If I Ever See You Again....

I won't know whether to laugh or cry, look or hide, hit you or hug you.

I won't know where you have been, what you have done or whether you have thought about me.

I've always hoped you would have seen me, laughing away on the tube, engrossed in a book, playfully touching the arm of the man leaning at the bar. Maybe you will have seen me, maybe you'll tell me how happy you were to see me smile again, the 'old me' you knew and loved, as you gazed out from a shadowy corner not wishing to interrupt. Or maybe you've forgotten my name already.

Perhaps you'll walk on by and pretend I'm not there, as if we never existed. I won't know what to do with that. Perhaps it will be for the best or maybe I'll feel worse than I've already had to feel. Perhaps I'll just cross the road and pretend like I never knew you, and you won't know what to do with that.

I hope the memories don't come flooding back, or that your smile will change everything I've lived and learnt after you. I expect someone will be in your place. Maybe, in the dim distant future, I'll be throwing my head back in hysterics, clinging onto the arm of a lover, as we race down the escalator of Liverpool Street Station towards a future, bright and unknown. It will be a mere snapshot in my world, but it will take a lifetime for you to forget.

I can't change anything. I know that now. But I can't blame myself either for being me and for asking the questions that I asked. There were times, buried under grief on my sofa or hiding in my quilt that I knew I could never forget you let alone contemplate replacing you. But as the months go by and the silence between us tears the space between our memories and our present wider and wider apart; I find myself forgetting your walk, your voice or the things we used to laugh about. The lines and contours of your confusing, shielded gaze are no longer etched so unforgivingly on my mind. It's all becoming hazy and mixed up, only faintly touching me now. You left a hole, it may always be there, but you are paling into insignificance much as I have to you.

In the years to come, there will be more memories, more nights out, nights in, moments of love, moments of despair, friends, family, lovers, a barrage of promises kept and broken. And our time will seem so distant, so far away that my heart may no longer skip a beat when I hear your name. I won't need to compare anybody to you because I know now that it just wasn't meant to be. It was your choice and it will be somebody else's choice one day not to walk away. I've picked myself up Gally, have you? I've learned something here have you?

So if I ever see you again....I know I can hold my head high in the knowledge that I did everything I could but it just wasn't enough for you. And that's fine, because all that I am and all that I have become since you, is probably all the better for it.