A letter

The one I would have written on paper, if I thought you would open it.

Raghav, my pookie,

This has been one of the hardest letters to write. I have started it a dozen times and deleted it every time, because every version was trying to get something from you. This one is trying to give you something instead, and I hope you can feel the difference.

I am sorry. Not for how things ended, which is the easy thing to be sorry about. I am sorry for what it was like to live with me. For the year you spent walking carefully around me. For the money I lied about, and for taking your help while I was doing it. For every time you said you needed space and I answered by turning up. For the evening at the airport when you came back from Seattle, when you needed to not come home and I made that cost you something. God only knows how much I have punished myself since.

You told me four separate times that you wanted this to end, and four separate times I talked you out of it. I used to think that was love. It was not. It was me refusing to let your decision be yours, over and over, until you had to end it in the hardest possible way, because I had made all the easier ways impossible.

I want to tell you when I knew, because I do not think I ever said it right. I said "I love you" at 5801, on the dance floor, moving badly the way I always do. But that was late. I already loved you before that. I loved you the night you fell asleep against me, spooning, breathing slow, completely at peace in my bed, and I lay there awake realizing I did not want a single night without it. I was already yours in the back of a cab at the San Francisco airport, on my way to Germany, crying because I knew the summer I had spent with you was ending and nothing after it would be as good. I did not have the word for it yet. I have it now. It was you, months before I admitted it.

You called me Chechin. Meri chhili hui andi. Daddy. Sometimes just Sachin, my own name in your voice, which somehow meant more than any of the others. I felt loved in ways I still cannot put into a sentence. I have tried, in a dozen drafts of this, and the words are always too small for it.

You know what I actually miss? Not the big things. The small ones. The way you took care of me after the bike accident in Pittsburgh, when I was useless and you just handled it, handled me. You biking over to my place for no reason. Calling me into the blanket to cuddle. Asking me to put you to sleep. The ridiculous pictures you made of me that I pretended not to love and loved completely. The grammar corrections, my grammar grandma, how much you enjoyed getting under my skin with them, and how much I secretly enjoyed it too. The food you cooked for me, the experiments that had no business tasting as good as they did. Dahi Tikhari on a weeknight for no reason. I fell for you over the bike, over the cooking, over the small quiet evenings, again and again and again. Almost four years of ordinary nights I did not understand were the entire point until they stopped.

You made me feel at home, and I did not make you feel safe. Both of those are true, and only one of them was in my hands.

You changed me. I mean that as fact, not flattery. The person I was before you needed a hundred things to feel like enough, and somewhere across these years you taught me the truth I kept refusing to learn: I only need love. Nothing else matters. I do not care about anything in this world the way I care about growing old with you, walking a beach with you like that Shania Twain video we both know, the "Forever and For Always" one, the life where the ambition finally quiets down and it is just us and time. You even gave me a thing for Asian food, of all things, and every time I order it now I think of you. All of it, all of me now, has your fingerprints on it.

I am not going to list what I am doing to fix myself here. It is all on the other pages, with dates, and you can check any of it. What I will say is that I am doing it whether or not this letter changes anything, because the person I was this year is not someone I want to be for anyone, including myself.

So here it is, plainly. I would like another chance. I want to build the life I described a few pages ago, and I want to build it with you. In you and with you, I found my home.

And I want to be clear about what that means. It is a request, not a claim on you. You do not owe me a reply, or a timeline, or a reason. If the answer is no, then no is the answer, and it will not be argued with. You have said no before and had it not stick, and I know that may be the hardest part of all this to believe. It is the part I most want to get right.

Take all the time you need. Take more than you need.

Sachin
Your Teddy Bear

If you read nothing else here, read this: you were good to me for almost four years, and none of what went wrong was because you did not try hard enough.