What else could I write

I don't have the right

What else should I be

All apologies

Nirvana

** If you have come here expecting a new chapter in the story, I am sorry. This isn't a new chapter, but an explanation.

Ironically, I started the last chapter with a trigger warning because of where the story was going, but what I hadn't realised was that I was the one who needed the warning.

It wasn't until I read back over the last chapter after I had published it that it suddenly hit me what I had done. It's funny how the subconscious works, but somehow all the way through the writing of the story so far, I had completely failed to notice what it was I was doing. All the clues were there, I really should have been able to read them.

A long time ago, something bad happened to someone very close to me. I don't want to use his real name, but let's call him Christos. It's a long and complicated story, but in essence it can be summed up in 3 lines:

Christos loved me.

I hurt him.

He died.

I have to write it like that as three separate sentences as the links between the three of them are too painful to think about.

I met Christos at University. We had an amazing and immediate connection, even though we came from different backgrounds, countries, languages and social groupings. We loved to argue and he challenged me incessantly, teaching me to open my eyes to different perspectives on the world. He was tall and muscular, with short, dark hair and goatee. He played basketball and had tattoos – okay so they weren't swastikas and he had never been a neo-Nazi, but I think you see where this is going. On a date back in the late nineties we went to see a film called American History X.

We had just started going out together – we had been close friends for 4 years, but I knew he had always wanted to be more than friends. I had just had my heart badly broken by someone else and was on the rebound, so convinced myself that the fact that I truly and deeply loved Christos as a friend was enough to build a relationship on.

It wasn't.

I realised soon after we got together that it wasn't going to work out. All his friends told me how happy he was and how he'd been in love with me for years and how amazing it was we'd finally gotten together. I tried so hard to love him the way he loved me, but in the end I couldn't.

The last time we spoke he told me I had broken his heart. He went back to his country for the summer, leaving me a note telling me he hoped I would have a good life but that I wouldn't see him again. I knew he was angry, and as I was spending the summer working in a remote location overseas, I let him go, figuring I would see him in September and we would talk.

I was away for 6 weeks in a remote village with no mobile phone or internet. On the day before I flew home, I travelled back to the city and made my way to an internet café to see what news there had been over the summer. I found a short, terse email from a friend of Christos telling me he was dead. I'd never met his family as they lived in a different country, and he was buried before I even knew he had gone. His friends didn't speak to me again and I didn't feel I had a right to try and reach out to them. 3 days after returning to my country, I started a new course, moved away from all the places Christos and I had been together, left behind anyone who knew us both and buried my grief. I couldn't talk about what had happened, I couldn't cope with the guilt and the pain so I made myself forget.

Il faut oublier. Tout peut s'oublier.

I really thought I had forgotten and haven't thought about him in years, but somehow my subconscious didn't forget and when I reread the last chapter it hit me like a freight train and I just sat and cried and cried. I cried for someone I had truly loved and lost, but who I didn't feel I had a right to say I missed. I cried for myself and the bad choices made and wished they could have been different. I cried for his family and friends who hadn't screwed him over like I had and who had to live with having lost him through no fault of their own.

I know Derry and Niamh deserve a happy ending. Derry needs to live, they need to find a way through this, but right now I can't write it for them. Christos didn't get his happy ending and I will never be able to tell him I'm sorry.

I hope one day I'll be able to write a different ending to this, but right now I can't.

Sorry.**