Seventeen months have passed since Matthew
died.
Seventeen months today.
That is
forever and it is
yesterday.
I
think about him and
wonder if he would be
proud of what I am now able to do? Or if he would
resent it.
Resent me moving on. Or trying to. Resent me being back at school, getting the second highest score on something I put four hours work into while everyone else worked diligently for a month? Resent me being in demand, on the catwalk, in photographs? I know he hated it whenever I had a shoot, and he would always persuade me to cancel. I think it would anger him that now I am able to be a semi-functional person, seventeen months after he died.
Before he died, months before, he said something like, 'oh, if anything happened to me, you'd go
running back to James.' Well
sweetheart, I'm not anywhere near James. I haven't seen fucking James since before you fucking died. I hadn't seen him for over a year before we got together.
I haven't seen anyone til somewhat recently. I spent months
crying over you,
mourning you. And even with this new person, it looks like it's going down the
crapper so I'll be
alone. Does that
satisfy you? That I am desperately
unhappy and you're not here? That I am struggling to make
money, to stay in
school, to hold
my life together?
I don't think you ever cared about me. I don't think you did. And I think you have fucked me up so bad that other people can't care about me. I don't think you could have done what you did if you cared about anyone.
Me. Your
mum. Your
brothers. Your
dad. If you had love in your heart, I don't think you would have been able to do it.
So since your
heart was
cold you had to go and break mine.
Whatever pain you felt, whatever
misery and
despair that drove you to it, I feel a million times more. Because I am still here. I
suffered through the past seventeen months and you were gone.
I miss you at the best of times.
I'm starting to be able to let you go. I cannot however let go of the
fury. Not yet. I do not
forgive you. I don't. I am not
in love with you anymore. I fell
out of love with you in September when I realised that I can't be in love with someone who can't return my love or even
reject it. I can't be in love with a dead man. You gave me some of the
best times in my life but You also gave me the absolute worst. So for that I cannot forgive you. For taking over a year of my life away from me. I can't let you go, and I can't let you have
peace. because I don't have peace.
I wasn't able to
sleep for months. I wasn't able to
eat. I was looking at
pictures of myself from the month after you died and I looked like a goddamned
skeleton. Even though I wasn't
sleeping I took to my bed and had
nightmares and
flashbacks about you.
You didn't just take your life but you took a lot of mine.
I think you
cursed me. You did something shitty and horrible and
selfish and because of that there are people who
hate me because of it. There are people who
blame me. Who
harass me. That asshole that was related to your former work colleague, he won't stop calling, emailing and im-ing me, blaming me for you
dying. He keeps saying your ghost is visiting him. He is demented and is after me. And that's because of you. It's your fault the
police keep calling and asking the same
questions. The same stupid questions.
And it still affects me. Constantly. Did you think that once you died it would just be over and taken care of? That there would be no casualties of your death? Everyone has someone else to blame. And I have no one to blame but you. I have all this
anger for you and nothing I can do but cry. Those people find
comfort in hating me. And I hate no one. But myself, for falling in love with you in the first place. I can't believe you'd do this to me. I can't believe you did this to me.
Thank you for the post-traumatic stress disorder, the debilitating anxiety and the crippling depression.
I remember you always but tonight, I remember you with anger and
resentment.