To the lady who I hope will never come across this letter,

I did not know it then, but that day I met you was one of the most consequential days of my life.

It stung that you ghosted me after that night we went out. Perhaps a shade of honesty then might have closed this door altogether. But then you explained, and you apologised. I appreciated that you yourself said it was long over due, months after you came into my life.

It seems facetious to say I have a crush on you, or even to say that I am in love with you. I have developed feelings, or whatever the most benign manner it is, of saying that I have fallen for you. Every time I see you, I am excited, my heart skips a beat. When you touch my arm, or take my hand, my mind goes blank. When I speak to you, I am nervous and calm, all at once. You make me want to be better, but you also make me perfectly at ease with who I am. I know that chemistry is no indicator of how well-suited people are, but in the year or so that I have gotten to know you as a person, since you came back into my life as an active part of it, I know that fundamentally, at the very essence of what makes us who we are, we are so incredibly aligned. And I thought, when I realised that I had these feelings for you, that we could, in fact, be happy together, even if only for a short while.

Maybe I felt this way even when you were with him. Perhaps it was subconsciously locked away, somewhere in the back of my mind. Consciously, I did not harbour feelings for you when you were with him. I have admired your beauty since the day I met you – but admiration from afar is chaste. Actions are the final determinant.

Words are insufficient to measure how much respect I gained for you the day you ended things with him, and you left me that message saying that you would understand if I were to stand by my friend and not speak to you again. You took the road you felt you needed to take, for your sake and his, and in so doing, did to another human being, someone you had great affection and love for, the worst possible thing you could do. You broke his heart. You broke his heart, and then called his friend and fell on your own sword. I know soldiers, who, in service of God and country who would not do the same. Cost be damned, risk be damned, you jumped on the grenade.

It seems to me that we are destined, written as characters, to keep living life paths that will always be parallel to each other. Converging at times and diverging at others, but never crossing. For some immutable reason, despite best efforts, it seems that there is some transcendent force that keeps pushing us back into each others’ orbits. Maybe we are simply destined to keep waltzing in the dance of life, but never with each other. Maybe.

I cannot say that I ever asked to feel this way, certainly not about you. The truth is that in the time I have come to know you, who you are at your core, falling fast and hard for you has been an unavoidable eventuality. Perhaps not now, perhaps not even in this lifetime, but eventually. The truth is that at our cores, we are as similar as two people can be. There was truth, to the joke that you made all those months ago, that he was only with you because you were a female version of me.

The time we have left together in this city is limited, and it takes all my energy, every day, to suppress the instinct to walk over to your front door and tell you how I feel. If you were to feel the same way, we could be, we would be blessedly, disgustingly happy together. Acting on that instinct, and my feelings for you, however, would ask of me to commit base betrayal to him, and no matter how much I desire to be with you, I cannot do that to him. It would break him, and I have no desire to do that to another human being, let alone my friend. And I know that you are now being courted by a new gentleman caller. I wish him all the best, and I hope he knows what a magnificent woman he is courting.

So, for now, having you as my friend and having you in my life will have to suffice. Some things are far too important to give up. In a way, the new man makes maintaining our platonic relationship easier. I will cross many lines for the things and I want and people I care about, but I will not step into the path of a serious relationship, or anything even remotely headed in that direction. No happiness earned at the cost of selling one’s soul to the devil could be worth it. Such ill-gotten gains bear the mark of Cain upon them.

Maybe someday along the line, our paths will finally cross. And if, as they say, things are “meant to be,” then we shall simply entrust our fates to the machinations if the stars, the sun, the moon, all the gods, all the heavens, all the hells.

So, here’s to things left better unheard, and better unsaid. And for now, I release my feelings for you, consigning them to the footnotes of history. Be free. Be happy. Live well.

Yours.