To my love, my dear, my everything,

By the time you will be reading this, I will be long gone. I implore you not to try to follow me — this is for the best. You may not see it, but you will in time.

It splits my heart in half to know I have to leave. I never thought of myself as the kind of person who deserts in the middle of the night — but apparently, today is one of reckoning. Not that I’m leaving on impulse — I’ve thought long and hard about this for many months now. More than I care to admit, in fact.

This makes it sound as if I haven’t enjoyed our time together. I promise you, I have cherished every moment of these last two years. Truly, I have. It may sound hard to believe, considering the contents of this letter, but if you were to believe anything from this, I would want it to be that.

Now, my leaving has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with me. You see, my dear, when you met me, I was in shambles. A disaster. The broken semblances of someone who had done terrible, terrible things — things that were still haunting them, day and night. But you — you were a fresh gulp of air after suffocating in my own misery. You were the morning light after the darkest of nights. You were… well, you were you.

As you well know, I have never had much hope or love in my life. So the barest of affections from you meant the entire world to me. I clung onto this — onto you. When you asked my name, I gave it. What you didn’t know, and I’m sorry to reveal, is that it wasn’t my true name. In my haste to keep you in my life, the lie had slipped out without my approval.

And from there, I spun a web. A web of deceit and lies that I kept promising and promising I would crawl my way out of. But when? In a week? A month? A year? Why end it now, when I still had you? When you still looked at me with so much love? What’s one more lie, if you looked at me like that again — if you brushed your fingers against mine one more time?

But in recent months, the guilt has started to grow. It has festered, rotting me from the inside out. It has gotten to the point where I can barely stomach the thought of seeing you, in fear that it will all come tumbling out.

I can’t help but wonder now what you would say to all this, had I told you in person. Would you forgive me and agree to continue our life, which, as you now know, is nothing but a fantasy I initiated? I think not. Actually, I would hope not.

I don’t deserve your forgiveness. I’ve ruined your life — my apologies for giving myself all the credit, but I see it is true. Had you not met me, perhaps you would have found someone who was true to you, and not the coward that I am.

Please, do not doubt my love for you. It beats on, and will continue to beat on, until my last breath escapes me, and I am once more reunited with those that once trusted me, as you did. By now, you must be sick of me, so I shall leave you here, my darling. I would ask you not to forget me, but I think it may do you better to continue on as if we had never met.

So long, my love.