It’s your birthday today.

Hey.

I don't know if this will ever find you, or if it even should. But if it does, someday, or somehow, I hope by then, we can remember it all in a way that softens the edges of what we couldn't hold. 

Before the beginning, I kept buying myself more time. Telling myself I needed it. More days, more weeks, more moments to understand you, to understand us, to think until I drowned, to stop thinking when it hurt too much, to feel what I kept denying, to forgive what I didn't want to admit, to quiet the storm inside, to loosen my grip, to finally let you go.

But every time I said: not today, maybe later, maybe after the next small milestones. After we met. After a week. After your special day. After my birthday. After yours. After December 21. God, it stings just naming that date.

And maybe I would keep doing that. Keep pushing the line further away, making excuses, inventing new deadlines just so I could write you back into existence. So I could keep you here, on the page, even when I've already lost you everywhere else. 

I know, there will never be a right day to let you go. 

No day where my chest won't tighten, or day where I won't reach for you in the spaces between my sentences. 

So I have to choose one. And I choose today. (I had planned to write this long after your birthday letter, but, I don't know.)

I'm just deciding to stop writing about you.

I'll start cutting the strings I kept tying back together. I'll begin to let pieces of you out of me, even though it feels like I'm also digging a hole in my own chest. Because if I don't, if I keep carrying you like this, I don't know if I'll survive myself. We both deserve the chance to love and be loved the right way.

So,

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry I cradled your childhood like it was mine to fix, and with all my arrogance, I cast myself as your shield, your anchor, your everything. As if I was the one who knew, as if I had the right answer, as if I could mend the wounds I barely understood. Where all I needed to do was just be honestly there for you.

I'm sorry I lied, in small ways and big ones, just to stretch our time a little longer, to convince my own thoughts and nightmares. 

I'm sorry I didn't see sooner, didn't learn faster, and instead, in my blindness, asked you to believe in fate. Asked you to surrender to it when in truth, I was just covering my fear of losing you. Even as you were already slipping through my fingers. 

I'm sorry because after this, I'll really do it. I'll erase you. I'll stop myself from carrying your name, and I, I'll really erase you. 

I'm sorry, because believing in us is harder than I wanted to admit.

I'm sorry, because I loved you the wrong way. Too much in some places, not enough in others. Too far when you needed intimacy, too quiet when you needed to hear it out loud. And I kept loving you even long after you were gone, long after I should have stopped. 

I don't know if I ever really stopped. I don't know if I ever will. But I know, I can't keep living inside this love anymore.

They say the human brain remembers what is most. Maybe that's why forgetting you feels impossible. Because everything first and everything most, belonged to you.

I know it will hurt. It does. But I've written a lot, and I have enough writing. 

Seems like this is the way it has to be. 

So, I think this is it. 
This is me setting it down. 
Saying goodbye, for real this time. 

Until the day I can finally let you go, wholly, and mean it. 

Good bye.