I require so much patience, but I always felt so pressured by him, pressured to love him, pressured to visit, "come live with me," he asked constantly. I must have said no a million times. Friendship was what I was starving for, not sex, not romance. In the end it was love or death, so neither of us got what we wanted. I know that it hurt him that I didn't share his vision for us, but dealing with his death is FAR worse than my rejection could have ever been.
After scrolling through years of our messages, I noticed a girl in Ecuador tagged him posthumously. She tattooed his name on her, referring to him as "my special person." She looks suspiciously similar to me, with a specific facial feature he loved about me. I am curious how she knew him, but I think I'll leave that one a mystery. Maybe they talked online because I refused him. Perhaps they were friends before she moved there. Women threw themselves at him all the time, but they'd obviously never actually seen him naked, nor had disappointing sex with him. He did have a magnetic energy though. I wouldn't blame anyone for finding him attractive. He was. And he enjoyed conversation, which women loved, like the time he was my wedding date but spent an hour talking to the married woman at our table. Her dull husband hardly said a word, so I didn't blame her for wanting to chat up my date so eagerly, while her husband and I quietly observed. I felt like I was doing her a favor by letting her borrow him awhile. He loved the attention. Attention-seeking was his downfall.
"He loved you so much," his best friend told me. She didn't know my last words to him were: "Let's just be friends." Maybe someone told her at his funeral, which I did not attend for a variety of reasons, one of them a fear of being shunned in my small town for accidentally breaking a dead man's heart. I also didn't feel like seeing hundreds of women weeping for him, all the women who threw themselves at him, but failed to capture his heart the way I did. I couldn't bear to see him in a casket. Besides, my only coat is at his house, and I was too afraid to ask his aunt for it. If I hadn't given his key back, I could have retrieved it. But I don't want to go to my town anymore. It's too soon.
"He said a girl shot him down. He was upset," his aunt told me. I am that "girl" who "shot him down." :(
I would rather have stayed friends and suffered through watching him fall in love with someone else, get married and have her children, than to have been greeted by his obituary after declining his flirtations. Death is an extreme punctuation. Was it just bad timing?
I'm obsessed with the multiverse, that there are multiple infinite realities. Somewhere else far away, or right under my nose in an overlapping reality I can't perceive, he lives, and is happy. My whole life hangs on this hope. I'm waiting for him in dreams. Will he ever come? I won't have peace until he finds me there. Please come soon, R. I know you have a lot of dreamers to visit, but I also know I was the only one you loved. Prove it! So what if I wanted to be friends? Platonic love means more to me than the physical. My heart still works, and all I can think about, is you. I know you still exist somewhere in this great mystery. Find me! Let me hug you goodbye the way it should have been!! If grief is the continuation of love, then I love you from the time I wake up until the time I sleep and every minute in between. Goddamnit, R. I love you.
8:35 a.m. - 2022-11-11