Today is 20 years since I saw you.
I only knew you for 1069 days. That doesn’t seem like very long anymore, but back then it was significantly more than 10% of my lifetime. And they were easily the most formative days of my life.
I don’t think there’s much more to be said. Or, more precisely, I could pretty easily write a million words or more, outlining and analysing every aspect of everything that happened in those thousand days and since, illustrating 20 years worth of thought about it all. I’ve been over it all in my head enough times.
But I think there’s no point in doing that. It won’t accomplish anything. It’s the same reason I generally don’t bother talking about it to people. I think it would only bring me pain and use up an inordinate amount of my time. Time that I could spend on productive, or at least enjoyable, things.
I think, and hope, that this will maybe be the last of these entries. I hope that the next 10 year milestone in 2033 might perhaps even manage to sneak by unnoticed. That would be pretty great. I’ve been low-key waiting for this milestone because I knew I had to observe it and post a (final? I hope) entry in this series today. It feels like maybe it’s an ending, a place for closure. That would be pretty great.
Things have changed even just in the 1000 days since the last entry. I understand so much more now than I did even then. Like for example just how wrong I was about you.
It occurs to me, going back and reading the previous entries, that I never said something important in either of them. And it’s something I had come to understand before the first entry in 2013:
It was all my fault. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I always will be.
I know I said that to you once when we spoke, but I realised today that I never “put it on the record”. So there it is.
I hope this is an end of an era. I hope this is goodbye.
If it is, just to be clear: What we had is inviolate and eternal. If this is an ending, that doesn’t change the fact that I still miss you. Or stop me from loving you.
I expect I always will.