Final Love Letter to Austen

 

Austen Cosmos,

For all the things I have said about you, all the anger, all the fighting, all the things that happened between us, there is one truth I don't think I have ever managed to say properly.

I loved you.

I really, genuinely, deeply loved you.

And I think somewhere underneath so much of my anger was heartbreak. I wasn't just angry with you. I was grieving someone I had opened my whole heart to.

There was so much about you that I loved.

I loved the way you spoke. I loved listening to your opinions, even when I completely disagreed with you. I loved your laugh. I loved that you read books. I loved your stories and your ridiculous jokes. I even loved hearing you shouting down the phone in Igbo to your friends.

I loved your mind. I loved your presence. I loved your stubbornness, even though your stubbornness meeting mine probably helped create one of the most spectacular clashes imaginable.

There was a magic about you that I loved.

I never imagined that two people who once meant so much to each other could end up where we did. Things became cruel and painful in ways I never expected. We hurt each other. We stopped hearing each other. Other people, anger, pride and everything else became mixed into something that once felt completely different.

And I was devastated.

I think that is something I can finally admit without needing it to mean anything else.

I was devastated because I loved you.

I had opened my heart and given you a part of myself that I don't give easily. When everything collapsed, I didn't know what to do with that love anymore. It turned into grief, anger and eventually a battle that seemed to become bigger than both of us.

But I don't want the ugliest parts of our story to rewrite everything that came before them.

There were beautiful parts too.

There was laughter. There were conversations. There were stories. There were moments when simply hearing your voice made me happy. There were things about you that I genuinely admired. There was a version of us before everything became so complicated, and she loved you without hesitation.

Maybe you were one of my soulmates. Maybe some people come into our lives not because they are supposed to stay forever, but because they are supposed to leave something permanent behind.

And you did.

Life is strange. We take ourselves, our arguments, our pride and sometimes even our pain so seriously. Yet eventually all of this passes.

So whether I ever see you again in this life or not, I want there to be one uncomplicated truth left standing after everything else:

I loved you.

Not perfectly. Not without anger. Not without mistakes. And certainly not without pain.

But deeply.

I loved your magic. I loved the person I saw in you. And despite everything that happened afterwards, I will never need to lie to myself about that.

What happened between us taught me things I probably needed to learn about love, boundaries, forgiveness and myself. Some lessons were far more painful than they needed to be, but they are mine now.

And I think I am finally reaching the point where I can put the fighting down without pretending the love wasn't real.

It was real for me.

You were loved, Austen

Very, very deeply.