Our love story was always a love story. We were never anything else. None of this “will they? Won’t they?” We would. We always would. Because when you put your arm around my shoulders on that very first day, kissed my forehead and said “that’s us, now” – that was it. We were an us. We were a team. I fell in love with you so fast and so hard that I can’t remember not loving you. Maybe there was a point when I didn’t find your chipped front tooth adorable, the brown of your eyes as bottomless, but I don’t remember it. I just remember glowing with pride every time you did anything. You could fucking breath and I would be telling the entire world “See him? That’s my person.”
And we were lucky. Not many people can travel that much of the world together before they’re clear of their early twenties. Chasing you down to the sea in Italy, leaping from the balcony in Casablanca, dancing in a shower of sweet orange petals in Nice. I keep all of those treasured memories in little glass jars full of foreign currency in my room – sometimes I get them out and hold them up to the light, so I can relive learning to surf with you in Gibraltar and getting lost in the Swiss alps. You picked gentians and said they were the same colour as my eyes, and I laughed. I was endlessly, endlessly dancing and laughing with you.
And we were lucky, because our love story was a love story right up until the moment when we kissed each other goodbye. It didn’t end because we stopped loving each other - It ended because we had grown up, and we hadn’t grown together. We weren’t two small-time athletes anymore. We couldn’t be held together with boarding passes and physio tape. We were big people, with big dreams and big hearts and a huge, huge love. I kissed you goodbye, and you said that you would never find another person who would fill my shoes. I hope you know that I have never even tried. There are no eyes as kind, no minds as open. And I hope that, when the city sings you to sleep, sometimes you think about me.
