The worst thing I have ever had to come to terms with is the fact that he will die.

The second worst thing is the fact that I can hurt him. That he is capable of being hurt by me.

Somehow I have decided he is to blame for both these things.

I can hate him for what he has done and said to me, and I have. But in the depths of the night when I wish I had never met him, it’s because someday I might have to live without him. And I don’t actually think I could do that.

I don’t think I could do that even now. I think I am in this too far already. My soul is leaning on his soul, like two trees grown together and I know, I know. He doesn’t have any idea I am alive. I am probably just writing this letter to the masculine part of my own self, but. He is not responsible for the idea of him I have in my own mind, but.

But I can feel him inside my heart, like a keen green shoot of joy, and. There are places the words fail.

Vera Brittain wrote in her memoir that her aunt once asked her, “is it beyond words?” It was. She sat in silence with her fiancee Roland. He died still her fiancee. He died in World War 1. He died.

She moved on. She had children. And then, she wrote a book that is largely about how much she loved him. They spent a total of 19 days together, in all their lives. And then he died.

Men die. We send them out into the world, and they die. His stomach hurts him sometimes, because he is dying, a little every day, like all the rest of us. He is tired and does not sleep enough. He is sick, sicker than he lets on. Eating hurts enough that he skips meals, too often. He is anger, and hurt underneath. He is someone who has been kicked too often, by people he thought I could trust. I am one of those people, though I have tried to walk it back. Though I cannot grasp my betrayal because I thought he would be ashamed for anyone to know he liked me, not ashamed because someone thought I had rejected him. I thought it was obvious I never would have rejected him. I thought.

I want to take him away to some quiet seaside cottage somewhere. To feed him brown mushroom stew and chicken soup and rice with lavender and mint until his body remembers food is a good thing. I want to hug him close. I want to teach him not to be ashamed of having a body that can be hurt. I want to light candles for him. I want to make him let me love him back. I don’t know how to make him let me love him back.

I want to run away with him to someplace no one else is watching. I want to write and write across his skin until he believes me. I want to show him what I see in him until he sees it too. I want to show him how to be good enough to himself that he can be the kind of good that he has always wanted to be.

He does not know how to be a man and be kind and be good and not hurt. But I do. I do.

I thought I did not know how to love him right. Maybe I did not then. So I learned. I don’t know how to Love correctly. Maybe I was too obsessed with loving him correctly. Maybe women learn to obsess about how to love men correctly like men learn to obsess about how to fuck women correctly. I don’t give a shit whether he does that or anything else correctly, I just care that he’s the one who does it. I think maybe I messed up.

My arms are filled with flowers. I lay bouquets of words at his feet. I wanted to be a writer, once. He’s the only reader I care about now. I thought I needed him to speak aloud to tell me what that means, before I could let myself believe what I already knew. That was really, deeply, profoundly wrong.

I want to stare at his stupid face for the rest of my life. I let him go as part of the bargaining stage of grief. I let him go so he would live and be happy and healthy and safe and free. I let him go for his sake. I let him go because I was trained to be a martyr. I let him go so my misery would buy his happiness.

I think perhaps I was foolish. I think perhaps it does not work that way.