Romantic debauchery

25 September 2024

Dear Old Sport,

With vague intent and a spark in my heart, I reminisce about the days when I first met you. What was it that dazzled me about you? Your intellect, your intelligence, perhaps it was that Irish charm or those huge green eyes of yours? Our first date – you took me to Dún Laoghaire. We walked along the pier under the constant attacks of seagulls (God, how I despise those winged beasts). You slowly let me fall in love with you. You awakened love in me and set my heart on fire, but you never intended to return those feelings.

Years went by, and my heart belonged only to you. Then you finally told me – fragments of the truth, just the bare minimum, so you wouldn’t risk too much. There’s nothing worse than destroying another person’s life out of fear of being alone. Coward!

You lived in a world of illusions and dragged me into it. You let me yearn, love, and dream of us two while knowing it was all just an illusion. Was it necessary? To spill blood, let tears flow in such torrents that they could fill a pond, and then just vanish from the life of someone who loved so much they were willing to suffer for you?

What happened between us that now you are there and I am here? That I grow stronger while you grow weaker? I remember falling in love with the idea that we could share a future. It was a clear plan with a distinct goal—the two of us, eternal love, and a home, our place. I smile at the memory of the girl who wanted so little and yet wanted so much.

I remember it so vividly as if it were yesterday. That day when you took me to the market in Howth. The original plan was to find something to eat, but I found art instead, and I would rather have emptied all my pockets to buy a beautiful painting than eat some Irish mystery that looked as if someone else had already eaten it twice before me.

It was the moment when I first laid eyes on that framed picture of rainy Dublin. It stood there, almost unnoticed, among the food stalls and small souvenirs. It was a moment when everything stopped – the surrounding world lost its meaning, and I saw only that magical picture. A framed photograph of a city we both loved, captured in the rain through the misted window of a bus.

I fell in love with that photograph then. I couldn’t resist and had to buy it. I remember how you watched me with a smile on your lips as I paid. And then we promised that the picture would hang in our home, that when we were finally together, it would become a symbol of our love, something that would grow old alongside us. Romantic debauchery, yes, but back then, I believed it.

The picture became my treasure. I cared for it with such love and dedication, as if it were a living organism. Every day, It became my daily ritual, a reminder that one day we would be together and everything would be just as we had imagined.

But the years went by, and our dreams began to change. I still clung to that picture, to the illusion that one day we would be together. Every day when I looked at it, I didn’t just see the streets of Dublin, but also the two of us – misty like the window of the bus in which the picture was taken. But while I waited, you were with hundreds of other women, with your lies and intrigues, and I cared for the glass framed with wood. That illusion of us two, until I forgot to perceive reality. My picture became the silent witness of my waiting, my suffering, and my unfulfilled hopes.

While I waited and aged, the picture travelled with me and became a part of me, and I never forgot the reason why I bought it back then. When I moved for the third time, I took the picture with me. This time, it no longer hung on the main wall as before, but I hid it in my study, where I could only see it. But even there, it began to lose its meaning. I still cared for it, but it was no longer with the same passion as before. It was there because I didn’t know what else to do with it. It was there because it reminded me of your other face.

Eventually, I took it down from the wall and placed it under the bed. I could no longer bear to look at something that had promised me a future for so long, a future we never had. In that box under the bed are all my hopes, memories, and unfulfilled wishes and dreams that I once had. Every piece, every memory belongs there – including that picture, which no longer holds any meaning for me today. It no longer hangs on the wall; it is no longer a symbol of our love. It is just a relic from a time when I believed that dreams could come true.

Today, you no longer weigh on my mind as you once did. Your charm is lost on me, and your Irish magic has faded. The emptiness that was long in my life I have filled with love for myself. It makes me sick to think of how I tried to save and revive something that never existed. And now, realising that you and I were only an illusion, I am finally free.

That’s why I’m returning your shackles, the ones you placed on me when I first laid eyes on you. I no longer need them. I no longer feel the need to revisit it, but still, now and then, when I look at that box, I remind myself how foolish I was, how I believed in something that could never be real. And yet, I feel a strange peace that everything is now as it should be. I am free, but you remain burdened by all that you have wrought. Your games are foreign to me now, and your fate is now only in your hands.

Goodbye, my dear old sport. 

You no longer shake my heart.

Sincerely,

Your former plaything