Dear Oliver,

There are some things that I wish I could say, but I can’t for fear of complicating an already fraught relationship, for risk of making your life more difficult than I already have done, for the possibility of jeopardizing a relationship, any sort of relationship which I cannot throw away.

So here we are. Writing to the abyss! Hooray for healthy, Raikes-approved coping mechanisms. Self care? Who knows, I’m crying (again), so most likely not.

So here is one thing. You got a truth, about who I am, but you did not get the whole truth and nothing but. You got an image, a shape that I slotted into around you, something that had been crafted around you. I worked out what you liked, how to read you, how to be the best I could for you. That is not to say I fitted that mould. But I knew what form it would take. It’s how I know that there is someone out there who is right. I know you well enough to know exactly what would be right.

But you didn’t get the whole thing. You got glimpses, when I failed to fit to the mould, but you never saw me in my entirety. You saw the gloss on days when I can’t get out of bed because everything is too heavy, the lacquer of a hangover, or another excuse on top of it. You saw some of the mania, the compulsions — the commitments I have to do, and the impossible standards that I set, and the inevitable beating myself up when I fail to fit those moulds.

It’s why I sometimes struggled to understand why you couldn’t see the artifice of the mould I had constructed for you. That the abnegation of the constant effort I have to make for everyone, all of the time, also involved the rejection of so many alternate moulds, alternate identities that I contort my fractured self to fit.

It’s why you didn’t like my friends, didn’t understand me around them — this was something alien and odd. It’s behind my struggle with the reading. To read is to place oneself into another mould, to understand the different methods and ways of being. It’s why I love the Faulkner. The immediacy, the potency of that psychological realism, the immediate embodiment in thought. That is the shifting of moulds that exists.

And there is the strange thing, which is that we always think the natural self, the natural person is the one absent interference, absent things that make them different. I don’t know if I am this collection of moulds, the predominant mould, the entity writhing to fit within them, between them.

I think it is why I feel your absence so keenly. It gave me something stable — a relief around which to fit, a constancy. It also gave me solace, something static and still. You are so wholly yourself, so constant between places. You do, patronising though it may sound, have an innocence. You are sheltered, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. It’s something that I wanted to protect. You are also, just so good. Uncomplicatedly good. You know how to be, and how to balance, and how to live and how to act. For someone who can oscillate so much between emotions, and feelings, this stillness was invaluable. I’m now spiraling outwards.

I miss you. And I think part of the reason you’ve been spared so much of the spiralling is because I felt emotionally deadened for a lot of last year. I did feel happy — really happy — when we were together. But this sadness that I have at the moment, this sort of angst which I hate because it is horrid, but I need because it is so much of me wasn’t there. I just couldn’t really feel it. I don’t know if you know this but every generation above me for 3 generations someone has tried to commit/ committed suicide. I’m not saying that I’m near that level, but also I do think there is a melancholic streak in the family tree, and I feel that sort of backs up objectively that this isn’t always just the normal feeling sad.

I think part of the issue of the moulds is that you don’t see how much you gave me. The world is scary at the moment. I live in close proximity to someone who hates me, and effectively has access to my room. I wet the bed a couple of days after breaking up. I had nightmares in preseason about an acid attack on St Michaels Street. You made me feel safe, and because you have never known me outside of that context, you have never known how I act when I don’t have that constancy. I can’t express how much Pub Golf meant to me. I’d not been that drunk since everything happened. And you had not only not tried anything with me, you’d tidied up my sick, you’d slept on the floor. I never, ever, did not feel safe with you. And I really miss it. I miss feeling like there is someone in my corner, who has my back. I miss being held. I just really miss you. It’s funny even looking at this paragraph feels inadequate. It does not do it justice how much it meant to me that you always respected me. I can remember the horror on your face when it even crossed your mind that I might not want to have sex. I know on one level, it’s the minimum. But it also means so so much to me.

I still think breaking up was the right thing to do. In part, this is because of the moulds. I wasn’t the same when I was not with you, and part of that extended to being mean about you when you weren’t there. Part of it was flirting with other people — nothing overkill, but also behaviour that is off. Part of that was a struggle when in other moulds to recognise the one that existed.

It’s also down to how I relate to things and people. I have a tendency to cut people out. Look at Josh, Eloise, Sasha. I don’t know why — maybe it’s an attempt to sticky tape over the deeper, more irresolvable things. Maybe it’s a form of punishment? I engage in wilfully risky behaviour — the late night running, drinking to excess — which I think I did less of when I was with you. I’ve been running at 1am, and there have been days where I have barely eaten. I haven’t had the degree of fitness weirdness since last Trinity. I don’t know why that is relevant, I just feel like it ties in to the drinking, overcommitting. I don’t know if it’s a cliche, self-worth thing? That I don’t feel like I’m worth anything intrinsically, so I just try to have value instrumentally by doing things for other people, and can take these risks because I don’t really matter. Wow, this really is therapist couch bollocks. Back to the point Levine!

Not having you is hard. I’ve never had anyone love me in the way that you did, and I really valued how safe you made me feel. I miss you, a lot. I sort of hate the idea that you are going away from me, and you are being independent and there is this disentangling — I feel like it’s pulling me away from the self that I was when I was with you, and I miss both you and being that person. She’s funnier, and nicer, and easier, and happier than how and who I am now. I don’t know if that explains the calls. I wish I had an answer to why I wanted to call but I don’t have a clear one. I don’t know if this is an answer, or it is not, or whatever role this is.

I do still think it was right to break up. I have too much going on, and I can’t put it on you, because you are still quite innocent. I mean this nicely, but properly bad things haven’t really happened to you. I don’t think it’s fair to ask you to be with someone who has this instability, these tendencies, and I don’t want to risk it. I was scared that I was going to cheat. Part of the difficulty of having these moulds, these schizophrenically differing selves is that you can forget yourself, and I do think I would have cheated had we carried on going out. Part of it is I sort of want to experiment with women. But this does not change the fact I still really really miss you. It doesn’t excuse acting out the way I have been, or some of the behaviour. But I hope it does explain it.

I started off writing this thinking I would never show you. Now I don’t know. On the one hand, I feel like it could help — could give an answer behind why I’m acting the way I’m acting, and it’s pretty stream of consciousness stuff. It might help let you know what is going on in my head. On the other hand, I feel like you would fixate on the wrong parts — the flirting or the bisexuality-potential or that the innocence point would be taken the wrong way (it is really hard to articulate what I’m trying to say there but I think it is why you hate things being unfair as well). I also think it massively undercuts the conversation we had — you just want to get on with your life without your ex popping up and being annoying and disrupting your stream of consciousness. Maybe if I showed this to you it would be really selfish — it chucks a new casting on what should be a good years worth of memories, it introduces a hell of a lot more questions than answers. It also might ruin our friendship if you think I am fake (although I don’t feel like the moulds are fake because taken together they just are me but I don’t know how that works). I think I’m not going to, unless you ask me why we broke up again. I think that works — I don’t want there to be no possible worlds where you see this, but I also don’t want to necessitate it so I’m going to leave it up to fate.

If you have reached the end of it — how exciting! This is the writing I was banging on about! Woohoo! Sorry for the bomb of information, the clunky sentence structures and the like. Please, please, please still be my friend. I know I haven’t made it easy. But please.