Goodbye letters

The letter arrives two days after Dean's death. It's just lying there on his doormat, and Cas picks it up with shaking fingers.

Tears start filling his eyes as soon as he read the first line.

I guess… I guess this is goodbye.

I never meant for this to happen, I swear. But it did. And you deserve to know why.

When I was a little kid, I had dreams. I dreamt of a house with garden in the suburbs, a beautiful wife, two kids and a dog. But then I met you. And I fell for you.

I like the term "falling in love".

I like it because I think it perfectly describes how it's like to… well, fall in love.

You don't just decide to love someone, you don't pick someone and be like: now I'm going to love this person so much I won't care about anyone else but them, not even about myself. It's not like that. You don't get to choose.

You fall for them. Head over heels. And once it's happening, you can't stop it. Just like falling into an abyss.

In fact, love's a lot like an abyss. You're falling and falling and falling, adrenaline and dopamine and all those other hormones floating through your veins, making you feel happy and dizzy and oh so good, until you reach the ground. If you're lucky, someone's there to catch you. If not… well, then you crash.

But it's not only love. There are a lot more abysses in life. A lot more ways to crash than to get your heart broken.

When I had that big fight with my dad, him calling me a dirty faggot and telling me to stay out of the house, and me trying so hard to fight back the tears, I fell into an abyss. I fell and fell and fell, but it didn't feel good at all, and when I crashed, it wasn't that bittersweet crash following a sweet fall. It just hurt. A lot.

I shattered like glass, a million little pieces on the ground of that abyss. But I put myself back together. Humans can do that. Some can even do it more than once. It'll leave scars, sure, just like a glass will never look the same when you glue it back together, but it'll hold. Forever, if you're lucky. For a long time, if you're not so lucky. Not very long, if you're like me.

But I believe there's a point when even the strongest human being on that whole screwed up planet won't be able to be put back together. Not by anyone. Not ever.

I'm not the strongest human being on that planet, so I reached that point a lot earlier than others may have. I fell and I crashed and I shattered, and then I just lay there, knowing that this was the end, knowing that I wouldn't be able to fix myself again, and I felt… okay.

I didn't blame you for what happened. I didn't blame myself. I don't blame either of us today. Maybe it was supposed to happen. Maybe we just weren't meant to be.

This might sound like I'm blaming fate, but I'm not. I don't think anyone's to blame. I think…

Maybe that's the point. Maybe the point is falling. Maybe we're supposed to fall and crash and shatter and be put back together and then do it all over again, until we're so shattered we can't be fixed. And maybe that's when we know we've truly lived.

If that's true… well, then I did live, and so did you. We've probably lived enough for a lot more people than just the two of us. It was painful, I won't deny that, but it was also… perfect. For a little while, we knew what it was like to feel true love. And maybe what they say is true: No true love without true pain.

Anyway, I just want you to know that it was worth it. Knowing you, being with you for a little while, even if we couldn't have forever, was worth all this pain.

I love you. I still do. But it wasn't enough to put me back together.

I'm sorry.