A Letter Never Sent

September 14, 1995

Dear Cam,

It feels like an eternity since we last spoke, though I remember your last words to me. You said, “I’ll talk to you later.” I have been very hurt by all of this, and feel quite broken. I still can’t make sense of it. I have read your notes to me over many times, and remember the time we spent together, how happy we were, how happy we could be and how happy I was to be with you, and how deeply in love with each other we were. I feel like we had everything we wanted in the palms of our hands, as long as we kept our hands together, kept touching each other.

I still have all of this love for you and nowhere to put it. I haven’t stopped loving you or being in love with you. I cannot hate you or dislike you. I still want to be with you, and want you to be with me, even though I did say goodbye to you. I guess thought that if I said goodbye, by saying it, I would feel differently, because I don’t want to be unhappy and feel hurt either, and every time this has happened to us that has happened to me, and each time the hurt has been more severe. I continue to feel all this love for you and have no way to stop it from coming. This s complicated by the contradictory feeling that I don’t want it to stop, because it has been the greatest and deepest love I have ever felt. It is very strong. But thinking about it causes me pain, and sorrow, to the extent that I feel that I need to make it stop, but I don’t want to let go of it and never want to lose it. But that causes me to keep loving you, and nothing gets put back. I feel like I am still bleeding and I wish that feeling would stop, because it really hurts.

I don’t know what to do or say, which is why I’ve done neither. I miss you so much and I hurt very deeply I am angry that you haven’t done anything to get in touch with me – and I realize that sounds contradictory. My frustration stems from this: In out time together, I’ve seen you fight for everything – for your opinions in class, for your job, for how your family treats you, for how your coworkers perceive you – everything, in short, except us, our relationship. Even though I think I can understand why this has been hard for you in terms of commitment, it still hurts me very deeply. You told me that you realized that nothing was more important to you than our relationship, yet you never fought for it. You only fought with me. And I was so in love with you, and supportive of you, of your ideas, your feelings. That has really hurt me.

I have been depressed. I guess I didn’t really know what depression could feel like before. I think I know now. It feels lonely and cold and dark, like an awareness that no one really cares that I am alive. Some days my greatest challenge has been to get out of bed. Other days, the challenge has been to get through a full day of work. Some days I have to leave early, or just leave the office to cry without attracting the concern and attention of the people I work with. I find myself not being able to understand what I’m working for, because without you to pursue my dreams with I don’t know what the point is – because my dreams haven’t changed, and they include you, us, our future – the future we talked about and discussed and planned to have together.

What has made me angry is that your actions since we stopped seeing each other lead me to feel that you are willing to just walk away from what we had together, without even trying to resolve anything, regardless of whether that would mean the end of this relationship. It angers me to think that you are capable of just writing it off to incompatibility or fate or bad timing. I realize none of those things are likely accurate, and that you don’t want me to feel that way, but you walked away, and your failure to initiate any resolution is beyond frustrating. And I feel like, every time this has happened to us, if I didn’t initiate communication, there never would have been any, and our relationship would have just ended. I’m tired of assuming that role, of always carrying that responsibility, and this most recent separation doesn’t do anything to convince me otherwise.

I can’t and, honestly, don’t want to repress my feelings. But I have to resist turning on myself, doubting myself – feeling like I missed something crucial that, had I been aware of it, would have allowed me to find the right words or take the right action at the critical moment that would have prevented this from happening, would have saved us. But I know that’s not the case. On an intellectual level, I don’t understand why this relationship failed, but it has failed. I know in my heart that I did everything I could have done and given everything I had to give to make it work. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault, the failure; we have discussed this many times. But, whenever we reached those critical moments, you accused me of things that I would never do to anyone, let alone to you, my friend, my beautiful lover, sweet woman – and you also told me that you knew it wasn’t me! I’ve found that it’s impossible for me to not be angry when I think: If it wasn’t me, then why did we spend so much of our precious time together discussing how much I had to change in order for our relationship to be “acceptable” to you? I tell you this with all my heart: I could not have done any more, any better, any differently. I am torn apart inside because I felt so loved with you, by you – you made me feel that way by telling me how very loved you felt with me. But it wasn’t enough to keep me in your life. What do you want, Cam? I never wanted you out of my life, Cam – never – no matter how difficult the issues that we faced were. I felt we could face them together. I was wrong. I finally had to say goodbye, because every time we worked though something (I thought), after every separation and mending, I felt like we really made progress; but we never did, because it always eventually came back to the same issues, and you made it quite clear to me that it was about your needs, your feelings, your emotions and – worse – what I was doing to them, how I was failing to meet them or appreciate them. It’s pretty hard for me to not feel emotionally beaten up by all of that.

Here’s the source of my pain: I feel like you didn’t really want to become as much a part of my life as you did, yet you very much wanted to and succeeded at doing just that. And I wanted you to. I did not imagine the strength of the love and caring that we shared with and for each other. I feel like you must not understand how far in and deep you have become, in me. It feels difficult to breathe without you. So much of you still exists in my life, like you’ve always been a part of it, but you are so far away now. I gave you every part of my heart, and let you fill my soul, and I trusted you – I let myself believe that I could let you hold my hand because you loved me and wouldn’t leave me. Now, I feel more alone than I was before we were together, and it makes me feel pretty naïve.

I dreamed about us being together, having a life together, before we ever were together. This has made it impossible for me, so far, to find any sense of resolution for the sense of loss that I feel, because sharing my life with you was very much the fruition of a dream for me – being with someone who made me feel so complete, my woman, my lover, my best friend, my partner. You are everything I ever wanted in a partner, and I told you this, and you told me that I was the same for you. I wanted to marry you. I wanted us to raise a family, to build a home. We talked about these things, together. Realizing that the dream is over – feeling like it has been taken away from me – makes me angry. My anger sometimes can make me feel like our relationship was just a trial run for you, while I lived it as the real thing, not as some hypothetical possibility that we were talking about doing. I was already doing it. Maybe we were never in synch. But you talked to me as if it were real for you, you made me believe that it was, and I still do. I never doubted the things you told me, never doubted your feelings. Which again confuses me, and my confusion, frustration and anger stem from this question: If what you said was real, how could you give up such a dream, if it had become true for you, as you told me? Why would you give up what you said you most wanted when you had it in your hands? What could be worth that sacrifice, Cam? As you pointed out to me many times, true love doesn’t just come along. To me, the idea that we had that – or thought we had it together – and that you are just able to walk away from it isn’t reasonable, or healthy. Or we were both just fooling ourselves, confining our relationship to some kind of idealized emotional space.

We had a dream together, I though, and it was my most important dream, and now it is gone. I am angry about that, and I have examined my anger, and feel that it is justified.

What scares and saddens me the most are the descriptions of your feelings that you have shared with me, as you were having them. You question almost everything that doesn’t come out the way you hope/expect it to. I’ve done this myself, and can share with you that it is unhealthy and self-defeating. It creates a dynamic in which you set yourself up for failure by expecting things to turn out one way and, when they don’t, assuming responsibility for it, seeing it as a failure, and internalizing this feeling. It is a control thing. I know in my heart that we love each other very deeply, very truly – I have always remained in touch with that, and it has allowed me to separate the real issues in our relationship (including my divorce, my son, individual personal issues) from things that I have always felt are not a part of our relationship, like doubts, fears and mistrust. I have never told you that your feelings didn’t exist, or weren’t real, though you have accused me of doing so, and this was unfair to me. I know that what you felt was real, but you told me yourself that when things don’t feel “right” to you, you compensate by searching for reasons to attach to the feelings. And I feel that you wrongly used our relationship as a scapegoat for some of these doubts, and then you let your emotions construct lies about me to justify the anger that you feel. I know that you didn’t do this consciously and that you weren’t trying to hurt me. But it hurt me every time it happened, and I told you and you continued to allow it to happen. You never stopped it from happening because you felt that to stop it would be to deny your own feelings. You are carrying anger and resentment, rightly so, over bad things that have happened to you in the past, the abuse specifically, and you are afraid to let go of those feelings because you are afraid that if you do those things will happen to you again and then if will be your fault. Even though you know in your heart that you didn’t cause them to happen to you in the first place — that they were done to you. And you know that you didn’t allow them to happen to you willingly, even.

Why does this hurt me? Because those things or anything like them would never happen with me. But you won’t let yourself believe it, because it’s part of the protective wall that you’ve constructed around yourself. To believe that it wouldn’t happen with me qould require you to let go of those feelings, and, with them, the survival methods that you’ve developed to protect yourself. You are too afraid to let go of them now, because you don’t want to ever be abused again, to be a victim. Which is a completely rational way to think.

But they would never have happened with me and I would have protected you from them every happening, as much as that is ever possible. It was wrong of you to project those feelings onto me because I really loved you and wanted you and wanted to help you and be with you. I wanted you to be happy, and I still do. I wanted us to be happy together. That’s all I ever wanted. But I know this will never be. It is what we had — happiness — or maybe I just thought so. Maybe I was the only one who was happy. But I was what you had, and now we’ve both lost the happiness of being together, and you’ve lost this relationship, because of these feelings that you need to deal with. It is very difficult to write this, because I know how much it must hurt you to hear it from me, but I am telling you because I love you so deeply, so intensely, that I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy with or without me.

Think of all the things we talked about doing that we never had the chance to explore because every time we got close the feelings would come out. And we’d spend all of our time and emotional energy sorting through them, sorting and dealing instead of walking in the park, or going out to meet people and make new friends, or spending time with our families, or making love. Every minute we spent dealing with your unresolved issues was lost to us. What did all of that time spent get us? As you used to point out to me, time, in this life is so short.

You can do this, Cam. I want you to know that you can, and to know that I know you can do it. And I still want to help you, if I can. When you discover how to let these things go you will give yourself a gift, a precious gift — permission to be the person you are inside, the one eager to come out and live the life that you want to live. Your life. The one you dream about! That is the strong and beautiful and passionate and intelligent woman who I see you as, the Cam who I fell in love with and remain in love with still.

So many times you told me that we can’t be anything other than who we are. That it would be wrong for us to change. Sometimes you even said that it wouldn’t be possible. When you really listen to yourself, I think you will find that the voice you hear telling you not to change is your own voice. When you learn to accept who you are, then you can enjoy the wonderful experience of being that wonderful person, of living that wonderful person’s life. Your life, Cam. You have no idea how much it hurt when I heard you say things about yourself like, “I should have been famous.” Or asking yourself negative questions like, “why can’t I be different?” They are unfair questions, because they subject themselves to pre-determined answers. They beg for negative answers. When you pose them, you make unreasonable demands on yourself to answer them, and trying to meet those demands is self-destructive. It causes you to stray further from who you are, from your center, from the center of who and what you are. You already have all of the answers because you are naturally beautiful and complete. That is how the universe makes us. Until you accept those positive answers and embrace them as a part of you, become comfortable accepting that you are that beautiful and complete person, no one — most importantly yourself — will be able to give you the peace of mind that you can only give to yourself, and which you will not receive if you continue to deny who and what you are to the self that is proclaiming the truth. You don’t have to live with these fears. You can change these things if you want to. You are strong enough, and brave enough. Please believe me. I know you. I love you, and I am your friend. You told me that I was your best friend. I am just trying to be that person. Take the gift. Do the work. You deserve to give this to yourself.

I hope for you, and hurt with you.

R.