Dear You,

I remember the very first time I met you. I doubt I'll ever forget it. I sneaked into your work to see you before you left to see me. I was curious. It was in the city centre, there were a hundred people who could easily have been me. And then I caught you. Out the corner of my eye with your hair sticking out. Then I had to escape because I felt you could see me even though you were walking in the opposite direction, preoccupied with work, and how could you have known anyway? But at least I knew you were really You.

I sat cross-legged on a bench dedicated to somebody special, poised across the road from where you made your exit, me waiting. I missed you for some reason; I think I was pretending to read as you made your way in the wrong direction with a city road between us. You've never let me forget the misplacement of my location, it always breaks me into a smile and a pretend argument as to who said what and when. It's one of the better memories from the early days.

From there things became blurred. I settled into a routine. I would use public transport to make the often tedious journey to to see you, often falling asleep on the heated bus after a long shift in another city, not much money but enough to see you. I would find myself sleeping again at your cramped flat, often leaving the morning (or afternoon) with a lingering sense of confusion. Sometimes at night when I was lying next to you, you would ask me what was wrong. I never said anything, because I felt I shouldn't have to. I thought it was obvious but maybe to you it wasn't.

It was never white and black, was it? It was unspoken words, and it hurt me. We would do all those things couples do: scoff takeaway food over the contents of evening television; make trips to the supermarket to buy indulgent desserts that would never have their calorie contents scrutinised or contents quite fully finished off; sip coffee in small cafes lazing away the weekend with free-flowing talk of any and all subjects....Well. Not all subjects. Almost all. Do you know, I would have traded all those hours of meaningless talk just to ask you what we were doing. Were we a relationship? Or were we nothing. We wouldn't hold hands outdoors a lot of the time - that's something I usually instigated and most of the time it didn't last beyond the second set of traffic lights. But we would go to bed together at night knowing that we would both still be together in that same bed in the morning.

We did all of that and more, but it was all me. It was me who was seeing you, it was me with eyes glued to bus stance departures, it was me scrutinising and analysing everything you said and moreso what you didn't say, and it was me who would wake up in the morning with a sinking feeling in my stomach, watching you sleep with everything running through my mind and reminding me that whatever we were, we weren't Us. You never mentioned me as 'girlfriend' and I hardly dared ask you for fear of you doing something silly, like telling me the truth. No matter how much I knew I should leave you I would panic at the thought of never seeing you again. I did watch you sleep a few times and I admit I did almost never see you again. That was my impatience. That was my need for us to be Us. I wanted you to commit to commitment and not be embarrassed to let everyone - including yourself - know that you were with me, and that we were at last Us.

We - us - had coffee one day. You had coffee one day. I drank peppermint tea instead. You were still in your work t-shirt and I didn't, or couldn't, look you in the eye. You asked me what was wrong again so I stirred me tea. I always stir my tea when I'm nervous. I don't quite know why. I had specifically came to see you that evening with full intention of the making or breaking of Us. I wanted so badly for you to read my mind but you didn't, or couldn't, and in the end I couldn't bring myself to ask, so I stirred my tea more. I was upset that you couldn't work out what was bothering me, what had been bothering me for so many months. I left with the same sinking feeling I always took home with me. Nothing changed.

But then something did change.

I found out.

~