Unsent

Written by Will Henderson

People have asked if I felt guilty for lying to you.

If I had told you everything, you would have cried and you would have yelled and you would have kicked me out or changed the locks or walked away from me.  You would have tipped your head back and screamed. You would have said we were over. You would have said I had no right to make you love me.

So I don’t feel guilty because when I asked for forever, I meant forever, and everything else was just noise.

You never lied about being a drug addict. You told me this detail about yourself at the very beginning. You defined yourself by this detail. In time, so did I. You may have lied about snorting pills with your friends, but you never lied about being an addict. I knew on day seven; and still, on day 10, I said yes to dating it out with you.

You were not the only addict. I was addicted to how I felt when I was with you. I was addicted to the future we planned. I was addicted to the idea that I had found you and fell in love with you and knew undeniably that I would wake up next to you until one of us died. I loved you despite your addictions. I loved how I felt when we were together. I loved your good morning text messages and the knowledge that there was a man out there whose body I thought I understood. I thought that I was happy. I thought that I was blessed. I thought I could jump ship and swim. I thought that the ocean would hold me. I thought that you would hold me. I thought you and I were two people in love who always found each other regardless of the crowd in which we found ourselves lost.

I have been called crazy for loving you, and crazy for thinking that life without your love was no life at all. While we were together, gravity meant nothing. We were moving at the speed of sound. We barely got our feet wet; still we drowned.

I loved that we had no boundaries. I loved that you kissed my cheek when I dropped you off at the employee entrance at the store where you worked. I loved that we became partners. I loved that you were so certain that I was your it, because for much of my life, and about so many things, I was never certain, until you, and about you I felt very certain.

Maybe you’ve found someone else and he’s on his way over or already in bed next to you on his side, on the side that was mine, and he’s reading something while you read this. You read to him and say, this is who I was, or this is who he was, or this was something we did that I had forgotten. He asks you why you’re reading it at all, and you say to remind yourself what you don’t want.