I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I come out as crass, or rude-tempered. All I wanted was for you to be happy.
And I truly want it, though of course it may seem otherwise, by how I bite you with my words, or my actions. I hate feeling how cold you are with me, when I remember how much you wished to be by my side just as I to yours. How much love would pass through our glances, how much we understood each other, how I knew something was wrong with you without you even telling me. Maybe I've cut myself from everyone because I just didn't want to acknowledge the distance that was growing between us, how I could slowly see you slipping from my fingertips like summer silk, so I pretended that I didn't see it, that it wasn't there. I have seen you grow, love. I have seen your beauty develop through the years, I have seen your back widen and watched your full cheeks turn into prominent bones. I watched how dark circles slowly slithered around your eyes, how your smile lost its gleam, how you lost your spirituality, losing yourself in an array of cheap vodka and late night parties.
I hope you're not pushing people away, like you were when we last spoke. I hope you're not alienating yourself from everyone who once loved you. I hope you don't feel lonely, or lost, or confused. I wish you would upload a new photo with someone who gives you the peace I couldn't give you. I hope you move on, to bigger things, to bigger loves and lovers. For though I ache to hate you, to tear apart the image of you limb by limb, I remember your tears. How you would come to me with sadness in your eyes and my heart reached out to warm the icy caves that you called a chest, to breathe into your hair  and lay soft kisses against your forehead, to linger against your young skin, untouched yet by heavy back-packs and treason. To pull you into my embrace as if you were of my own flesh, to nurture you love until you could keep walking. And my pride will never let me show this, or the way that I am. Sometimes I wonder, if I truly miss you, or being with someone. I always tried to comfort you, because it seemed so natural to me, like if that was part of my fate, for your head to rest against my bosom and trace circles around your back, to fumble with the buttons of your shirt. As if it was written from the immense stars that I should hug you and your heart should rest against my ears, your heart beating persistent like raindrops falling from a rooftop, breathing into the smell of your shirt and feel your muscles flex and relax, and think that this was where I was supposed to be, without questioning the authority of the most beautiful coincidence I had the pleasure to experience. I never really thought of how it would be without you. Of course, whenever I was mad at some incompetence of yours, I would make-up someone who might make you jealous, but leave your side? I never really tread upon the idea that someday my head wouldn't be against your chest anymore, hearing your lungs fill with air and your soft baritone voice catch unto the release of your exhale, concealed from everyone and everything else except me, and how I would listen to that sigh, as if the deepest secrets of our lives hung onto that thread of a sound, sound so small yet so big, because it was I that only one who could hear it, only I who could decipher what that sigh latched onto. And now, I must face the idea of a life without you, idea that had never been seeded into my head, as if destiny had suddenly retreated me to its cruel hand, playing some kind of practical joke, for I stand now, naked, unprepared, with the idea just barely a few murmurs and blurry images that pass through and never come back. So I simply don't think about it, as I go about my day. I don't think about waking up alone. I don't think about the child we will never have, whose tender hands I would hold as I would coon her name "Catrina", I don't think about the way I won't know what you will look like in 5 year's time, how your hair will look when you wake up early in the morning, how your voice might change so that my own memory of what your voice sounded like in the unborn hours of the morning was now as lifeless as our love. I read, and I laugh, and I walk, as if I bear no pain. As if this was all a dream, that might blow away as the smoke from my cigarette, pulling it out of my weary lips and staring up at the stars, wondering what you're thinking of, if you're talking to a girl, if I'm real, because I swear to the heavens, sometimes I just feel invisible, unreal, like my flesh is merely part of the air that surrounds me. I long to jump into cold lakes and feel heat just to know that I'm still here, breathing, that I haven't taken routes to where I can't go back to. And now I just have so many things inside, because I haven't written in so long, and I always think of things to write but I lose the will to express them in tangible ways, so now, as I write, I just don't know where to even begin with. My thoughts are as ink upon water, dispersed and feeble until it adapts itself. I don't allow myself to feel pain, or barely feel. I prefer to think about things that are still within my reach, things that I can change. I read stories about great lovers and sigh from the love they beam onto me, even through their fictional existence, I talk to my friends about the change of seasons, about music, and they look at me thinking that there is merely nothing wrong with me, that I didn't love you as much as they thought I did, for how could she not be a walking mess? I am sweetheart, a bunched up mess with makeup on and pink cheeks that smile bitter-sweetly. I look at your face in photos and again and again suppress the
notion of "love, need, want, help" and replace it with dry apathy, with a dull sting that will always bother me but will finally wash away as imprints upon sand do when the tide devours them. I feel as if I am caught with that tide, not wanting to think about my own existence, my own loneliness, my own wants, only to think about those great lovers, about happy things, about a green-filled futures with boats and rivers and temples ruined with time. I am a walking paradox, who lets go but can't, who doesn't care but does, who feels but doesn't. I never understood myself, how I am so cold, yet so warm at the same time, how I can hate so profoundly and love so deeply, how I can never forgive but I can forget. You always seem to be that neutrality in-between my own extreme existence, trying to balance me out, and you still are. For though you destroyed me, you destroyed my trust, my belief in what is love, in what is real or not, in how much I can hate a person-
I forgive you, somehow. I remember those tears, that laughter, the rain, the smells, the heartbeat, the warmth, and though I hate you, I know I should hate you, for though I never truly forgive those who hurt me and as much as you did, I just want you to be happy. I should detest your existence or not give notice to it, I should refuse to speak to you, I should erase you from my consciousness just as I have done with those who have struck a knife against my back, but I can't. I never will. You were always the exception, the only one, and always will be. I will never let anyone this much under my skin, again. I may not understand myself, but I know my own behavior, how I react to these things. I will never forgive someone again, for what you have done, for what we have done together. It will be the only time, and the last time.

(about gabriel, september 2013)