I knew her when...

...the time for this has come and gone like the railway stations. You won't say "If I'd known that then. Would not run. Would have stayed. Would have been okay." - One Line Drawing

I remember the first time you asked me if I loved you. You said "Don't say it unless you're ready. Don't say it unless you're ready to tattoo it on your heart and not take it back." You said with that finality that I've never heard from you since then, but which I remember with such unreal clarity that I often imagine it was a dream. I told you I loved you that night. I meant it that night, and I've meant it since.

I never had girlish notions of love. If anything, I was a realist to a fault. I prided myself on telling my heartbroken friends that your true love, the love of your life, that that person may not be who you ended up with. I told them it wasn't always for the worse, that sometimes it was what had to happen to bring us where we are supposed to end up.

I would take it all back now if I could. Every word, every breath, every thought. I never meant it. I couldn't have known what I meant.

Even when I fought against loving you I failed.

Now everything is cheapened, and yet I don't regret it. I, afterall, am of the school of "better to have loved and lost" - but how could I have known how it would feel?

God, now I feel so foolish. Still, I can't say how on earth I would have managed to do it differently had I the chance.

I have loved you since that night with more than I thought I ever had to give. And that love has been at the expense of so much else. But I've only known one other love that has compared, and I lost it. So yes, I'm grasping, and I've been grasping, arms outstretched, reaching out to hold onto something - and I've never known what:

A promise of a future. A promise of not sleeping alone. A promise of everything I'd dreamt of. A promise of an ending that I'd watched onscreen so many times, or at least the promise of a shot at it. But I feel robbed of that shot because you lack the ability to alter your own circumstance.

You changed everything for me. You made what meant something to me meaningless. You made the meaningless the only things that mattered.

Fix it.