New Years Eve

||| NEW YEARS EVE 2014 ||| a letter ||| |||TW: loss and cancer
||| I wish I could have said yes. I wish I could have said yes to you when you asked me to marry you.
I wish I could have said yes when you said, “We could do it. We could drive to the countryside tomorrow and just do it. We could just get married now.” I wish I could have said yes. I wish New Years Eve hadn’t been when it was. I wish it hadn’t been our only New Years Eve together. I wish we hadn’t spent it the tiny overnight room of the hospital where the doctors usually slept, in order for me to stay the night with you. I wish our celebration hadn’t been me crying into a pillow, telling you that I was no good for you and that once I left England to go back to New York, we weren’t going to be together. I wish the linear experience of that night didn’t destroy me every day. I wish I could have said yes. I’m so sorry. I wish I was one of the people you hear about in great love stories, that said yes to you on your deathbed and then they make a movie about how love perseveres through sickness and in health, till death do us part.
But, I didn’t know you were going to die. I knew, because I was told, to think of your life in terms of years instead of decades. I only found out after you died that the correct time reference would have been months instead of years. And I don’t know what a difference that would have made.
But I didn’t know to say yes to you that night and I didn’t know you were going to die.
My heart is still screaming 5 years later. And I wish I could have said yes. And I always wish kisses at midnight hadn’t coated your body in pain because that’s what cancer does, I guess. And I wish you had been conscious enough and pain free enough to remember our only New Years Eve Kiss.

I wish I hadn’t said that we couldn’t be together. I wish we could have. I wish I didn’t still hate myself for that. I wish you had felt loved.
I wish that the memory of walking next to you in your polka dot bathrobe in the half lit hospital hallway... (with a cane maybe?), was a different memory.
I wish the memory wasn’t of trying to figure out how to walk with you and hold you without hurting you because the pressure on your body was too excruciating. I wish I could have held you, really held you. And I wish when I was crying into the pillow, we could have held each other. I wish that when you turned to me and said “We could just do it. We could go to the into countryside tomorrow and just get married.” I wish I could have said yes. I wish every day that I could have said yes. I hate myself every day for not being the person that said yes.
I wish I could have said yes, instead of saying “I love you. I love you but I can’t marry you.”
Because, whatever I feel for you is something more than love and what I wanted was more than marriage.
And I wanted to marry you because I wanted a life together.
Not a death.
I wanted and so believed in the possibility of your health and getting better and working on our selves. And part of me was so scared that I would leave and you would get better and that you meet someone else and marry them and have a beautiful life together.
And I was afraid of seeing that.
I wish that after saying that to you, that I could have followed you down the hallway back to your room instead of watching you walk into the darkness, silhouetted by the dimness of the ward. I wish I had been able to walk you back, and laid down next to you.
I wish I could have slept next to you and for the first time in such a long time, I wish we could have slept next to each other and felt safe, sleeping soundly through the night.
I wish I could have said yes. I wish I could have said yes. I wish we could have woken up next to each other the next morning instead of apart. Well, you woke up alone that morning.
I woke up to you knocking on the door to that tiny hospital room to kiss me good morning, just like you had done every morning since always... except for that Christmas morning .

I’ll always wish I could have said yes. And I’ll always know why I didn’t. And that breaks me. Every day it breaks me.
Every second of my life it breaks me.
And I know that labels are just labels and labels shouldn’t matter.
But, I think it would have mattered to you.
And I just wanted for you to feel loved. And I don’t know if you did.
I doubt that all the time.
If you actually KNEW it.
I love you, Philip Willingham. I wish I could have been your wife. I wish I could have married you. But, saying yes on the only New Years we spent together, that New Years in that miserable hospital room... saying yes then would have been saying yes because we believed in your death...and then there would have been no hope for the future.
Which seems silly now because that doesn’t matter.
I wish I could have said yes. I always wish I was kissing you.
There are a million reasons why I said I couldn’t... but those... well, I don’t know if they matter or not. I love you. And that’s what I have to chose matters, or else I’ll go on hating myself for the rest of my life for saying no.

I wanted to say yes to our life together.
And I could have said yes, even if it would have been short.
And I didn’t.
And I’m sorry. |||