Keira

I've been thinking about you for the past couple of days. More than I've thought about you in the past year put together. You're home now, and the drastically decreased distance between us is making me uneasy. And after coming across the last thing I wrote about you before you left, I wanted to address some things; so here I am, not repressing any knowledge of your existence anymore.   Dealing with you was a rollercoaster, to say the least. There's no point in talking about the intricacies of when and how you hurt me, because it's all in the past and I became too exhausted a while ago to hold onto so much anger. There's also no point in pretending I never cared as much as I did, because to put it simply, you were all I wanted for three years. But I think there is a point in expressing something that I never thought I would be able to give you: forgiveness. You might not care. You might be mad, or be insulted that I think you did something wrong enough that I need to forgive you in the first place. I will probably never let this see the light of day, so maybe it doesn't matter, but there it is. I forgive you. And I didn't know I had forgiven you until about three seconds ago, when those words formed in front of me and I stared in awe at them and everything sort of clicked into place. This is me, giving myself the closure I never got from you because we were both too stubborn to seek it out.   I don't think you're a bad person. I don't think I ever thought that. I think you made some bad decisions that were partly fuelled by young selfishness and partly fuelled by resentment that your own heart was getting played with so badly. The fact is, by the end you taught me a lot about how I deserve to be treated by someone and the boundaries I need to draw for my own wellbeing, but right from the start you also taught me what a male friend that wasn't afraid of his emotions looked like, and make no mistake; despite everything that happened, I still hold fond memories of our early days being friends, and if I could go back I really wouldn't change them for anything.   I don't think we can be friends now. Despite everything I've just said, I'm at a stage of my life now where I want to leave as much of the bad stuff behind me as possible, and while I don't know who you are now because you've gone through a lot in the past year, I don't think I could separate the two no matter how much you've grown. But I do really hope you've grown: I hope you see that nothing she did to you was your fault, I hope you see that you have your whole life in front of you to fill with amazing things, and I think you do see now that the world is so much bigger than that school and those towns and those people and everything we've ever known.   When I sat down to write this, I thought this was going to be a "fuck you, look how happy I am" kind of letter. For the record, I am the happiest I've ever been. University has helped me feel like I don't need to hide from anything anymore. I'm in love with a wonderful man, who treats me with more kindness than I ever thought I'd deserve. I have great friends that care about me and I've finally moved out; single-handedly fulfilling my biggest wish since I was 14. Overall, I'm at peace with myself for the first time in a long time.   But, here I am. Acknowledging that you exist for the first time in a year. Processing that you're back in town. And now I'm making my peace with you, too. I am too young to hold onto as much hate as I do. I don't have the energy to drag the rest of the world down anymore. There was a point in time when all I wanted was for you to feel the same pain you caused me. I think I was too focused on myself to realise that you probably were. None of that matters anymore. The last part of me forgetting that version of myself is to put all of these thoughts about you to rest. I forgive you. Now, continue to grow.