06.11.2002 | 1:01 p.m.
unperfumed, unsent love letters protect my sanity

Dear ___________,

Even though you're never going to see this letter, I'm not quite sure where to start. I've written letters of a similar nature to you before. Both those times, however, I was vague, and basically expected you to understand what I was insinuating. And you did. You knew exactly what I was getting at. You didn't react like I thought you would. You didn't say you were uncomfortable. You didn't distance yourself from me. You didn't treat me any differently. At the same time, you didn't pretend that nothing had happened. You never once dismissed or belittled my feelings. You took my confession in your stride, and our relationship remained as strong as ever. Your love for me grew proportionally with the intensity of my depression, something I could never have anticipated.

At the most ungodly hours, I found myself depending on your words,on your actions, on your love to keep me alive. I longed to show my true self to you but I had long forgotten what she was like. You knew, though. You constantly reminded me. You stood by me no matter how badly I treated you. That is, until I took a jack hammer and started thawing at our relationship until the cracks got wider, and slowly, what I had paradoxically wanted and feared happened - We started disintegrating. Like the true parasite I was, I sucked the energy out of you. Your generosity depleted and you left me on my own for a while, floundering for survival.

That was only a few months ago. Yet it feels like you've been always been in my life; I've shared some of my most personal moments, events, thoughts, desires, apprehensions, insecurities and dreams with you. I like to think that, on occasion, you've done the same. You are the embodiment of everything I consider precious. You are everything I want to be and so much more. If I could write like you, if I was half as intelligent as you are, if I was as selfless, perseverent, genuine - you'd better believe I'd be the epitome of arrogance. I don't believe in perfection in its absolute sense, but in my realm, you come closer to it than anyone else I've ever known. My love for film and music might seem trivial to most people, but you understand. Our extreme elitism with movies might seem shallow to most people, but we understand each others' gripes. I've never met anyone,anyone who thinks so much like me. It really is uncanny how most times our thoughts seem to be replications of each other. There are things I would never, ever tell anyone else just because they would miscontrue it as haughtiness or contrivance. You're the person I always bank on to understand and empathise. You've never failed me thus far.

In retrospect, I don't know why I told you about the assault. We weren't as close when I first told you. But there was something about you, something in the words you spoke that comforted me. Inadvertently, they urged me to confide in you. I regretted it for a while. I didn't want to be 'your sexually abused' friend. I didn't want you to have to walk on coals around me. I didn't want to make you feel compelled to say the all the 'right things'. I don't think anyone could have handled the situation better than you did. You made me believe in myself,___________. You gifted me the one thing I had been denying myself - the right to grieve. And while I grieved, you waited patiently for me to calm down. The days I didn't, you devised plans to help me. When they didn't work, you simply said you loved me. I hurt you repeatedly by denying the truth in your efforts. I found it impossible to reconcile the person you talked about so fondly with myself. I aimed for your Achilles' heel over and over; you didn't deserve to be stuck looking after a lost cause like me. I won.

It feels like I am writing this to send now. I forget that you will never read this. I have the liberty to speak my heart, and yet I am afraid to. I am in love with you. I told you I had feelings for you at the beginning of this year. The initial awkwardness eased out into a friendship I felt privileged to be part of but my feelings never left. They just found a little spot in my heart where they curled up comfortably, and made themselves scarce. But as we got closer, started professing love for one another, they reminded me of their existence. They increased in strength, and soon, they were the only part of me that still wanted to survive. I credited the re-emergence of these feelings to the new avatar our relationship had taken. I truly believed it was nothing but the blurring of the boundary between infatuation and friendship. I told you I loved you every single day, but never once did I mean it in the way I do in this letter. I needed joy to revel in, and you were the only person who provided me that. So I brought it up again, like before never concretely verbalising the emotion, but just implying it. Ever since, I have realised that my love for you isn't completely innocuous. You obviously have no idea, what with Nick coming into the picture and all of that. But no. I projected my feelings for you on to Nick. They were too strong, and too deterministic for me to deal with.

They say every person has one truly tragic love story that will reside in the recesses of their being forever. I think this one will be mine. I am always filled with sadness when people tell me they have found the one but also know they will never end up being with him or her. That is exactly the way I feel about you. I know you will be the yardstick for every boy I involve myself with from now on. I know the day you tell me you are with someone, I will be consumed with conflicting feelings of intense hurt and and happiness for someone like you should never,ever be with someone like me. I guess I don't have to worry about that seeing how ants will bray before that can happen. You deserve the best, honey. You deserve someone who reads Pablo Neruda and cries because it makes her think of you. You deserve someone who will realise every single day how incredibly lucky she is to warrant your love and loyalty. You deserve.....you deserve a lot.

And so, my dearest boy, I end this here. I wrote this hoping to feel less guilty about being so much in love with you without you having the slightest inkling. We've always agreed that brutal honesty is what makes our relationship as special as it is, but I think we both know that actually telling you all of this will decimate everything we've strived to salvage and maintain. God knows neither of us can deal with that right now. But maybe some day when we're stronger, happier,more settled, we can laugh about this, and wonder what would have happened if I had told you at the right time. Until then, all I have is my diary and all you have is my silence.

With love,sincerity and cowardice,

Aurina.

deja vu? | jamais vu?