My love,

I don’t really know where to start, or even if I should start this letter to you – and even if I do, I don’t know if I’ll ever send it. Maybe this is just a phase that I need to work through, and maybe by sending it I’ll make things worse when they could have just sorted themselves out on their own. I just need to get some things out, I guess, and it’s easier to write it down than it is to talk about it. It never seems to come out right if I talk about it, and most of the time I’m pretty certain that when I do talk about stuff, you don’t want to hear it. Don’t get me wrong, I know that it’s not that you don’t care it’s just that whenever I do talk about it I see that it hurts you. I watch you shut down and close down both emotionally and communicatively, and that hurts me just as much as feeling the way I do, just in a different way.

I want you to know before I go any further that I love you more than I ever imagined it was possible to love someone. You are to me everything that I can’t possibly put into words – you are my heart, you are my soul, you are my reason for living and breathing, you are my soul mate and my best friend. Nothing can change that, and nothing can change how completely I love you, but right now I have to admit I feel a bit lost.

I really don’t know what’s wrong with me at the moment, but this – the way I am right now – isn’t me. I can’t stop crying. All of a sudden my heart aches, my stomach turns into knots, and I’m sobbing my heart out and I can’t stop. It’s crazy I know, but I stood in the shower for twenty minutes today, and couldn’t stop myself from crying uncontrollably. The worst part is that I don’t understand why, or how to make it stop. No-one’s died, but for some reason I feel like I’ve lost something so precious to me that it makes my heart ache every day, and before I know it the floodgates have opened and I’m sitting here sobbing into my laptop while writing a letter that I know I’ll probably never send, and you’ll probably never receive.

Maybe I’m losing it, maybe somewhere along the line something cracked and I’m having some kind of weird, screwed up emotional breakdown.

I also don’t know what the answer is, nor am I expecting you to know the answer either - I just know that right now I feel more alone than I think I have ever felt in my life. At least before I met you I had no idea of what it felt like to truly feel as though you belong completely somewhere – and I guess when you have never had something before, it’s impossible to know what it feels like to when that something might be lost. And that’s what scares me the most – that feeling like I belong completely with you will be lost, broken, or abandoned by the wayside somewhere, and I know in my heart that once it’s gone it can never come back.

It keeps me awake at night - when I wake up at four in the morning, I am overwhelmed by it. It creeps up on me when I least expect it while I’m working, and takes over me until once again I’m just crying and crying. It catches me unawares during the day when I’m driving and I hear a song that pulls at something in my heart and I’m crushed all over again by a feeling I don’t understand.

I’m sure if you ever read this, you’ll be thinking by now that I have gone quite mad and that these are the ramblings of an insane woman, and that actually you’ve married another psychopath with a whole different set of issues to the last. You’ve got so much your plate already dealing with the challenges you have every day at work, dealing with your kids, and dealing with your ex-wife and everything that goes with that - and knowing how much else you have to deal with on a daily basis makes me feel like even trying to talk about how I might be feeling is unendingly selfish of me.

But then I think, I’m your wife of four years - I’m the person you promised you would love completely, and who loves you completely and unconditionally in return, and it would break my heart if you felt this way and you didn’t tell me. So a part of me wants to tell you that I miss you and that I feel so alone and sad right now. A huge part of me wants to just open up, and have you open your arms in return and tell me that you understand, that you feel the same, and that you love me and that we’re going to be ok. But I know that isn’t how the conversation would go, and that no matter how hard I tried, it would end up with that feeling that something has just closed down instead, and then the distance between us will just grow even further into an aching chasm that I can’t close.

And that, my love, breaks my heart.

So I don’t say anything and instead I feel alone, and invalidated, and that my needs and my feelings can’t count. Or if they do count, then they’re competing with a million and one other things that also count, but for some reason the other things always seem to win. Inside I’m crying out for you to show any sign that you understand, but when you don’t I wonder if maybe you just don’t feel the same and it pulls me apart inside trying to work it out and trying to understand your view of it all – I wonder whether for you nothing has changed from what it was, or that if it has changed then you don’t mind that it has, or that perhaps you haven’t even noticed at all.

But that too, my love, breaks my heart – because to me it matters as much as living and breathing itself. To think that it doesn’t matter as much or that you haven’t noticed makes me question everything I ever thought I understood about what we meant, and questioning that makes me feel like such a heartbroken fool for maybe having misunderstood it all in the first place.

When I look at it all now, perhaps the cold hard truth of it is that I was simply too naïve to think that the life we shared abroad – and the love and closeness that came with it – was “real life” and that it could blissfully survive once we came back to the UK. I had misjudged the extent to which the monotony, the routine, the stress, the shit that goes with being in the UK takes over your life and bleeds it dry of the sense of completeness, of magic, of happiness that had become such an intrinsic part of my life with you, and such an intrinsic part of my being.

The thing is, I honestly felt like I could deal with it all – I was going back in to life here with my eyes fully open and my heart ready to deal with the challenges that would no doubt come when we came back, including embracing your kids becoming a part of our lives. I felt like I knew I could deal with the routine and the shit that would impinge on day-to-day life because you and I had each other, and we had a bond and connection that was stronger than everything else combined. We made promises to each other that we wouldn’t go back to letting the same old shit rule our lives and ruin the closeness and strength that we had created together in our marriage while we were away. Our love was you and me, so closely connected that nothing in the world could come between us – back-to-back forever, bloodied but still fighting, together against the world.

And yet I’m standing here right now staring at the world closing in around me, and I feel like I’m standing here pretty much on my own.

It’s a pretty lonely place, if I’m honest, and I’m not really sure how I ended up here. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything to deserve being here – maybe if I had then I wouldn’t feel so bad about being here, and at least then I might have understood why I was here - but I put my heart and soul into coming back to the UK and making it work. I put my heart and soul into you and supporting you in your new job with all of the trials and tribulations and crises that went with that for the first few months despite enduring my own, into supporting you and your kids and trying to make sure you got to see them and that they would be happy here when they came to visit, into trying to build some kind of relationship with them because they are such an integral part of you and I know how important they are to you which in turn makes them important to me, into trying to support you with all of the other shit that was going on so it wouldn’t overwhelm you and we could share the burden of it all together.

And despite all of that - despite feeling like I have given every ounce of my being – I feel like I’m standing here on my own, and as though I have lost the one thing that was my very essence for being.

And again, my love, that tears my heart apart.

And I don’t understand.

And I cry, a lot, because of what I feel like I have lost.

I feel like I have lost the person who looks at me like I’m the only woman on earth. I feel like I have lost the person who is always firmly at my side, with his arm around my shoulder and who is always quick with a laugh and a kiss filled with love that doesn’t have to be spoken. I feel like I have lost the person who laughs with me every single day for no other reason other than the fact we can laugh together because we love together. I feel like I have lost the person who is endlessly proud to be with me - and that together we found something so special that everyone else in the world envies what we have found together.

Perhaps I’m asking too much, maybe it’s even impossible to give, but I desperately want to have the feeling of “us” back. I want to feel considered. I want to feel like I matter. And I don’t want to feel alone, with some great aching chasm between us that I don’t know how to cross, and which reduces me to tears every single day that I realise it’s there.

I guess if I admit it to myself, I’ve known it’s there for a while. I’ve tried my best to tell you in my own way that I’m worried that it’s there, and when that didn’t work I tried my best to ignore it or hope it will go away with time, but it’s still here. I can feel it every day, and the worst part is that it feels like its growing.

I can feel it when you come home from work and spend excited time with the puppy before giving me a quick kiss that doesn’t even come with a smile anymore and checking into your Blackberry and suddenly it seems like we’re only half-participating in the part of the world we share, and that’s when I realise I feel like there’s something that’s gone missing. I can feel it when we sit next to each other on the sofa and barely say a word that’s not either about work or some email or another, or the kids, or your ex-wife and that’s when I notice that we don’t laugh as much together anymore, or really “talk” like we used to, or hold each other like we used to, and then I notice the missing piece of the puzzle even more. I can feel it when suddenly I’m feeling marginalised when it comes to decisions concerning when we see your kids, because it’s easier for you not to upset your ex-wife than it is for you to take into account the needs of our marriage, even though the reality is that you divorced your responsibility to her and her needs, and married me.

I can also feel it when I realise that the long discussions and mutual agreement we had about making sure we had the kids Friday through to Sunday every other visit are now quite apparently null and void because she dictates that it is so, and I suddenly realised I was never even consulted or given even a tiny voice in the decision that was made to go along with it. On the single occasion that I asked for you to push back so we can have just one evening before I had to go travelling for a week with work, it was made quite clear that it was not something you want to deal with and I felt as though I was putting you under extra pressure that you didn’t need. It made me feel like it was my fault for putting you in a difficult situation with a woman you’re no longer married to, and whose reaction was more important for you to avoid than the single quiet request of your wife who just desperately wanted to have a tiny piece of you reserved for her. I have no issue with your kids visiting, this isn’t about them and I don’t have any issue with your kids being a fundamental part of our lives here, but I have issue with the fact that there’s no part of our lives that hasn’t been fundamentally pulled apart and replaced with something I don’t recognise.

It’s hard enough to feel as though I no longer have “us” as I had come to know and understand “us” to mean, but it feels even harder to feel as though I also have lost any voice in our lives together, or any right to talk about how that makes me feel. I couldn’t even bring myself to ask you again to push back that one evening over the weekend, because it I feel as though me asking you to do that puts you in a difficult position, and I don’t want to feel that’s my fault because I have made what has come to feel like unreasonable demands of you.

The truth is that’s why I was so deeply, deeply upset about us not being able to go abroad together at the end of my week away and back to where we had grown so close, even if it was just for a couple of days. I so desperately wanted to try to reclaim just a tiny piece of what we had built there together and what was “ours”. Even just a couple of days back in a world where I remembered us being as we were for the last few years, whether that’s the current reality or not, was enough to keep me hanging desperately on. It was just enough for me to try my hardest to deal with having the kids for two three-day weekends in a row while knowing I wouldn’t be able to connect with you during the week in between, because I knew that there was a silver lining that might just make it feel all worthwhile at the end.

But without that silver lining I’m suddenly left back out here on my own with no hope of being able to bridge the gap between us because I don’t know how to even begin to talk to you about it, and no means of asking you again to try to help me do it because I’m scared you either don’t feel the same, or won’t understand.

I’m not asking for you to take me out to romantic dinners. I’m not asking for flowers or expensive presents. I’m not asking for us to go on foreign holidays and I’m not asking for us to share adventures. I’m just asking to have you back. I’m just asking to have a tiny piece of us back as it used to be. Everything else is just window-dressing, and it’s not important. What is important to me is, quite simply, our love for one another – just “us”, nothing more.

And right now, my love, I miss that more than anything.

So when you ask if I’m ok, the real answer is no, I’m not ok. I’m falling very quietly apart every single day, crying for no reason at all and without any control over it, feeling very lost, confused, and alone in a world where I always thought I would have someone at my side, before trying desperately to pull myself back together again before you get home so I can go through it all over again the next day without you ever having to realise and deal with the fact it’s happening.

And that, my love, breaks my heart more brutally, painfully and terribly than I could ever have imagined possible.

So this is me, just trying to say that I miss you and that I feel very alone and sad right now, and that I desperately hope that one day you understand.

Yours most truly forever, always.