To an Irish wildflower,

I was watching Scrubs the other day and Ted said ‘no-one wants the person who hurt them to see how badly they’ve been hurt’ and that’s sort of true. I thought I’d write this letter anyway, I don’t know if I’m going to send it or burn it, but either way it’s for my closure, because the trip did nothing to help with that. I barely talked about anything I wanted, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to speak because I knew what was coming. Things didn’t end the way I’d have liked.

What your friends said about this not happening if you loved me, I don’t buy it. This could happen to people who’ve been in love for years too.  It isn’t that black and white. I feel like they sensed the way the wind was blowing and didn’t want to say anything against your decision. He just took advantage of a lonely girl at a vulnerable point in her life and turned you against me for his own gain. Obviously it would be in his interests to tell you anything to doubt what we had, and he manipulated that.

As for disliking changing me, those things were all unbelievably superficial, it’s not like you were fundamentally changing who I was as a person.  If you were, I would have been the one to walk out. Now I do prefer all the things you changed about me.

You asked me why I put all our photos into a folder called “Don’t”: because I wanted to delete them and keep them at the same time. If I’m honest, all I want is to have the opportunity to take more photos of us like that. But right now they’re in there so I don’t look at them. If I decide to burn this letter, then those photos are gone too and if I send this then they’re as good as gone anyway. We shared such happy times didn’t we?

Maybe at the beginning we did settle into a routine, but that was only because we wanted to make the most of our time together before I left. I could see it happening, and tried to be spontaneous sometimes and take you places but there was always that time-bomb in the back of my mind and that made it hard.

It makes me sick to think that the whole time I was worrying about our relationship and you, you were just off with someone else seemingly without a care in the world. And you’re probably doing the same right now. I could never have done anything that would have hurt you or betray your trust. I was tipsy one night and considered doing something but I just looked at my phone and saw us together and I was fine. Your whole ‘your feelings are stronger’ is a catch-all reason you can/do use as an alibi for everything but it doesn’t excuse what happened.  It’s not like either of you was going anywhere, you couldn’t just wait a couple of weeks until I came in person? Rather than just break my heart, you had to stamp on the pieces too.

Regardless, you meet someone and suddenly that makes you end a relationship of months for knowing someone a week? What’s the worst is that we were completely different people during my visit. It’s like overnight I became a stranger to you. We knew each other so well and going from being one of the closest to being one of the furthest from you killed me. How could you let him come between us like that?

‘A black wind took you away from sight, and held the darkness over day that night’

My job is to help and support you through anything you go through, but you aren’t letting me so I can’t. I keep thinking what I could have done different and the only real answer I can come up with is to care for/love you less. You deserve to be looked after and cared for S, and you’re so deserving of the amount of love I have/had for you but if you don’t believe that yourself I can’t do much about that, how much ever I wish I could.

And I know you ran away

Oh, I know but I’m feeling okay

But now I found love and the feeling won’t go

Of course I don’t want to force you to be with me if that makes you unhappy, but the hardest thing is that I didn’t think it would. Leaving someone isn’t a solution for taking someone for granted, reassessing them and yourself is. It isn’t easy but the easiest option usually isn’t the best. I’ve taken you for granted sometimes but taken a step back and realised that I was lucky to have you. I can (just about) handle all the upsetting things you said and part of me can understand where you’re coming from but the circumstances are what I’m not prepared to and shouldn’t have to handle. I said it time and again when I was there but it is the worst feeling knowing you’d be with/are with someone else a day after things ended between us.

Like you were just waiting for someone closer to home to conveniently show up, then leave me without a backward glance.

Like I was somehow in the way, and you just wanted to get rid of me.

Like what we had didn’t mean anything at all.

How does someone you’ve known for less than a month change you so much as a person?

They say hold love too tight and you crush it but hold it too loose and it’ll fly away. Both have probably happened in our relationship.

You were a light in my world (and you lit it up like nobody else). It’s turned off now, for both of us.

‘And the sun will set for you, and the shadow of the day will embrace the world in grey’

You’ve used your fair share of clichés so my turn. My problem was that I cared too much. I cared too much for you, I cared too much about making it work, I cared too much about someone who apparently didn’t feel the same way. Well, never again.

I think we are good for each other and I wish it had worked out for us.

Raff