19th October 2011

Dear Wesley,

As he stood in front of me in reception, leaning on the front bar with an air of confidence of someone who had done nothing more than fuck your best friend, saying: ‘You know what’s depressing? Manning a gate for six and a half hours on Christmas day, then having a break and doing it again. That’s depressing. I did get paid £500 for it though – fucking Afghan.’ I flinched at his candid use of the word fuck in a place that anyone could walk into at anytime and I walked backwards in my mind and forwards to now.

As the two year gap between the day I watched you run toward the train on the platform and the day it happened, two years on, I can do nothing but go back there everyday. Every single day. I can’t tell you how the pain felt and still feels, it is still to raw even after all this time. Like someone has seared my skin then ran a freshly diced onion into the wound. I will return to that emotion another day, another time. For now, nearly 24 months on, I realise the way to deal with this is to essentially write it out. If I put everything onto paper, the initial feelings of when I first saw your eyes and decided that I wanted to speak to you, seeing you in others I have met…then that is what I have to do. You need to be gone, erased and ended.

I doubt that at any point you will read these letters – or posts if I have to be ‘now’ about it. The process of writing by hand seems and feels dated, but as the ink falls from a pen and onto a page, the letters on a computer dance and sing with every touch of a key. You are leaving me, maybe not yet, I can still feel the way your finger clipped into mine like the last piece of a jigsaw, but I will reach my final chapter in good time.

The people hear take me back to you. I am not angry at the boy in the reception today. Yet another army ‘god’ who has done nothing but live with other men in a bubble world where it really is sink or swim. Not that I could ever do it. I’m still a firm believer that it takes more to stand up for what you don’t believe in, than be aimless and join a regimental clan because you essentially have a family who wants you gone. This is a generalisation and you would look at me like I had said something truly earth shattering right now. You know I say sweeping statements (my high school teacher taught me that expression) without a thought for there consequence in today’s social setting. You drank my opinions, a bit like a vampire who wanted every once of a kills being. There could be twenty voices and you would solely belong to mine.

The words given now, are merely the beginning. I have covered this I know, but I had to get them out. The inspiration is going to come back to me, it died two years ago in the summer of 2009 when my heart did nothing but not matter to you. For now, I will leave you, with your head just above the water as you remember all the things I said to you, although I imagine that you filled the black gaps of me with someone new since then. Just take in the thoughts that I still remember and right now, I can’t forget.

Hopefully soon, I will be able to.

Yours truly,

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