Dear Charlie,

It has been over six months. I still think about you every single day. Why? I know I am young. And I know I will meet other people. I already have. But it doesn’t bother me to leave anyone else because the pain is nonexistent compared to the pain I felt when we broke up. That pain might be muted at times, but it is still there. I don’t feel upset when something ends with someone else. Because they were never you.

You.
My soulmate.

My fantasy is that we will both finish school, successful and ready for a future. We will somehow bump into each other, maybe on purpose or maybe intentional. We will rekindle and everything will be the same, but even better. We will be in the right place at the right time. It will work out. I know that I have a lot of hope that is probably false. I know that I should learn how to be on my own without this fantasy that someday I will be with you. But I will wait. I will keep living my life, open to new experiences or new people. But you will always be in my mind. Whether your name is screaming and the color of your eyes is all that I see or whether you are a mere whisper and I forget where the freckles on your face are, you will still be there.

It is incredibly hard to justify letting go of someone when nothing went wrong. I fully understand and agree with why you needed to end things. We both need growing space to figure ourselves out. But I also feel so strongly about you and what we had. It wasn’t a typical ‘high school relationship’. We were more than that. We travelled. We had an app to sync our calendars. We created floor plans for a tiny house. We saw a fucking pet piglet being walked across the street in Canada.

The amount of time I spend thinking of you sometimes scares me. But no matter how hard I try I can’t help it. Obviously I am not crying to myself every night or letting the thoughts affect me or my life in any negative way, but they are very stubborn.

Maybe someday I will finally let go of you and what we had. I don’t know if I can do that until I am shown that there is a love that exists that was greater than ours. The way you looked at me always answered any possible questions I, or anyone else, could have.

I don’t know why I continue to write letters to you that I never send. In a way it is therapeutic to give my thoughts extra attention. In the moment I will want to send it with an impulsive click of a button but after reading it through I know that at least right now it won’t do any good. Time is the only thing I should be listening to. I need to focus on myself. Let you focus on yourself. I love you, so so much. I think I always will.

Lily