For a few more hours, it is your birthday. I don’t know what you’re doing to celebrate or who you spent it with. I didn’t ask.

I couldn’t.

Knowing that yesterday you saw my hand-writing in purple Sharpie on the package I mailed you, that your hands opened the card and held the letter–imagining you feeling the soft plushness of your gift as you gave it a gentle squeeze–it’s the closest I’ve felt to you since we last saw each other and shared those three sacred words.

I’ve lost something immense.

When I really think about what I’m letting go of, I can’t handle it. But I also never really had you, either. Yes, I may have had your words of devotion, your insatiable kisses, your loyalty, in a sense, and we shared a deep intimacy; however, you were never my boyfriend, I never met your sister, you didn’t tell your friends about how this amazing girl stole your heart. No vacations were spent together. No mundane moments. No walking up and down aisles of a grocery store looking for the right kind of mustard, or asking each other where we left our keys. We never spent an entire Sunday afternoon lying on the couch watching cartoons.

That’s what I lost: The chance to ever experience more than a handful of sultry, passion-soaked hours together. I missed out on the every day. On being yours–and not in the possessive, derogatory sense–in the this girl only had eyes for you and wanted you to be proud to hold her entire heart sense.

Even though I didn’t get to wake up next to your sweet-smelling bed-head and drowsy eyes more than a few times, and even though I have no idea what you’ve been doing these past months or what thoughts gather in your brain moments before they trail off into slumber, I feel so much love for you on this day.

I’d like to think I know you in a way that no one else does, and I don’t need to know how many reps you did at the gym, what you are wearing, or what the last errand you ran was to know this.

I may have missed out on so much of your life, and perhaps, I was cheated of the experience of being immersed in your world as your girlfriend, but one thing I haven’t been kept from is your heart.

Just knowing your day has been wonderful, without any other details, fills me, because when two hearts have the connection ours do, that is never lost.

I can no longer ask you how you are doing and I can’t tell you how I feel delirious on opiates whenever we speak or touch, because if I can’t have your open, vulnerable love and commitment, then I can’t know how you are.

Just knowing you are out there is enough. Maybe it will be different someday.

I feel warm with the satisfaction that my words and my gift touched you last night, and today is yours–just for the very special you.

If I can no longer tell you those things, then I’ll just let you know, from time to time, here.

Transitioning from being in love with you to just loving you is hard. Stubborn and persistent memories douse me in a perfume of belonging and fixation, and my selfish sorrow of your erasure thrashes at my body so violently sometimes that I have to force the thoughts out before I am weather-wrecked and broken.

Yet, it is also just so very seamless to love you in any capacity, because you’ve bared yourself to me. I might feel gratitude on this day because you were torn from warm comfort and exposed to the unyielding swinging axe that is the very nature of this life. It is an unforgiving place at times, but the day you entered my world, my heart was forever changed.