“I lost him once when he told me he didn’t want us anymore. I lost him again when he stopped being my friend. A twofold blow. It’s hard to sleep at night.”

“I am still wondering why and how all your feelings for me just disappeared in thin air.”

“I fear during that time I was running out of things to say to you. We settled into this weird routine where we never spoke about what was on our minds and I didn’t know how to break it. Every wrong word could have led to this fragile connection coming apart at its seams. I don’t think you really understood what it meant to me to lose you. I always knew I needed you a lot more than you needed me, and to be honest, I could feel you slipping away, but I had no idea how to stop it. I was so scared of saying the wrong thing. I was terrified. And so I said nothing at all. It was only when you were gone that I realised any word I would have said instead of swallowed could have been the right one if it’d made you stay a little longer.”

“I would have given anything and everything to be with you but at the end of the day you still wouldn’t have loved me and I now know that’s your problem, not mine.”

“One day - I will tell you about the dream I had, where you and I were together and you did not leave, where I was not terrified and you were not numb, where things were the way we wished they could be and not the way they are.”

“I just want you to know there will be a piece of you in me, always.”

“I think one of the saddest things is when two people really get to know each other: their secrets, their fears, their favourite things, what they love, what they hate, literally everything, and then they go back to being strangers. It’s like you have to walk past them and pretend like you never knew them, never even talked to them before, when really, you know everything about them.”