Yes, I’m better now. One call, one confirmation, no further questions, and I’m much, much better. She didn’t call because she didn’t want to give me the wrong impression, but in not calling all sorts of impressions raced through my mind instead. But it’s all good now, and the cards are telling the story as it unfolds: now comes Understanding as the fighting works itself out. We have many beautiful years ahead in whatever form they may take, platonic or otherwise – it doesn’t really matter.

She said she loves me, but for the moment only as a friend. And that’s fine, it may well stay that way. But my guard is down now, I have nothing to hide and nothing to prove, and as a result there is every chance she will now fall in love with me. And I’m not being arrogant when I say I couldn’t blame her, because this episode has helped me discover my own beauty and now I don’t fear it nearly as much as I did. I am learning to love it, and as I do, those around me surely will too. Life is beautiful!

The most beautiful woman in the world has not responded to my advances. Maybe she gets them all the time, maybe I have scared her with them, maybe I floored her with them, maybe she hasn’t even read them. But she hasn’t responded.

I would like to say I’m upset. I was. About half an hour ago. But I’m better now. All this does is confirm the cards: I have a mission, a job to do, and it is my job, my role, and something I need to follow through on regardless of an other. I have given too much credence to a feeling, been carried away by it, and in the process left myself behind somewhere. A long way behind, waiting in the wings like I have in the past, instead of flying forward, soaring as an eagle. The cards were right.

These intermittent lapses are too destructive to ignore: pinning my hopes on an ideal is pinning them on a ghost. Reality is right here, right now, and she is elsewhere. That is all I know, and all that matters. Everything else is mere interpretation, perception.

It is time now to seek the beauty in me that I sought in her. Everything I credited her with is right here, right now, but I just haven’t given myself the opportunity to know it. I am beautiful, I am great, I am perfection, and I need to know this before I start to fly. It will lift the weight of gravity from my shoulders and instil me with a lightness that can only soar.

And I will have all the love I could ever want because it will grow as I do. I have too much light to spread on the world to be standing in another’s shadows. This is a special moment, for it represents my newest love: myself. I am beautiful, and I will know it. And I promise to remain loyal forever more.

My ego has been holding on to an empty ideal, has interpreted something to suit its need for attachment, and its power has been so strong it has swept me asunder. In finding it so easy to ‘love, respect and admire’ another person, I have allowed my ego’s past dreams of emotional fulfilment to come flooding back and interpret this as being ‘in love’: a state that I know cannot last, and therefore one that is not even real. But I have played along with the ego’s story, being almost crushed in the process, because I want to believe in fairy tales. I have awoken now from a beautiful dream, only to find I was living a nightmare.

Do I love her? Of course I do. As I say, loving her was something I found almost too easy to do. And for that, I doubt my position has changed: I would love to spend more time with her and would be willing to put some effort into a relationship. But what my ego was doing was creating a massive weight of expectation that would have been impossible to fill – it had no choice but to end in disappointment. Rejection would have been instantly disappointing, though far kinder, and a relationship could have been devastating.

But I am awake now. I have seen my ego’s cruel trick and I wish to distance myself from it. Romantic ideals are ideals all the same, and reality – the here and now – can never hope to rest on ideals. What is real exists, it is not a dream.

So next time I readily love, respect and admire another, please God let me recognise it for what it is: an opportunity to grow and a clear message that I’m heading in the right direction. I recognised all this on this occasion, but I painted all that with a thick gloss that would have lost its shine immediately reality came along and poured acid on it.

But I am still in love, of this there is no denying. I am in love with my newly unfolding perspective on the world. I am in love with the possibilities it offers and the love it shares. I am in love with all the things I couldn’t see before the dark cloud of pessimism began to lift. But I needed a trigger to recognise this, and it came in the shape of a woman. For this I will hopefully be forever grateful. And hopefully my misinterpretation of this will be something for which I am ever wary. For there is nothing more destructive than placing yourself at the mercy of another, nothing more damaging than the gales of emotion and self-absorption this breeds unchecked.

I am not ‘deeply in love’ with her, but I love her deeply. Just as I should with every other human being, just as I ought with the rest of the world. And I do thank her for helping me see that. I do.

I really thought that writing her a letter would give me some closure. That I would now somehow be freed from thoughts of her. I believed that almost a week apart would dim my memory. I thought that by now I would have moved on. No such luck. My mind is preoccupied with her and I can’t seem to escape this sad fact. This is not healthy. It is holding on to an illusion. It is living on a perception of a sensation that was quite probably brought on by a perception. It is, for all intents and purposes, without foundation. But still it eats away at me, chewing me up from the inside, leaving my soul bare and unprotected.

And if it is like this now, what will happen if we actually get together? This scares me. I would need to give her freedom, but there’s every danger that I could cling to her, not let her out of my sight, like a little puppy dog. Neither of us would want this, but at the moment it feels like a very real possibility. She is so beautiful to me that I just want to become part of her. Slip inside and never come out.

Again, this is scary. What happened to me? Where did my self-belief go? It is still there, but it seems I would be willing to give it all away for the belief in another. Not healthy, not healthy at all.

But my heart’s aflutter and this is the meaning I ascribe to it. The whole world is beautiful to me at moments like this, yet that beauty is coupled with longing. How could one long for anything when surrounded by beauty? It is beyond me, but happening to me all the same.

And then there is the potential one-sidedness of such an affair. Even if she was interested in me – which I’m sure she has been to an extent – it is doubtful her feeling would reflect mine, so we would start off on an uneven footing and the relationship could well remain lopsided evermore.

But this is all speculation. She is away. She knows nothing of the letter. And it is doubtful she is wasting any time thinking of me. So what am I doing? I am better than this. I have better things to do than daydream about how things could be. Like a teenager’s first love, this is way out of perspective. We are good friends, let’s leave it at that.

I wish I could. I really wish I could. And I will try, I promise. I will try to get her out of my mind. I will try to move on. I will try to write about other things. I will try to return to normal. Right here, right now is all there is, and she is not here and I am. That’s that. There’s nothing more to it. It’s quite simple and totally straightforward. And if I keep telling myself this, I may even begin to believe it.

The feelings I experience when she is on my mind, in my heart, are the feelings I want to experience for all humanity. And in a sense they are, for when I feel these things I feel them for all humanity. It is beautiful and there is no way I could think ill of the world at a time like this.

And yet I have come to accept that this will never amount to any more than a beautiful friendship, and then I ask myself what more could I want. I have come to the conclusion that almost every man who crosses her path must feel the same way about her, so that helps me put things in perspective. I have fallen in love, yes, but this doesn’t have to mean any more than that. I don’t expect the same from her – how could I? She naturally attracts people, that is what she does, it is her talent. I am but one of the many people who have come into her life and been enriched in the process. I am a very lucky man. And she has welcomed me warmly, taken me on board, and that makes me luckier still.

There was a time, not too long ago, when this would have been debilitating for me. But now it is liberating. Now I am flying, I am in a special space and I can only hope that I can revisit it when she’s gone. If all I have to do is think of her then it would be simple, but memories fade and life moves on, and who know, maybe there will be little left but these words in only a few months time.

But maybe, if I’m lucky (and that is, after all, how I feel right now), maybe something is being opened in me now and maybe that something will stay with me long after our paths part.

I certainly hope so.

It’s not real flash, but I have a feeling I may be in love. A year ago this is exactly what I would’ve wanted, but I have other priorities now and this isn’t at all what I imagined I ought to be doing. But, all the same, there is a lass that I know and the more I see her the harder it is not to think about her; the more I get these strange, tickly feelings in my chest; and the stronger the pains in my stomach. This latter one sounds conflicting but feels related.

I tell myself time and time again that this is not what I want right now. I ask myself, is this just lust? have I felt this before? am I just overly romantic? do I perceive a hole in my life that I somehow expect a partner to fill? For these are the sort of things that would’ve prompted such feelings in the past. But I don’t know, I think I have grounds to believe that many of these things have been dealt with, that maybe my emotions are more pure this time. But there is still that very real possibility that these sentiments stem more from some perceived ‘lack’ than from true love, whatever that may be. But I have been working hard on removing any perceived lack from my life, on understanding that everything I need comes from within, and that is why it all feels so strange.

And for this reason, I don’t believe that if this didn’t come through that it would shake me up too badly. I feel that I should be able to move on quite happily. But on the same tack, I also feel as though it is something I need to pursue, because it is there and it is exciting and it has got me until I do something about it.