Twenty five years is probably long enough

[Names and minor details changed for privacy.]

Dear Patrick,

I met you in my first year of high school when I was 12 and you, in the year above, were 14. I liked your low-key uncompromising weirdness and, despite the age difference which often really matters at school, friendship blossomed. We hung out. We tied up our parents' phone lines for hours (ah, the 90s). We wrote each other letters - I still have some of yours to me. We made each other laugh, and we saw the point of each other even when other people didn't. Even as you kept your offbeat emotional distance (the word "avoidant" was not then in my vocabulary), you were sweet and affectionate and understanding, and it felt to me like we were made from the same piece of clay. I wrote in my diary when I was 14 that I loved you and we'd be friends forever.

You were only sexually and romantically interested in boys, and only pretty sporadically and diffidently at that. But despite your queerness and our youth, as time went on I came to feel sure, without any conscious thought, that things would work out somehow so that we could spend our lives together. It felt inevitable in a way that transcended reason. I remember talking about it with you once, hanging out in the mall after all the shops had shut, imagining our future lives. Just as long as we're together, I said, it doesn't really matter at all. I don't care what you do by way of [implicitly male] lovers and partners. You asked me what I'd get out of this set-up and I said, "Your companionship, of course. All I could possibly want." Which wasn't true of course - it wasn't all I wanted at all - but what I really meant is, it would be enough. It already was. Your place in my life, and mine in yours, filled me with happiness.

I didn't see any point in telling you that I was in love with you. It didn't feel hopeless or unrequited; in my mind, we were definitely both reading the same book, I was just a few chapters ahead. I was happy to wait a few years for you to catch up and fall in love with me back - an outcome that, as noted, felt to me as necessary as a physical law. Gay erasure by logical entailment.

In the meantime, we dallied with other relationships in a way I considered healthy. I had massive crushes on other people and you sympathised with me through them. We were sowing our wild oats; I was content for the domestic harvest to come in its own time.

In my second year of uni I went flatting with my friend and part-time workmate Millie. She was a couple of years older than me, and a lot prettier. Big brown eyes, long dark hair, and an appealing air of feminine vulnerability. I liked and admired Millie. She was one of the very few people who knew how I felt about you.

One night we were all at a party and everything was normal and fine. Then I turned around and saw you sitting on the couch very close to Millie, tracing a forefinger up and down her upper thigh with unmistakably non-homosexual seductive intent. I remember our friends made laughingly pointed comments; maybe you blushed, but you did not desist. What the fuck was going on, my gay best friend I secretly loved? This was not in the script.

You went home with Millie that night; came home with us, that is. I sat in the front seat of the taxi, calm with shock. You and Millie held hands in the back. Disappeared into her room.

(Remember when my mum drove us to the beach, when we were maybe 14 and 16ish, and we held hands in the back seat all the way home? Sometimes even now when I feel anxious, before a big work meeting or a difficult medical appointment, I conjure that specific memory to strengthen myself.)

The next few days are muddled in my head - you were around our flat a lot, I know. I avoided talking to you, I think? I don't remember. Did I hide in my room? I remember repeatedly calming myself from hyperventilating - I didn't know what panic attacks were but I knew I would faint if I didn't get my breathing under control. I remember feeling like my heart would burst inside my chest and kill me.

At some stage I know I told you, over the phone, what was going on. I said I was sorry I couldn't feel happy for you in this exciting new development in your life. I explained that I was in love with you, with my whole heart, and had been for years, and that I was devastated that you had (as it felt to me) chosen Millie instead of me. I can't remember if I told you that she knew how I felt.

You immediately said (and oh how I have hugged these words to my heart over and over in the 25 years since), "I'll break up with her, then. You mean so much more to me than she does."

I said, "I can't ask you to do that". But I thought, I don't have to ask. He'll just do it. He hardly knows her. When he sees how this is destroying me, it won't even be a contest.

It wasn't a contest. You and Millie started dating and you stopped showing me affection. What I mostly remember about that time is how for months I just couldn't stop crying. I moved flats and changed jobs to get away. I avoided places and events where you might be together. "I think I miss Patrick more than I would miss the air I breathe," I told your parents. I dissociated. I self-harmed. I also performed well academically and at my job, obviously. And any time I was alone, I sobbed and sobbed from grief and loneliness and rejection and shame and despair. It went on and on and on. God, it was awful.

We tried to talk sometimes - I craved your attention - but I could never control my tears for very long and you could not tolerate my sadness. You said repeatedly that you didn't see that there was anything you could do or say.

After a few months you gave up and just walked away from our friendship. I felt erased, unreal. Like a ghost. "I was there in your history", I wrote to you pathetically nearly two years later, in a letter I'd marked Never sent. "When I remember what our friendship consisted in, I have a picture of you as the one who comforted me every day." You had been concreted into my psychological foundations, and without you I was lopsided and unsafe, condemned. I felt like I was worth less than nothing.

Looking back now, I can see things I couldn't see then. You had always been avoidant, and for all your confidence and style, you were yourself only 20 when you met Millie. Your inability to tolerate my grief was a reflection of your limits, not of my worth. And the temptation of a new, gloriously heterosexual relationship with someone hot and smart and fun was overwhelming to you. I can see all that. Intellectually it adds up.

But the damage lingers. We were so close for so many years, you knew me so well and seemed to walk away so easily. The belief I internalised, for a long time unconsciously, was not just that I wasn't inherently very loveable but specifically that, no matter how close someone seemed to me, no matter how much they seemed to see and value me, I couldn't rely on them to keep loving me when I was sad.

Now in middle age I am trying hard to foster new and healthier beliefs, by loving myself steadily and consistently through sadness. I am doing so good at this! So good. But my 18 year old self still feels your loss, and sometimes - just this week, in fact, which is why I am writing this now - she stands between me and someone I really want to hold and comfort me. I know she is trying to protect me but she causes me pain.

Maybe when I get my next fever, I'll be able to connect more deeply with her and find the right words or gesture for the healing to happen. I feel like I'm ready for this chapter to close, 25 years is enough. But in the meantime, we travel on, me and her, and the ghost of you.

[Readers, in case you're curious:

• Patrick and Millie dated for two years, and then he abruptly announced he was moving overseas without inviting or indeed consulting her. He was a talented walker-away.
• Millie later married a guy who had ambitiously but unsuccessfully solicited my phone number at a party in 2002. A better person would not consider this any sort of victory.
• Below are my two favourites of the many, many poems I wrote for Patrick circa 2001.]

Motionless

I used to think you were the centre around which I spun crazily, our outstretched arms joined wrist to wrist.
For years I could feel the outward pull but I held tight,
by some metaphysical miracle,
to you at the heart of my existence.

Finally I learned that I felt the pull of your movement and not mine.
I know this now because when I let go of you
for one millionth of a second
it was you, not I, who went spinning far away
and I was left motionless.

When you fell in love and not with me
I let go, my darling

and when I regained my balance you were already gone. I had always thought
it was I who would be spun away.

Never leave

When I wake I usually remember you have gone, which is why
the city is littered with my one-night stands;
but early this morning it was a shock to find I was missing,
killed off, swept away by your womanly hands.

So I found myself dead and I left my body in the cold bed
and came looking for my better half, for an answer or
looking just to hand it all back to you,
this endless time I’m carrying.

What if I found you in one of our places,
someone else’s smile covering your face?
I could never walk the ten thousand miles between us
to pass my hand through your empty chest.

The fault of this haunting is entirely your own.
I know it is over but I can’t be removed
when all that is left of me is your memories;
your memories, and my memory of you.