Thank you.
Even at this point – when I don’t know if what we have is ending – thank you for having been in my life, thank you for so many things.
Thank you for making me believe in love after the long desert of the last years of my marriage.
Thank you for making me feel like a teenager in love again in my mature years.
Thank you for making me feel loved, appreciated, beautiful, attractive, passionate, loving, young, reckless…
Thank you for making it worth the risk we were taking.
Thank you for being tender, truthful, for being solid as a rock, for making me feel I could trust again.
Thank you for the wild moments, the romantic gestures (of which giving me a ring on a famous bridge in Italy was one of the very best – but then there were so many), for the dark circles around my eyes after a sleepless night, for the perfectly synchronised dances, the discovery of new places, the long talks, the “bear” hugs, the cosy dinners holding hands over the table in small restaurants, for giving me so many happy moments and memories.
Only because it was so perfect I feel it cannot go on as it is now.
This – now – is nothing, it’s light years from what we’ve had, and when I see us today and I remember us then it feels as if we were two characters in a long ago, happy play, now facing the harsh reality of a fallen curtain.
Don’t ask me what happened.
Slowly, inexorably, we’ve changed, grown apart.
Maybe I know why. And maybe – just maybe – you know it too.
When I was a teenager, I used to listen to a beautiful love song by Kris Kristofferson and even then it made me sad. I’m listening to it again. It is called “For the good times” and I feel the words were made for us today, because they speak of a love story that is over and the singer asks his lover not to be sad, but instead rejoice in the fact that they had been so happy together. And he ends with the most touching words, asking her to “make believe you love me one more time”. All for the sake of the good times spent together.
As the song ends, I press on my iPad. It’s beautiful but so very sad. A song about love lost, but still a love that filled our lives, and was perfect for a time.
That’s why I want to thank you.
For the good times.
