Some things are known before they are known. Like winter; and the logic of its freeze. I felt her retreat before I saw it. Inching back from intimacy and the fear of being seen. That’s why I’m writing to you. Because you understand.

There is no need for detail; save that her wounds once bled from you. She embodies the shape of an all too common hurt. It is the titanium of her defence. I bounce off it now as I once slammed into the wall around you.

You remember that, don’t you? The coldness that permeated our love. The distance created by cruelties I had no say in. But so too by my weakness, my neediness, my not knowing what to do. I look at her now, her eyes hard, and I watch you walking away. Feel our bodies separating. A wrench like the memory of violation. Betrayal. You needed to mend, as she does – and I am no healer, no saviour with easy miracles to dispense.

I too closely resemble the enemy, sound too much like the echo of lies. Only silence is viable. This too you will recall. Numbness over words. Tears cried privately. Alone.

Yet ours was the beautiful sadness. We sculpted our sorrow into lovely defiance. But she has no such luxury, and neither do I now. All the warmth has frozen over, all the doors are bolted. I may not like it, but I know why it is so.

I could rage against injustice, like some petty righteous poser, relishing the theatre of my own indignation, or I could humbly accept that I was not truly there for you, and that I did not know how to be. I hoped it may have been different this time. It was not.

She is not you, and I never felt for her as I did for you – but it was enough. Her bruised energy. My failed compassion. And everyone who ever sought to take a piece of us. The soil of their viciousness.

Perhaps, in the end, she reminds me not of you, but of me, and of what I can never be. For she will tend to the ghosts herself, as you once did, and I will pray that she deals with them as brilliantly as you. I look to your light, as I ever did, and hope that it may fall upon her.