The woman I loved died two days ago. 

Her name was Jane Marceline. 

Before she died, I promised her that I would show her something that I wrote. I told her that I was writing every day and every night before seeing her; I was writing something that I was finally proud enough to show her, even though I knew that she didn’t care in the slightest how good it was. She would have been just as happy to read it even if it was full of unfinished plot threads, a million grammatical errors (even if she hated seeing them in other people’s writing), underused and flat characters, a failure of a climax, an uneasy resolution, and the thousands of other things that plagued first drafts of novels.

I would have perfectly predicted her reaction to this book had she read it. She would prop herself up on the bed’s headboard with a pillow on her back and proceed to read every word of it aloud like she was an actor at a table read for a script. She’d have voices, mannerisms, and everything. She would jump out of bed and act out every scene, break out into a musical number somehow, and ask me to read the lines (or be the narrator, honestly) that she wanted me to read. Then, as she finished the story, she would’ve turned to me, her green eyes shimmering like emeralds, and said: “You really wrote an entire story about me? Just admit that you’re madly in love with me already.”

And she’d be right. I am— was— madly in love with her. 

She died before she could read a word of anything I wrote.

There’s a part of me that’s relieved she never read anything of mine. Purely because her reaction would have given me one more thing to miss about her. One more memory to add to the hundreds we’d made, and a thousand more wishes that some miracle would save her even though I know that this world does not work that way. This world is cruel. It is cold and ruthless. It will take everything from you and give nothing in return but memories. And even those will eventually be lost to time. 

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

There is an even smaller part of me that believes I never should have written this book in the first place, that the only reason I even finished it was because of my grief, that somehow, someway, writing and finishing this book would bring me the peace that I wanted more than anything else; that by the end of it all, I would have gained some higher understanding of why she was taken away from me, of why I fell in love with the same person who brought me so much pain. 

I was wrong. I was so very wrong. I am still just as confused and lost as I was when I first started writing this. The pain hurts less, however. But it hurts nonetheless. 

I wrote this book because I knew that it would be the only way for me to remember anything about her; I wrote this book because I did not want to forget her; I wrote this book because I know I will never love someone as deeply as I loved her. I wrote this book because I hoped that it would somehow end up in her hands and that she would be able to understand everything there was to understand about me. 

Saying these things is selfish of me, I know it is, and being selfish is bad. Spare me the lectures on the importance of letting go, on how pointless it is to pursue understanding in the face of death; these are things that I already know— I am not a fool. But… But allow me this one moment of selfishness. 

Let me visit the ocean of memories of a relationship that was measured in all the moments we could have shared but didn’t, in all of the hours that were stolen from us, in all of the words I wish I said yet didn’t say. A relationship that only fills me with regret for all the love I should have given her sooner, for all the pain that I caused her. Let me sink in these selfish thoughts until nothing but those memories remain. Let me drown in this sea of selfishness until I learn to swim once again. And once I learn to swim, I will swim to the shore and gaze upon that very sea with nothing but fondness and adoration and love.

Just as she would like.