These days I can see your disconnection. Ours, really. From each other. I feel like, the way that I want to be away from myself has now infected you – that you want to be away, too, and there’s a distance in between us that feels narrow but so so deep and cold. I always feel like I’m interrupting, maybe you feel like that too, when I move to kiss you or hug you. Maybe you no longer feel the tug at your heart when a longing, sweetly worded I love you reaches your ears. I feel dead. I feel no ache of lust just the pang of loss, like the joy has been sucked away and I can’t remember how it got there but I want it back. I wonder why I take birth control. I wonder why I sleep with you at night. I wish our bodies moved to touch like they used to, but I don’t know what made it work. Why doesn’t it now?

I want you to want me, and me to want you. I love you, I know this for certain. I know I love you because right now I am crying, and I have known this was coming so I have been crying for months.

I do love you, dearest. I do. I love your smell. I love the feel of us together. I love my legs around you, your arms around me. I love our banter, and how you put up with my rants. I love your messiness, the way you pull knots out of my hair, when you wear sandals in the winter. And more. I would generically say everything but that’s not good enough for you. You don’t deserve this to be cast aside, and I couldn’t do that to you anyway.

To stand at the still and cold, cold place between us is horrifying. But I have to cross it, somehow. It’s too deep for me to wade across, too cold to swim. I need a little help – but I’ll make it. I promise you this. I won’t let this stay between us. I can’t.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes. The fact that I love you with all my soul doesn’t make up for them, but I intend to make those mistakes overshadowed by what I do right.

You mean too much to me.