Well Lady,

Here it is: the last letter. I’ve learned a lot from this time in my life. Thank you so much for what you’ve taught me. Especially, thank you for the lessons that have come because of you after you and I parted. I know now it’s best to talk first if I have a problem and to address it right away before it gets out of hand. I know that if I get involved with someone else I had better learn to be more organized and to keep a cleaner house. I learned that, so help me god, I will never cheat on another soul ever again. I know what a treasure it is to have someone’s heart and to share a life with them. I’ve wrestled with myself and I’ve forgiven you for the resentments and the bitterness I harbored. It’s time now that I start getting on with my life.

First, let me say: I’m sorry. Sorry for all the lies and the ways I made you feel unimportant. Sorry for hiding my feelings and not being honest with you. But, most of all, I’m sorry for wasting your time. You deserve a life with someone who loves you and wants to be with you. Someone who will walk with you arm in arm and hand in hand. I could never be that person. I don’t love you how you want me to love you. What should have been easy turned out to be incredibly hard. Mostly, I can’t love you how you wanted because I don’t feel safe with you. I love you as a friend as an older sister, and as a partner in life. But, I feel no sexual desire towards you.

Most of the time when I think about how we made love I feel dominated. I see you on top of me and I feel crushed, deflated and unmanned. I’m in one of those in-between spaces in my life–somewhere between what was and what might have been. I wish sometimes for that beautiful maybe–for what we could have been: open, loving and caring, a relationship founded on mutual respect, trust, admiration, and desire for each other.

Even so, I will always remember you. The place you have in my heart is real. My love for you still beats. You were my partner, my eighty percent out of one hundred. We tore each other apart and broke each other’s hearts over that missing one fifth. Gosh and golly-gee I wish it had been otherwise, and I wish we had found the missing piece to complete what might have been. I hope you will be happy, and I hope you will find someone who gives you the missing part that I could not provide.

I’ve reached a place where I am ready to move on. I hope I have matured enough, grown up enough, and learned enough that I will be a better partner the next time around. If by chance it happens that my next relationship is successful, I want you to know that it is because of the things I learned from you. Thank you for your heart and your smile. Thank you for the way you used to say my name. There are times and things I will always remember: our first date at the symphony: where you said, “hold my hand,” the night we spent camping in front of the fire, and the wonderful ways you made life so much better. There were times, it is true, where I felt dominated by you. Yet, there were other times, every once in a while, where you felt like home as well. I will remember both and carry them with me in my heart for as long as I live.

The harder lessons and the harder truths I shall not voice. But, they sound the louder in my ears for not being said. I am a better man because of you and your memory is a blessing. God bless you my girl, even though you are mine no longer. I will carry your memory with me, and when the time comes to cross the bridge, to enter in and to commune with another soul, the lessons from our time together shall be my polar star–guide and messenger to the spaces between the words where two hearts may share their love. May you find peace to soothe you, love to heal you, and warm touches to caress you through the night.

I love you, and I shall see you some day on a bright clear morning when all the pain and hurt have been replaced with love and tenderness. Until then, may God hold you in his hands. May your family surround you with love, and may you find a place to build a life–some small corner of the world, a place out-of-the-wind, where you may have a home full of love and tenderness.

Signed,
A-man-who-loves-you.