"Is everyone in the world full of issues?", you asked, and I nodded. Of course they are. As soon as you listen hard enough.
"I need time", you said. "Time from me?", I said, "Should I disappear again?"
And you said "No".
And I do not need anything from anyone. I do not want anything from anyone. I'm not obsessive, I'm not clingy, I'm intelligent and rational and quite well-balanced.
I thought about you, set everything right in repeated conversations with my memory of you, for many absent years.
I am, occasionally, overcome with melancholy, eye-watering pangs of heaviness, for a scent I recognise, for a street whose name I used to know, for whatever it takes at that moment; and I hold onto it, I sail the melancholy, and sometimes I feel a hundred years old.
Sometimes I have a sob in my throat, but I can't cry, even when I try to: I spend the night destroying it, then, smoking too many cigarettes and if I have whisky I drink it.
But these things are not what I am. I smile at my acquaintances in the morning, and they never need to know about my sporadic too-long nights. I laugh with my friends, and the laugh is no less real just because once in a while I think too much about things I should let go of.
I am stubborn, perhaps, and I can hold a grudge forever. I overanalyse; get caught up in details and corners, and I am often shy, preferring to pretend I'm gone rather than make my presence known. These are parts of who I am, and you may sooner or later find out about them, but they are mine to deal with, and not yours.
Even as I water the fern in my windowsill, explaining to it why I'm doing so. I don't need to be a hero, and I don't particularly want one.
I wonder what you'd have said if I told you this.
Until a day comes that I decide you need to know, I've still told you the truth: Everyone, everyone in the world has issues, and there is no exception, not even you. We have a choice with our stories; to include them in our portfolios or not, and I, in recent years, choose not to.