Diary of a Resurrection (A Novella) (5 page)

You sent me a letter. It was a fresh
wave of pain exactly when I felt like there might be hope for me after all. I
could have lived without it, to be honest. You felt the need, after all that
time and silence, to tell me your truths. Well thanks for that. Perfect timing.
Just as I’d convinced myself I might make it through without needing to know
where we went wrong, and that perhaps it was best not to know, you ripped open
the clouds and rained on me more than I ever needed.

Dear Mina,

I’m so sorry. I am sorry I
have treated you like I have. I am sorry I let you down so badly and broke your
heart. Watching you walk away from me that night in the restaurant, crying and
hurt, destroyed a little part of me. I wanted to chase you, I wanted to
explain, but I knew if I did I would not be able to let you go again. Staying
in my seat was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

I wanted to tell you a few
things, things you deserve to know but I never had the balls to tell you to
your face.

The most important thing,
sweet beautiful Mina, is that I love you. I love you so fucking much it stings
inside. I loved you from the moment we spoke. When we were together it was like
nothing could be more perfect. No one could be more perfect. I never lied when
I said how special you were to me, I just never told you exactly how special.

I don’t just love you because
you are beautiful, which you are, I love you because you are fierce and strong.
You are clever and bright. Too bright for me. Had we stayed together you would
end up knowing me better than I know myself, which scares me. It scares the
shit out of me. I struggle to accept that someone has worked their way so far
into my heart and soul that they have become a part of me, but you did. And you
are still there.

I am a coward, that is what this
comes down to. You told me that you loved me and I loved you back, but I didn’t
know how to say it. I don’t know how to be the person you want or deserve. So
instead of trying, and inevitably failing – which I know I would and I would
let you down – I backed out. I took the coward’s way out for sure. I am so
sorry for that. I was never bored of you. I never wanted to treat you like that
or say half of those things I said to you, but I had to push you away to save
you. I had to be horrible to you so that you would walk away and so I would destroy
everything between us enough that I would not be tempted to try and get you
back. I needed to push you so far that we broke in an unfixable way. I am so
sorry that I had to, but it was to save you. You would be miserable with me. I
am constantly searching for something, I don’t know what and maybe I never
will, but I would be afraid to let you love me too deeply, and love you back
the same, in case I still felt I needed to search and have to leave you behind
to do it. If I had you, really had you as my own like I wanted, I wouldn’t be
able to leave you, then I would be left missing something that I needed to find
and it would destroy us both in the end. So I had to do it, to save you and me.
I know what you are thinking; perhaps what I was missing was you. I think it
might have been, but I couldn’t take that risk. Not with you. That’s part of
why I stay with Pan. I know she is not it, this thing I am searching for. Maybe
that won’t make sense to you, but I think it will because you know me so well.
You see me in a way that no one else does.

You do everything with such
passion, Mina. You throw your heart into everything, your big kind heart, and I
know you invested part of it in me and I don’t deserve it. I never did. When I
said you can’t give 100% of yourself to someone, I meant it. I was hurt, not only
by Pan but someone else, a long time ago. I was seventeen and completely in
love with a girl. She cheated on me and broke my heart. A few months after, I
found out she had been pregnant and had an abortion. She never knew who the
father would have been. It destroyed me. This tiny life that could have been
part of me, gone forever. You can’t take that kind of thing back. I was
devastated. Then I met Pan and just as I started to move on, she ripped my
heart out all over again. After that I gave up believing in love. Until you.

I told myself I wasn’t
falling for you, but I knew I was lying. I knew I loved you the second I heard
your voice. Then I saw your pretty face and your big eyes and I was lost.
Utterly gone. We fitted together like it was meant to be. The further I fell,
the more I panicked. Then you told me you loved me and I knew I could never be
what you needed or wanted. And I bailed on you.

I was never bored of you,
Min. You need to know that. I was trying to save you by letting you go.

I got every one of your
texts. Every single one. I read all of them one hundred times. I am so sorry I
didn’t answer, I was just trying to do the right thing. I did feel it though,
all of it. I missed you and all I wanted was to hear your voice too. Some
nights I drove by your house just to see your light on. I just wanted to be
close to you again, but I knew I couldn’t.

Mina, I love you. I love you
so much it fucking kills me to be without you, but it’s for the best. If we
stayed together, if we even gave it a try, I would let you down. I can’t be who
you need or deserve. I want you, but you need better.

I hope one day you’ll
understand and forgive me. I’ll love you always.

Drew

Your words made me feel sick. Seeing your writing, the letter
you had sat down to write to me to make me understand, suffocated me. You loved
me. All the hours I had spent wondering, agonising, trying to work out what I
did wrong or how I had upset you, and now it was all clear: You were a selfish
bastard.

I gave you my soul and you crushed it like a bug.

You coward.

We could have been amazing, but you were too scared to try.

Yes you loved me, it was the thing that I had wanted more
than anything else in the world, but it never mattered in the end because
reading your letter made me see what a waste of my time you were. I had given
you everything. I opened myself up to you and let you crawl inside, giving you
a permanent residence in my heart, and you took it, knowing you were going to
let me down all along. You intended to let me down the whole time, knowing our
relationship, or whatever it was, had an expiration date. You were fully aware
you were never going to try to be the person I wanted, that I deserved. You
knew you were just waiting for the moment when you had the balls to leave me
behind. You were practically waiting for it to go too far, then planned to back
out.

I burnt your letter you should know. I burned it because you
burnt me, scarring my heart, and I wanted to scorch you back.

I hope it melted some of the ice in your soul.

After I burned your letter, with my
mum holding my hand, over a specially built bonfire in the back garden, my
stomach stopped aching. Just like that. I didn’t notice at first. Instead I had
a niggling feeling that I was missing something. It took me two days to notice it
was gone. I no longer felt sick or wanted to curl up into a little ball.

I was still doodling; white ink on black paper. I still
wrote your words and created little scenes around them. I drew the stars and
the moon we had lain watching. I drew the lake we walked around. The giant
plate of spaghetti we shared. But then I drew a heart, a whole heart, not a
broken one. I drew music notes and thought about playing something upbeat. I
drew snow covered mountains and fairy lights, thinking about Christmas which
was just a month away. I doodled a Christmas tree and wondered what my friends
were doing. Whether they wanted to go out. I drew cake and coffee, thinking
they might like to catch up.

They did, and they had missed me.

I had missed me too.

Then I took my black paper and my white pen and drove back to
our park. I hated it at first. I didn’t want to get out of the car. It was cold
and raining, but I put my woolly hat on, grabbed my umbrella, took a breath and
forced myself out into the grey November day.

As I walked around the park, my eyes initially avoided the
places we had sat or kissed. Then I made them look. I made them stare. I made
my mind drink it all in, empty and alone. I won’t lie, it was hard. These were
the places I had avoided for two months, in my mind and in person. I stood
still and drank it in. All of it. Then I got my white pen and I drew it. All of
it. The rain smudged the ink and the wind blew the paper, I had to battle to
finish, but I battled and I fought.

And I won.

I burnt those drawings too, just so you know.

When I got home I put my black pad and white pen away.

I was ready for colour again.

It took three months for me to not
want to text you about every little thing that made me laugh or cry. To be
fair, it took me almost three months to laugh again full stop.

By December I had stopped texting you pretty much
completely. I still wanted to. I thought of you every day and my fingers itched
to send you a few words. I didn’t want to say I missed you or that I loved you,
I just wanted to know you were OK. But I didn’t. I managed to stop myself.
Instead, I focused on Christmas. I had plans to visit family and see my
friends. I made a full itinerary that covered pretty much the entire month
because I had figured out that keeping busy was key. It helped keep away those
thoughts of you. It stopped your words from spinning around my head. It made me
feel almost normal again, and God, that was a beautiful feeling. I knew I wasn’t
quite there, but only being twenty or thirty percent present was still a
welcome relief. I wasn’t crazy after all. It was amazing.

I often thought back a few months, to when I was at the
bottom of a black hole, certain I was never going to feel better. I was
positive that feeling of being pulled down and down and down was never going to
end. Eventually I would just collapse under the weight of gravity and misery
and crumble to dust.

But I didn’t. It surprised me. I surprised me.

Sometimes my heart caught me unaware and I was hit by such a
wave of longing and loneliness that I could have suffocated. But I carried on,
trying to leave you behind.

I still saw things all the time I wanted to tell you about.
I still thought of things that you would find funny and I started towards my
phone, thinking maybe you would be happy to hear from me and hear all about it,
but then I would remember how far I had come and knew I didn’t want to go back.
I knew any contact from you would have done it. I knew a single word from you,
in person or on my phone screen, would have sent me tumbling back weeks of
progress.

My friends were amazing. I had finally come clean about
where I had been and what had been happening. My phone had started to buzz and
beep all the time, them checking in on me and saving me from my thoughts. I
don’t know where I would be without them. You still had your own alerts, just
in case. We had a plan, my friends and I, that if your alerts were ever to
sound I was to contact them immediately. I was not to be left alone with any
contact with you. It was a good plan. It made me feel safe because I knew I was
weak when it came to you. Maybe I always will be.

December passed in a blur of tinsel and learning to live
again.

I gave my family and friends all paintings for Christmas.
They were bright watercolours, using all the colours of the rainbow. I did it
because I could. Those colours no longer made me hurt. I wanted them in my
world again. Bright beautiful colour.

On Christmas Day I gave myself a present; I deleted all the
texts I had saved from you, and I finally gave up that tiny last flicker of
hope that we could go back to what we had once been.

I also finally deleted your number.

Merry Christmas me.

I saw you today. You were in the indoor
market, looking at cakes, and you were with her. Pan I suppose. Although maybe
not. I might never know. Your arm, which used to belong around my waist, was
around her shoulders. Whoever she was, she was beautiful, as I might have
expected. You said something to her, right up close to her ear, and she threw
her head back to laugh. I watched her blonde hair swish over her shoulders and
across the skin on your forearm, the same skin that I used to run my fingertips
across. You made her pretty skin flush. Your blue eyes sparkled and I felt like
I couldn’t breathe.

I was better though, better than before. Better than when I
thought life without you meant nothing. Better than when I thought I would
never feel like myself again. Because I do. Finally.

That was why I was there. It is the New Year and I needed
new paints. It is something I do every January. I renew my art supplies for the
year and get excited about what I will create with them.

I made a New Year Resolution you know. It was to leave you
behind once and for all. You had taken six months of my life and that was more
than enough. I knew I need to start afresh, and when better a time than a whole
new year? It was a bit cruel of life I suppose, seeing you so soon. Testing me.
But life is unexpected like that, and we just have to face what it presents the
best we can.

I watched you for a moment longer, watching you together and
wondering if that was how we looked to an outsider; happy, close. In love. I
looked at your smile and my heart twisted in knots. I thought for a minute I
might collapse. I felt hot and faint. But it passed.

It was then I nodded to myself, because I knew it was time.
Enough was enough.

I turned my back on you and went to the till, unloading my
armfuls of paint and paper and clay. I didn’t really pay attention to the guy
behind the till because I was trying so hard to keep my mind free of you,
consciously emptying my thoughts of what I had seen.

“Got a big project on the go?” the guy asked.

It snapped me to and I was grateful for the distraction.

“Sorry?”

He gestured to my stuff. “All this. You must be working on
something big.”

“Oh.” I looked at my things. They were perhaps a bit
excessive, but I was excited about starting over, as one should always be.

“No. Just the start of a new year. New things to learn and
try.” I explained, “I like getting new supplies in January for the year ahead
and then see where it all takes me. This year I think I am going to go big and
bold. The brighter, the better.”

He smiled; it was wide and he had perfect white teeth.

“Sounds interesting. I like models. I start something new
every January too. Like a goal for the year. Something to achieve. Something to
evolve.”

“Models?” I asked.

“Sure,” he grinned. “Tiny paper models. Replicas of big
stuff made really small. Like the Sydney Opera House, or the Empire State
Building. That kind of thing.”

My stomach gave a little roll. I loved the sound of it.

“That sounds amazing,” I said as he rung up my total.

“I tell you what,” he reached for a post-it note. “Why don’t
I give you my email address and maybe we could get together sometime and swap
projects. We could see what this year holds for both of us.” He wrote on the
post-it and took my proffered cash.  With my change he gave me the note, which
I tucked safely into my purse and smiled.

“That sounds nice, I’d like that.”

He held out his hand. “Riley.”

I shook it; his skin was warm and soft.

“Mina.”

“That’s a pretty name,” he said, handing me my carrier bag.
“I hope to hear from you, New-Year-Mina.” He flashed a smile. His face was
nice; gentle, kind but most importantly, sincere.

I laughed. “Definitely.”

I was still smiling when I turned away, and almost crashed straight
into you. You caught my arm to steady me.

You and Pan – or whoever she was – were right behind me,
waiting patiently in line. I could tell from your face you had heard
everything. Your mouth was set hard and angry, your eyes were sad. Possibly-Pan
was looking around, oblivious.

I looked you in the eye, flicked my arm out of your grasp
and said, “Excuse me. My mistake.”

Then I stepped around you both and walked away, and I didn’t
look back. I never even had the urge.