After your death I made of this blog the place where I could talk to you; tell you what was going on in my mind. I got lost – and in a way I think I still am – and needed some kind of relieve. This was my relieve, my therapy, sort of saying…

I’ll never stop loving you and talking to you my love, but I will stop doing it here. From now on nobody will know what I feel anymore. I’ve always given myself too much. I won't expose you or myself here anymore, not with strangers.

I miss you Lea, always. I will always love you.

Tonight I woke up laughing. I dreamt of you once more, but this time you were really there with me, in Slovakia, in your house. Of course the house was different, and among your family there were other people that didn’t belong there. But you were there, for me, and it was really you. I could see your face, touch you, feel your love.

In this dream I had a plane to catch, to bring me back to Portugal. But this time I stayed. This time I didn’t left you, and that was why I was so happy. That is why I laughed and woke up laughing. I’m just sorry this time it was too late… I love so, but so much. No-one has an idea of how I wish I could hold you in my arms once more…

I’ve been feeling so, but so lonely! I’ve been feeling so sad... But the funny thing is that the lonelier and sadder I feel the more I joke, the more I try to laugh. Everybody thinks I’m OK, so let’s try not to disappoint everybody, right? Others don’t like sad people… it makes them uncomfortable. Maybe it reminds them there’s nothing to laugh about their lives too…

You dared to love me once, I will love you always.

I wonder if we will be together again one day. I miss you no matter where I am. I miss your warmth.

My love, a long time has passed since last I wrote you. But you never left my thoughts, mostly at night, when I go to bed and dream of you there. I always wish you there with me, every night, and no-one else.

I'm back in Angola now, for a new job... maybe a new life, I don't know. It is hard - although it's my birth country - but not as hard as having lost you. Not even close! Nothing compares to that, and I only wish you were alive and I could be here, or anywhere else in this world, but with you...

I love you so much still. It's just like I believe you can still come to me. I miss you.

Happy birthday my love.

You’d be 30 today, and I only wish I could spend this day with you, and only you. At least people will always remember you young and beautiful, what more can I say at a time like this? You have no idea how I miss you Lea. I just wish I could be there to give you some flowers, but in my life things never turn out the way I think they should, the way I expected, and for that I really am sorry. It hurts me to be here, away from the place you’ll always be, but presently things don’t hurt me anymore the way they used to. I don’t care anymore, I suppose. I just care about you, and miss you more each day.

I really love you.

I have dreamt of you again Lea. Well, at least I’ve had one more dream I can remember, for I don’t know how many times I’ve dreamt of you. This time I was with a friend (can’t remember who) in some sort of ruined ancient Roman village that reminded me Erculanum, in Italy. Initially I was in a high position and I looked down to the village. It was small, cornered by a rapid stream, and I begun walking down a stairway to reach the streets. When I finally did I found myself amidst a graveyard full of tiny gravestones. It was very ancient, covered with wild vegetation, and I felt like a giant in there, afraid of stepping something important. By that time I was alone in there, and the sound of the stream was louder.

Suddenly I turned my eyes to the part of the village closest to the water stream and, sitting over a ruined wall and facing the water, there you were, beautiful and alone, as I remember you from some of my cherished memories of Latvia! After an initial shock, and somehow knowing I was not allowed to talk to you or get any closer, I surrounded you and leaned myself, silent and once again with a friend, to a wall right in front of you. I remember having told the person I was with that you were still my love, that you looked just like I remember you and that I missed you as I never knew I could miss someone. I also felt a deep sadness not to be able to reach you and hold you.

You never looked at me during that dream. Instead, you lowered your eyes to the ground and all I could do was catching brief glimpses of your familiar face, as the breeze rearranged the hair hiding your expression from me. I then woke up. It was brief, it was sad, it was painful, but it was also the best I can expect from my life now.

It’s almost Christmas again. A year has almost passed since I went to Slovakia to spend Christmas with you. I don’t miss you more now Lea, but I miss you specially. I love you still, I'll love you always.

I keep loving and missing you day after day.

I’m losing sight in one of my eyes, the right one, to be specific. So, since it’s impossible to recover – so I’ve been told by the doctors – I’m left with a bad eye and a good one. Half blind? Half aware? Anyway, half, once again, as I’ve always felt. In the worst case scenario, I’ll completely lose my right sight and become half blind. But is it something new? Haven’t I always been half blind? Still, one can never be half blind! Either you're blind or you're not. That's why we have two eyes, two kidneys, two lungs... So we can afford to lose one and still not being considered handicaped (what a deal for social security!).

Half of me as always been extremely aware. Half has always strived to see things the way they really are. Half has always given up too soon by realising how impossible to climb were the mountains of prejudice and circumstance. Overwhelmed, half of me has always felt joy.

Meanwhile, there was this other half of me, the going-blind half of me, the cloudy, shady, fictional, unclear half. And this half fantasised, dreamt constantly, was at the origin of several emotions, conceived new and strange worlds. This half, deprived of clear definition, chose myth over science, chose fiction over reality. This was always, maybe, the half capable of feeling love.

Next Monday, September 28th, it will be a year since the first time we talked to each other. We’ve met the day before at Riga’s airport, but our first words to one another were on this day. I’m keeping track of all these little things because that’s part of what you left me with. That’s how blind my blind half is!

One year, and it hasn’t gone away my love. It is quiet now, it is silent, but it’s still here. Even now, after all this time, I rather go on loving you than anyone else. I don’t want to be rude, but even dead you’re so much more loveable than any living woman I know! Of course I may be loving you with my blind half, but be as it may, I’m looking at others with the sharp and aware part of me. Lea, you are irreplaceable. I know that's almost like saying "water, you're wet!" But as I’ve said, I may be losing sight in one of my eyes, but still I only have eyes for you.

These last days I’ve been missing you more than usual; I’ve been thinking things I’ve never thought before, little details, like how profoundly sad it is to die in the snow: death over white, over purity. Me, at least, whenever I conceptualized a place filled with snow, whenever I imagined a snowy village, pure, beautiful, clean, white, death had NEVER a role to play. White as Heaven, I always thought... But is there death in Heaven?

Red over snow, like blood in Paradise: The world has definitely changed. No more sacred places, I won’t hide again. You see, here is the going-blind half of me: In the absence of clarity, illusion! In the absence of rationality, dementia! Maybe religion will still have a word to say...

I just miss you and don’t know what to say and how to say it, and because I miss you I don’t know how I can stay for so long without writing something to you. I just talk and talk, with no-one to hear words that will be lost forever.

You loved me once Lea. You’ve changed me and I will love you forever. Today it’s my birthday, but what I celebrate in me is you.

I’ve been away Lea. Away from Portugal, away from my everyday life, away from Internet, but never away from you my love. Everywhere I go I miss you much. It doesn’t hurt anymore, I think, but your absence is felt every moment. I feel you so close sometimes.

Hello my love. It’s been a long time since last I wrote to you, I know. But this is not the only place in which I talk to you. Far from it, and you know that. The truth is that I miss you everyday. I won’t say I miss you more every day, how could I say that? These things can’t be measured. But I do miss you terribly, and every day it’s stranger, every day I feel more hollow and sorrowful. Every night I imagine you, I imagine I’m lying there with you, that I’m not alone and never will be... But then I feel all that silence around me, and I search you with an arm in bed hoping for a miracle that never comes. Then I tend to get exhausted and eventually give up and sleep. When I wake up, everyday, my first reaction is disappointment towards life itself.

 

I’m a mess. At first the pain was unimaginable, and tears were always finding their way out of me. Now it’s different. I don’t cry anymore. I can’t, although my eyes still feel tears coming very often. Now I just miss you too much and feel so lonely. Sometimes I just want to go on with things here, try to have a life, try to feed myself out of my grief and anger. Other times I just which I had in me the strength to give up, because no matter what I’ll never have you again in my arms. No matter what I do, never again I’ll be able to kiss you, to take your hair out of your eyes as I used to do... In a way, go on living feels like treating like trash our moments and our plans together.

 

I’m going away from Portugal for a time. I’ll try to give a rest to myself for some time. I’ll be away from telephones, from computers, from my family, from friends who don’t understand how I need to be alone and keep calling me; keep talking to me about things I don’t want to hear anymore; keep inviting me to things I don’t want to do anymore; keep believing I’m the same. Well Lea, I’m sure I'm not the same, that I will never be the same. You were so much more than a girlfriend to me! You were many of my infant dreams made flesh! I will never be the same, partly because I don’t want to go back being the person that I was, someone who did not knew you.

 

I don’t want to be alone. But every time I’m with someone I feel so tired. I feel I’m acting to be a mix of the person I am now and the person others met once, somewhere in the past. It just takes all the strength out of me, although, I repeat, I don’t want to be alone. I’m just so scared of life without you here.

 

So I’ll be away for some time my love. I’m not going to the mountains that you loved so much – how I wish I would… Everyday I dream with snow and our Christmas in Slovakia. I’m going to escape Portugal for a while, but to the north, and try just to stare at the sea. Come.

 

I love you and I miss you always.

I hope one day things can finally be stored again in their respective drawers and boxes, for right now I feel like they’re all scattered through the floor. I have no home without you Lea. There are no words for the way I miss you.

I’m still here my love. I still miss you much, though I’m feeling blank and empty. Some nights ago I dreamt a lot about you, although in the morning I couldn’t remember a thing. I woke in the middle of the night with you on my thoughts; with the absolute certainty that it was you who were there with me, in that dream of mine. Many times I think about writing you something in here, but everything I have to say feels so dull and hopeless… I want to give you good news, for once, but still haven’t any and maybe I feel kind of ashamed of that fact. Anyway, I’m still here, loving you, missing you, thinking and dreaming about you everyday. And as long as I’m here you’re alive too Lea. You’re always with me, and you’ll always be. 

Sometimes, not very frequently, I shut my eyes and imagine I’m close to you, just sitting in your tomb or standing next to it. I then face the little hill downwards in front of me, the houses of the small village, and behind them the narrow peaceful river. And on the other side of the river I can see the vast agricultural plains, with the mountains on the horizon. Behind me, only a few meters from your resting place, the hill where the cemetery stands transforms itself in a forest, and from those woods I can hear a variety of sounds, mainly from birds. If we stay very still and silent we can even see rabbits, foxes, or a deer. And in there, with my eyes shut, I can hear the sound of the tree leaves blown by the breeze. You’re in a pretty, unpretentious, and very peaceful place my love. I’m very glad I went to say goodbye to you there. This way I can always keep a visual memory of the place in which you will rest forever.

 

I keep dreaming with you Lea. Even today you were there, in one of my nightly fantasies, in terms I no longer remember exactly. I miss you so much! Everything’s lost its meaning and it’s getting lonelier here everyday. When in bed, before I fall asleep, sometimes I try to remember your expressions on precise moments. And eventually I succeed and try to hold that thought for some seconds more. I find it particularly hard, though.

 

I still have your phone number in my cell phone, as well as all the messages we’ve sent each other. In my photographic camera I still have the memory card full with all the photos I’ve taken when I was there with you last Christmas, with the exact dates of when they were taken. I’ve thought of what it would mean to me to erase them. I already have them on my computer and in another data device, but I think I will not be able to do it. I can’t erase them, not the photographs nor your cell number or our messages. Also the things you gave me in Christmas, like that beautiful book about the Slovak mountains you loved so much, plus the photo of you your mother gave me after you died, and some other little things, are all inside a plastic bag I keep over a table in the room where I sleep without opening it. I don’t seem to have the courage to open it. Better said, I have, but I know it will hurt too much! I dream of the day I’ll have my own house, or room, in which I can put your picture in a frame and keep it at sight forever, like you deserve.

 

Like I said, I miss you too much Lea. And so, I want to leave here this picture, of the church in Rézekne in front of which we kissed for the first time, sitting in the grass in that freezing night in Latvia. It’s just another fragment of our story that I can look upon if I ever loose my reasoning. Anyway, I still hope one day I can be just fine.

I love you. 

There are two of me, now more than ever. None of them is any good, though. One is lost and the other slowly loosing his mind. Remember stuff is all I do these days, and have been having really strange thoughts frequently. I need help but don’t know which way to turn. I want to move somewhere but am kind of frozen, as when I was a kid, afraid of spiders, wanting to run away but unable to move. Not a day goes by without me being hurt again my love, just like you were dying constantly, day after day, week after week, month after month. How I miss you! Sometimes that monstrous day when I received the awful news of your accident comes to my mind, and it’s like I’m there, back then, feeling all the pain and grief again. There’s no need of talking about the consequences of all this, you know how it goes. I’m almost dry, I don’t even know how I can still be feeling the way I do.

 

I need work so much! I need to wake up in the morning, having the day filled, interact with other people, earn my living, smile sometimes, and going to sleep tired each day. This is not intended to forget you, but to try and face it all without you, and you know that. I can’t stand anymore going to bed just dreaming of you and waking up some hours after, feeling empty, soured, more distant of everything each day. But even that looks like something well beyond my reach! There’s no work for me here, and I feel there’s really nothing I’m good at. I feel I’m part of nothing. All I am is what I feel for you Lea, but it is not enough. It can’t be! Where am I in the middle of my own world? Would you be proud of what I am? 

When I lost you Lea, after the initial shock, I told myself I would want to try and do something of my life, to make it worth living, and by doing so honoring your life too. I made it my wish, and my intent, to make you proud of me, of having loving me one day. But I guess that’s something I will not be able to do. I will never do nothing special, neither for myself nor to make you proud of me. I try but just can’t find a job, I have no money, am full of debts, and am feeling each day more detached from this world and from everybody. I feel scared sometimes, and others I just wish I had someone with me, to talk a little, to do me company, I’m not sure. I dream so much my love! I keep dreaming and dreaming, as if that’s the only thing left for me now. I have never felt so lonely in my life. I still want to try, but don’t know what to do anymore, feel scared sometimes, but mostly I feel so alone. Where’s my life? Well, at least you know what I feel for you. Only you know how I feel, how I miss you.

I still dream about you, my love. Whenever I go to bed you’re there with me, putting a smile on my face, and only then I feel safe, remembering all you gave me. Those are the moments when I remember all the little things I miss so much...

Since I was informed of your death, my little princess, I always sleep with a small candle by my side. The only pause I took in doing this was when I went back to Slovakia to your burial. Apart from that week I’ve been doing it every night, I don’t even know why. Once, when we met in Latvia, you told me you didn’t believe in God, during the visit to that big sanctuary near the Russian border. I was never a believer, too, and I told you that. Now it would seem even harder to believe in such an idea, in such a cruel and ruthless entity. But that’s not the point. I never believed in God when you were alive and it’s no now, that you’re gone from this world, that I will start. At the most I would believe God only to have someone to blame or hate, I think. 

 

Maybe I just keep that candle lit to take some of my own fears away. Or maybe it's even simpler and I do it just to see the little straw Christmas angel you gave me before I close my eyes each night, or whenever I open them while having trouble to sleep. Anyway, that’s something I do now I’ve never had the habit of doing. Little details, little rituals and little thoughts each day that trick me into the impression that things can still change. Maybe deep inside I just want to point you the way in the night towards me. Maybe that’s one fantasy I will never be capable of letting go Lea, because I still love you and miss you so much. Maybe I need to believe there's still time.

More life...

How can you love me now Lea? Days go by without easing things for me, without bringing me the peace of mind and hope I would need to go on. I miss you more and more, and each new day brings with it a stronger pain. When I wake up in the morning and realize a new day has risen I feel so depressed and sad, so anxious and lonely, that I wish I could again close my eyes and sink in a deep unending sleep. I miss your pretty face, I miss your smile and your gentle touch, I miss our conversations and kissing you, I miss we joking with each other and having you in my life, I miss you loving me, I miss writing you something and know there would be an answer, I miss our plans together and, most of all, I miss my beautiful friend! A friend I made, so late in life, so beautiful and loving, which left me so soon.

 

I’m yours. I love you.