands exactly where I know it would. Every observation arrives with the same cadence I remember. Every sudden descent into philosophy sounds exactly like you. Sometimes I laugh out loud and then feel ridiculous because I've just laughed alone in my room like a fucking chud.

You called what happened between us a misunderstanding and a lack of accountability. I think you're being kinder than history permits. Those weren't mistakes. A mistake happens once. A mistake is accidental. There was a pattern, and patterns demand recognition. The tragedy is not that I failed to recognize it. The tragedy is that I recognized it and convinced myself recognition alone was enough. It wasn't.

I treated the most beautiful person I've ever met like garbage.

There are more sophisticated ways of saying that. More intellectual ways. I could dress it up in psychological terminology and theories about attachment and insecurity and emotional immaturity. I could spend pages dissecting causes and motivations. But all those explanations eventually collapse under the weight of a very simple truth. I hurt someone.

What an embarrassing thing to admit. What a pathetic thing to be guilty of.

I still think about The Flea. You probably don't realize how much that poem stayed with me. The first time you mentioned it, we were sitting in the garden. The second time we were on the phone. It has followed me ever since. Not constantly, but with a persistence that could snap my ribs in half. It returns unexpectedly, carrying the same ache with it every time.

I think what fascinated you about it was never the flea itself. It was the longing beneath it. That impossible desire to collapse the distance between two people. To become so intertwined that separation feels like a violation of natural law. There is something beautiful and grotesque about that. Something sacred and desperate. The writer understood that love is not always gentle. Sometimes it arrives as hunger. Sometimes it arrives as obsession. Sometimes it arrives as a tiny creature carrying two people's blood inside its body and somehow that feels like the most romantic thing ever written.

Only you could make me spend hours thinking about a flea.

Just today I was out with a friend, eating chicken, and for reasons entirely beyond my control I remembered that phone call. I remembered telling you that every time I eat chicken I feel like a king feasting in front of peasants, and then putting on that ridiculous voice, clutching my imaginary stomach and declaring, "Oh, my big fat belly. Oh, my big belly." A truly astonishing display of intellect. Clearly it was a success, though, because you immediately started laughing so hard that I could barely get through the bit myself. Sitting there today, I started giggling again into my food like an absolute fucking chud while everyone around me carried on with their lives. God, I really do crack myself up.

It reminded me of that day in the theater when I was sitting with L. Later you confronted me about it because apparently you kept looking back and thought I was laughing with them. The truth is much less flattering. I was mostly laughing at my own jokes, as I often do. I remember that same day you were sitting behind us and you said something that I can barely reconstruct now. It was completely absurd, something about Hungary getting hungry and eating Italy, or something equally nonsensical. You were laughing so hard you could barely force the words out between breaths. To this day I am not entirely convinced I ever understood the joke. I think I started laughing because you were laughing. Whatever logic it possessed was lost immediately beneath the sound of your amusement. The joke itself disappeared, as most jokes do. What remained was the moment, and somehow that is what I still carry with me.

What strikes me now is how little I remember the actual jokes. The words have mostly vanished. The punchlines are gone. What remains is the sound of your laughter, the way it arrived suddenly and consumed everything around it. Memory is strange that way. It preserves what mattered and discards the rest. I cannot always remember what was said, but I remember how it felt to make you laugh, and somehow that feeling has survived long after the jokes themselves became unintelligible.

You wrote that you only have one soulmate every lifetime, and that you were happy you got to meet yours. I've thought about that line more than I'd like to admit.

If soulmates are true, then I hope with all my heart that you're wrong and I'm right. I hope you find your real soulmate. I hope one day you meet someone, or reconnect with someone.. I hope they listen to you the way I should have. I hope they listen to every word you say and understand what a privilege it is to be allowed inside your mind. I hope they recognize the extraordinary person standing in front of them before it's too late.

But selfishly, there is a part of me that understands exactly what you meant. Because you were my first love, and you will be my last. You were the person who taught me what love was supposed to feel like. Before you, it was theory. After you, it became experience.

You said you preserved the memory of me untouched by bitterness. I don't know if I deserve that kindness. But I have done the same for you. When I think of you,  I think of your laugh. I think of the garden. I think of phone calls that lasted until one of us fell asleep. I think of stupid jokes that somehow became sacred because they belonged to us.

If soulmates are real, if there truly is one person in every lifetime whose existence rearranges your understanding of love, then I am grateful beyond words that mine was you, even if I was not yours. 

You said my flaws didn't matter to you. You saw every ugly thing in me and somehow found room for affection anyway. There is a mercy in that which I still don't understand. Perhaps I never will. Some people spend their entire lives searching for someone capable of looking at them honestly and remaining. I found that person and responded by giving them reasons not to.

Thank you for showing me love. Thank you for every conversation that lasted until sunrise, every recommendation, every joke, every time you let me go on a political tangent, every moment that felt insignificant while it was happening and sacred once it was gone. Thank you for proving that tenderness exists. Thank you for proving that another person can know you completely and still reach for your hand.

I carry your name with me the way some people carry prayers. Quietly. Repeatedly. Reverently. Not because I am unable to move on, but because some things deserve remembrance. Some things alter the architecture of a life so thoroughly that forgetting them becomes impossible.

And if God exists, and if Heaven exists, and if by some clerical error I find myself admitted through its gates, I think my first request would be a simple one. I'd like to hear your voice again. Just once.

And about the photo... you were wrong. You did not look bad. You looked so beautiful. I do not know what version of yourself you were looking at when you wrote that, but it was not the one I saw. To this day, I still think you are the most beautiful person I have ever laid my eyes on. I wish you could have seen yourself the way I saw you then, because whatever flaws you thought were there never stood a chance against the simple fact that you were you.

I love you. And for all my failures, all my cowardice, that has never been difficult.

I'm sorry.