************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************ Remember when you couldn’t speak last time? Do you know why that was? It’s because of the emotion you were feeling at the time. Intense emotion changes how we think. It makes people temporarily forget second languages. It makes us unable to do things that otherwise come naturally. It’s the same reason I couldn’t find the true meaning in the posts the other morning when most other times it comes so easily. Intense emotion clouded my ability to see the whole picture and as a result I reached a painfully wrong conclusion. That should give you an idea of the magnitude of what I felt was at stake. That misunderstanding happened for me, and I think it’s happening for you right now. For me, the emotions were love and fear. For you, love, hurt, and anger. Same clouded vision though.

Have I seemed at all uninvested in this? I’ve been doing everything in my power to try to get to you. Traveling a thousand miles multiple times just for you, searching high and low for how to reach you on that first trip, offering to fly to where you live, making myself as available as possible over and over in the coffee shop, the Airbnb, the hotel rooms on the first trip and the second—I did all those things happily and without any second thoughts because I thought they would bring us together. There is zero way I would have left if I thought you were still where I was. Zero.

Neither of us has a cold heart. You’ve seen the truth in what I’ve said about us, about love. I know your huge capacity for caring, and you’ve seen mine in what I’ve written to you and publicly. You’ve seen how I am around others, around my niece. How I treat people online and in reality. You know these things about me and that I have a warm heart. I’ve seen all the same about you.

You’ve come to know me over these past months. You’re weighing all the good from all that time against my action and the lie my fear was telling me from when I was scared I’d lost you, and my fear seems to be outweighing the rest for you. Please reread my explanations from yesterday and today of what happened with me that night and morning with as much empathy as you can, then read some of the things I’ve sent you or posted that you’ve found touching. I hope that tips the scales in the other direction, but in the end, of course, you get to judge what you want. I’m asking you to not be completely unwilling to forgive me for one of my most deep-seated emotional struggles.

We could have everything together. We could be each other’s everything. Don’t throw that away.