Goodbye Tomorrow

“I have so much to say to you that l am afraid I shall tell you nothing.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

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I have lingered too long at the edge of these words. They hover just beyond the stroke of my pen, dissolving before they take shape, blurring beneath my thumb before I can type. I have always been a man of many words, but when it comes to you, language abandons me. My vocabulary collapses, vanishes like smoke at the mere thought of you. I cannot lie, nor can I conceal the fragile, fickle parts of myself that falter in your presence. Once, I believed you were my saving grace—my first real friend, my first true love. Through your gaze, I felt the world turn its face toward me at last, as if a single spotlight had burned through the greys and haze that had defined my life until then.

So many have come and gone, and yet the words I owed you remain unspoken. They drift through me like unfinished sentences, restless ghosts in the hollow of my chest. Perhaps you no longer care to hear them. Perhaps they would fall flat, carrying too little, too late. And yet the thought lingers—that somewhere within you, their echo might still stir. My silence was its own betrayal, and perhaps the cruelest of them all. For despite everything I have lost, you remain. You greet me still with the same warmth you offered the first day we met, unchanged even after the wounds I inflicted. That constancy gnaws at me. It is both my penance and my undoing—a reminder that I cannot turn you away, nor excise you from my story. Without you, it will always remain incomplete.

I wish I had loved you harder. Harder than I have ever held onto anything I’ve called my own. You poured yourself into me until our essences seemed to blur, until I could no longer tell where I ended and you began. You gave more of yourself than anyone else around me ever dared, investing in a love that yielded nothing but diminishing returns, sometimes cruelty. And still, you stayed. I am left bewildered by the force that tethered you here. What bound you to this wandering soul, stumbling aimlessly through the cold?

Was it hope—the fragile conviction that one day I might grow into the man you believed me to be? Or was it that letting go carried its own unbearable weight, a wound you could not bear to open? I don’t know. Perhaps I never will. But I ache to understand what invisible threads entwined our hearts, and whether any words could ever mend the fracture I left behind.

So I surrender these thoughts to the silence. Not in search of forgiveness, nor in the naïve hope of absolution. Only to finally offer what I withheld for too long. The last fragments of myself—the ones that still belong to you.

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It has been ten years since our fateful encounter, and still it remains, crystalline and undimmed, like a shard of yesterday embedded in the marrow of my memory. I was younger then—reckless with wonder, delirious with dreams, yet cloaked in a loneliness too vast for my fragile frame. Meeting you felt less like chance than trespass, as though I had slipped through a door in reality and stumbled into a mirror where my reflection finally stared back. Your ache was my ache. Your hunger for comfort was the very echo I had long mistaken for silence within myself.

What I cherished in you most was, in time, what drove me farthest away. You inhabited a world too serene, too merciful in its ordinary rhythm. I could not abide its stillness. My pulse demanded fire, demanded ruin, demanded the restless shadows that had raised me. In your calm I saw both refuge and threat: the possibility of rest, and the terror of not knowing who I might become without my chaos to anchor me.

Yet you remained the one indulgence that never fractured. Everything else in my grasp turned brittle, crumbling into dust no matter how tenderly I held it. But not you. You were the fragile that would not break, the quiet constant in a storm I could not name. And so I loved you the way one loves a secret—guiltily, hungrily, knowing it might one day demand the very thing I feared to surrender: myself.

Even now, a decade later, I stand on the edge of that truth, uncertain whether to call you my salvation or my undoing. Perhaps you were both. Perhaps that is why your memory still burns like a brand across the quiet of my chest, why I return to it again and again, as though it holds the map to a life I might have lived, had I not mistaken peace for peril.

I fell in love with your essence long before I dared trace the lines that sculpted your form. It was not your face, nor your figure, but the invisible aura that drew me close—the way silence gathered around your words as though the world itself paused to listen. The nights we spent in the dark, weaving touchless embraces through the fragile fabric of our sentences, were more intimate than any flesh I had known before. In your voice I discovered the warmth of skin, in your pauses the ache of breath, in your laughter the tremor of a pulse against mine. You did not merely soothe the storm inside me—you calmed the monsters I had once mistaken for home. You saved me, not with hands, but with presence. And even now I burn with the hope that I might have offered you the same salvation, if only for a moment, if only in fragments.

But love, for me, was never safe ground—it was always a cliff’s edge, always an ocean. And after finally crossing the distance that once divided us, I found myself drowning in a new abyss: the weight of my own desire. I cannot tell you the moment it began, only that I felt the steady unraveling of something once sacred. The purity I had worshipped in you began to slip from my grasp, and in its place grew a hunger I could not quiet. I forgot the reverence. I forgot the vow. I let selfishness replace wonder, and I shattered what I once swore to protect.

I abandoned our love. And in doing so, I abandoned the best part of myself. If there must be a name for the wound that broke us, let it be mine. I am the transgressor. The betrayer. The one who loved you and still failed you. The one who touched heaven and then, by my own hand, cast it aside.

Yet still, you do not cast me aside. You hold me in a love that feels less like mercy and more like a sentence—a prison where the bars are woven from your quiet devotion. I am guilty, and yet you choose to remain, as though my betrayal could not extinguish the flame you carry. It is unbearable, this kindness. It strips me bare. For I do not deserve you—not then, not now—but I do deserve the weight of reckoning. To stand before you, trembling in my scarred and frightened state, is the least that truth demands of me.

Perhaps redemption is not the lifting away of guilt, but the bearing of it with dignity. Perhaps love’s truest form is not the hand that spares us from consequence, but the fire that demands transformation. If that is so, then let my punishment be my rebirth. Let me no longer retreat into the shadows. If your love is fire, let it consume my selfishness and leave only what might gleam—scorched, but purified.

I will not beg for forgiveness; to do so would be another theft, another taking. Even now, I would not dare. Instead, I offer only my acceptance of the penalties I have earned. Let the burden of my transgression settle on my shoulders. Let me carry the gravity of a love both beautiful and blighted, radiant and ruined. For what we built was sacred, even in its breaking, and I would sooner be crushed beneath its weight than ever flee from its memory.

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Even these words, offered now, are but the faintest bridge to what lives within me still. They are the least of what my heart holds, fragments too fragile to capture the weight of my truth. “Sorry” is a sorry word, and no matter how often it is uttered, it cannot undo a single wound. It lingers like an echo—hollow, insufficient, incapable of stitching shut the fractures I carved into you.

I began this piece confessing that you leave me speechless, and yet I have poured out what little I could, straining to give language to the inexpressible. Still, these words mean nothing if my actions do not rise to meet them. Confession without transformation is only another form of deceit.

And so, beneath this flood of memory and reverie, there lies a purpose more severe: to sever the thread between us. Cruel as it may sound, I believe it may be the truest mercy left. You cannot go on tethering yourself to what I have become—a corpse of the man you once loved, a hollow shell staggering forward only to piece together some fractured purpose. The life you once imagined with me, warm in its simplicity, lies buried. I have abandoned the dream of an ordinary happiness, that domestic grace you once held out to me like a gift. My path now is harsher, lonelier, lit not by comfort but by necessity.

If I am to do one right thing by you, let it be this: to stand in the light without disguise, without strings, without the false hope of “see you soon” or “talk to you later.” I will not bind you to a future I cannot give. I will not let my absence masquerade as presence, nor my silence as promise.

This is not rejection but release. The love we shared will always burn in me as both wound and wonder, but it must not chain us anymore. If there is grace left between us, let it be found here—in honesty, in the surrender of what can no longer be saved, in the quiet severing that allows us both to walk forward unshackled.

I am not vanishing into shadows, nor disguising absence as devotion. I am, at last, choosing the harder mercy: to unclasp your hand so you may carry your light unburdened by my ruin. If I am remembered at all, let it not be for the chains I forged between us, but for this moment of release—the one gesture of love I could still give without taking.

So here I end. No more strings, no more borrowed promises, only this: gratitude for the fire we carried, sorrow for the fracture I caused, and hope—quiet, unspoken—that what remains in you will not be scar, but bloom.

Farewell, not in bitterness, but in reverence. Farewell, not in erasure, but in remembrance. Farewell—because love, even broken, demands nothing less: Goodbye Tomorrow.

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“Whatever’s happens tomorrow, we’ve had atoday”. — David Nicholls