Closure in 2 acts.

Act I - The Panda

I met you online, and usually people I meet online are all about the body, but rarely about the person inside it. You seemed to be one of those, at least initially, but once in a while a surprise comes along in a world of meh. You were that surprise. I cannot explain how or when, but you suddenly started to be more than someone I swapped nudes with. We started to become friends.

Our friendship grew, and even though you were always very clear about how much you still wanted the body, you become something essential in my life. We talked every day about everything, and you were closer to me than almost anyone else. You were in the same level, and sometimes one step ahead, of the people I saw every day.

But you were not here. You were a quarter of a planet and five time zones away. And if that wasn't bad enough, you had a very possessive and controlling husband, and you were trapped in an oppressive and abusive relationship. I wanted us to become friends, I wanted to be in your life, meet your kids, meet your husband and you meet mine. And two things started to be clear to me: first, we could make it work despite the distance and the adversities; second, we would never be more than friends. Doing anything else would jeopardise everything we were building. I never stopped finding you attractive, but I stopped seeing you as someone I wanted to fuck. I thought what we had was more important than anything else, and that included sex.

We only met once, but it felt like I knew you for years. That we had had just seen each other the week before. I had a lovely time with your family, on your favourite pub, and I later ate one of the best cheesecakes I ever had. I wished then that we could have spent more time together. And we were so excited about that meeting that we forgot to make a picture. We had memories, and the promise of more to come in the future.

But that future did not come. One day, over a video call, everything crumbled. I got upset with the realisation that I wouldn't see you when you came to the UK, and you took yourself away. And that moment haunted me for the next year. I never fully understood what happened then. My logic told me that it was not so bad, but reality acted in a different way. We stopped talking, and later you decided to end the friendship. Just like that, it was over.

I tried to understand, to explain, to make sense. How could something so small and so simple break a friendship so strong and deep as we had? Why did we recover from worse moments, and still this one was beyond salvation? Did I do something so horrible or so wrong, and was I failing to see it? Or what did I not see, what could I not understand, which pieces of the puzzle did I not have?

I asked myself these questions for years, and I built theories. It took me a while to get over you, but eventually I did. I never got closure, but I did move on. I accepted that you were my ghost. You'd appear to haunt me once in a while, but you were, at that point, harmless. I would wake up from your nightmare feeling scared, but then I'd realise it had only been a nightmare, now I was awake and you were not there, in the real world. Life was ok.