Dear –

Now that you’ve read his panicked revelatory message and the other woman’s stories that have contradicted all he ever told you; accept that your photos, his gifts and messages have taken on a whole new meaning. Take time to adjust to this new reality and accept that he took all your love and in return gave you back a handful of dust.

Nobody died. Nobody was maimed. Nobody bled. The trembling will stop, the panic and anxiety will subside and the white noise of revelations will cease and this too will turn to calm.

Accept that this is a terrible thing to have happened but, crucially, forgive yourself for trusting because there is no point to love without trust: the two hold hands.

Don’t think back over events which now have skewed and alternative meanings; those times when he had you both in the same room; the times when he fluently lied; so eloquently, so painlessly and the times when he made you think you were mad for ever suspecting him of being less than the good person he claims he wants to be.You will never see him again. You will go on to do wonderful things without him in your life.

Those memories you are torturing yourself with are nothing but neurons and synapses; little beats of electricity that mean nothing. They are pictures from a film that has simply ended and in time their colours will turn to monochrome before fading away completely. In time, his importance to you will shatter and you will realise you picked him out of a small crowd and gave him more attention than he ever deserved.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay said, ‘I shall forget you presently, my dear…I shall forget you…I would indeed that love were longer-lived.’ You fell in love with a fiction and so remember if you must things in this way: remember being spun in the water under a starry sky, remember the anticipation of weekends away, the kisses and secrets shared, the carefully created tokens of affection you made and gave him. But realise now that all of that has perished so place the remnants in the grave and bury it with your sympathy, your patience, your concern, your counsel and your love.

And if in those cold, long hours of the night, the spectre of his body and all he once told you and made you believe won’t fade away into dreams, think of Carl Sagan who noted that we all live out our lives on a mere dot, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. All of this is just a blip in the timeline of all our lives and he deserves no more of your time and tears.

x