Dear T

Dear T,
Remember back in 2011, that conversation we had outside your old house? We sat in the car a good hour after we got home just talking. I’d confided in you how sometimes I knew things happened before they did, and how I’d seen myself sitting at the farm, watching the sun go down over the hill, but I somehow knew I was dying.

In the image I had, I was wearing jeans, a black long cardigan and a scarf on my head like something someone with cancer would wear. I had a date circling my mind, September 2012 it had been there since I was a small child with no particular details other than an unwavering ominousness – at the time we spoke the cancer part didn’t make sense to me, we joked about avoiding leaving home that day in case of car accidents or falling tree branches, I felt inside my most likely cause of death would be suicide but I don’t think I told you that.

You were going through your own stuff, I wanted to be there for you, I didn’t want to burden you with my strange internal pain I couldn’t understand when I knew I had such a good life on paper.

You listened to my crazy talk of premonitions and knowing since early childhood I would die young, you heard me, you validated my feelings and fears and you believed me, at least you believed that I believed it and you even vowed to keep me safe when that day would come the following year, you said if need be you would sit by me the whole day and not let me move so nothing could possibly happen.

That was before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and I wonder if later when my mental state crumbled you chalked up my fears to paranoia and early psychosis the same way I did.

I’ve been scared to think about that conversation or call you and ask you if you remember it, I’m worried after all of that I may have been right all along after all just off on the timing by a decade. I still hold that image, crystal clear of me, sitting on that slope, scarf on my head watching the sun go down and it brings tears to the back of my throat because it still feels like my ending, only now it makes sense.

I have spent my whole life waiting to die, so worried about the how’s and why’s and somehow trying to find a way of controlling it that I never got a chance to live. I chose to end my life in May 2015. I said goodbye to you, in my head that night I held you close and apologised for giving up. I had tried to make you a video, write you a letter but I just kept dissolving into tears when I thought of our vow to live together one day as two little old ladies, remember how we used to say that once our significant others had inevitably passed away from their lifestyle vices we were going to buy a little federation house together in a small town and live out our days gardening?
I pictured us, on our verandah watching the sunset with margarita in hand, and I held the warm glow of that sun in my heart as I drifted away and let you go, let everyone go.

We reconnected recently, I had been essentially gone from this body so long and it had been many years since we had spoken. I almost cried to see your beautiful daughter all grown up, she’s an amazing young lady, you must be very proud.

I haven’t told you about DID yet or why I was gone so long, I’m still trying to figure it out myself, let alone how to tell you. Now I know so much more about myself, my selves, I understand things better, I can see why I felt so much pain that I didn’t understand, why I lost so much time, had such a bad memory and why I’d spent most of my life wanting to die.

I know we drifted apart after I tried to end my life, I know that you had been there for us -but I wasn’t there. Thank you so much and I’m sorry I did what I did. I’m glad I have a new chance to see you again, even if it’s only to properly say goodbye.

Love always,
Katie