Love, Rosie

Dear Alex,

Twice we have stood in front of each other, twice we have tasted the bittersweet longing on our lips and twice we have got it all wrong. They say somethings are better left unsaid, yet not a day goes by when I do not regret telling you all the things I should have. 

I should have told you how much you mean to me. Not in words but actions. In all the years that I’ve known you, you’ve become my tressured secret, one I would never be able to share with another. 

I should have told you, you are the other half of my soul. In all the words we wrote to each other, and in all the video calls we gazed at each other, smiling yet not uttering a word, the meanings were lost in translation. Year after year we grew, a little more mature, a little more sensible, a little more responsible but we grew. We grew apart. Yet in our hearts we know, we are one text away, one call away, one flight away to be there for each other. 

I should have told you that I love you. That I always had and I always will. It never felt like the right moment to confess all that I feel for you in the right words. Perhaps, there will never be a right word to describe my love for you. Loving you feels like the first rain of the monsoon, a cup of chai on a winter morning, that one song of nostalgia on a long drive, a recurring deja vu of us dancing in circles, in an ending loop of love and longing. 

Year after year we found ourselves on the same road. Diverged into two paths, the unknown and the known. And year after year we chose the known path, the certainty of our rigid today, of our circumstances and the chances we were too afraid to take. We never treaded onto the unknown shore of possibility, where dreams come true, and the prayers are answered. Too good to be true, we told ourselves. Retracing our steps back to the known routine, step after step we continued to dance on the melody of our miseries. Never-ending and never really beginning. Like our love. Like the road not taken. 

And this is where we have gone truly, utterly and completely wrong.

Love, Rosie