It's 2020,

I remember the last time ever I saw her face. It was the 3rd of May, 2017. I was recovering well from major surgery, and we went to the park. It was winter, and she wore a faux fur coat. I still have the last photo I took of her. It was the last photo in my camera roll, stretching back five years with her.

I would never see her again.

Within two months of that day, she would break up with her husband.

I thought at first that this meant that we would be together finally. But I never heard from her, except to send me a cryptic message or two about getting some clothes she had left at my place. I didn't take this seriously, she had said such things before, and hell, I had said worse. I put it down to her dealing with the aftermath of the breakup of her marriage.

The weeks turned into months, and then seven months had passed.

One day, I rememeber clearly, the 2nd of January 2018, a mutual friend messaged me to ask if I had heard the news about her. I feared the worst, and my heart quickened, and my breath shortened. No, I said.

She's pregnant, with twins. 

I was confused. To whom? Did the divorce not succeed?

To her new boyfriend, that she'd been seeing for a few months.

Friends, I cannot describe the primal pain I felt. The pain I still feel now, two years later. After five years of my life, I was ghosted but the person I loved most in the world, and gave up my marriage for. I never got closure, an explanation, or a single kind word. I was simply forgotten, I didn't exist. A vapour.

In the following two years, I would go on to re-partner, to a woman that is very different to her, that is good to me, who I am also good to.

But the pain has never left, and I still think about her daily. She is with me always, and the thing that hurts is that I know that to her, I never existed, and so don't exist now.