Dear you, for the last time.

Dear you,

Yes, she's writing about you again. After all these years – tell your friends to play that game they invented, 'spot him in her blog!', as this will be the last time they can. They'd crowd around a laptop in your dingy kitchen, poring over the words, they couldn't get enough. You couldn't care less, most of the time. 

Well, you'll be gone after this. Gone from this blog, and gone from my mind. You'll be merely the inspo in a series of outdated posts, a face in old YouTube videos and some faded T-shirts crammed in my pyjama drawer. A bow tie that I selfishly kept, and now plan on giving back through a mutual friend. 

I'm finding this strangely hard to write. Not because, like before, back then, I'm so overcome with emotion and longing and needing my questions to be answered at last – but because I feel...next to nothing. There was a time when your name appearing on my locked phone screen would send chills through me, make my heart race and fill my head with questions. I'd smile when I walked by your house in the mornings, just two doors down from mine. I'd cry when I walked by your house at night time, and saw strangers scurrying out of it.

You're fragments of memories now. Way back when, you were my sixth, and I was your lucky seven. At the time, that shocked me. After a year, that seemed ludicrous. You got eleven by me, in our second year. But who's counting?

I remember you saying you wanted to fall in love. I told you I loved you, once. In a two man tent, after midnight. It was just us, hot under all the nylon, hearing rain happen as it had all weekend. Kids ran amok around us too, screaming and smoking and throwing shapes while a band played far, far away. Somehow, everything went silent when I said it. I felt you tense up and hold your breath, like you were wishing it away. For me to swallow the words that had ruined everything. I soon took it back, tacked on an 'as a friend', and laughed emptily as I heard you exhale in relief.

I'm happy you found love, much later.

You're Barney to most, Ted to few. You watched your series online, but I'd bring my DVDs. We'd joke that I was your Robin – but after that dreadful finale, we can conclude I'm not any more. I'll be Nora, maybe. She was a burst of light, a could've been. I like that idea. Let me have that, will you? As you ride off into the sunset with your Tracey.

When your big moment happened, just last year, my good friends' first reactions were to diss. Reassure me, by mocking you. They didn't realise that they were insulting my taste by doing so. In a way, anyway. But it didn't hurt me much, them saying those things – it not only showed they cared, and felt the anger I was surely right to have inside me, but actually also because...the news wasn't upsetting. I didn't care. If anything, I was happy for you. I still am.

Today I am going to be adventuring alone – or meeting up with friends – and enjoying my life, post-you. I do a lot of that these days, actually. That's not to say I don't remember the sweeter things, and the more precious moments – your singing in the shower, the kisses in the park, the necklace you made me, private jokes aplenty. Introducing you to my family, and then my friends from home – who hated you in the end, but I didn't care. Watching all the Oscar nominations one year, both of us only half paying attention. When you met me from the station at nearly midnight, and lifted me off the ground. Being asked repeatedly if we were together and both of us laughing, because we didn't know most of the time. And of course, that night we danced down main street, you in a suit and me in my pyjamas. 

There was good there, in amongst the madness and the pain. There are things I will never forget, nor regret. But I'll make the effort now to never speak of them again. The Ted and Robin era has ended. 

Happy wedding day to you. I genuinely do wish you all the happiness – and I want all your dreams to come true. And more than anything, I hope you're you.

Not yours, never was – well, maybe once,

Me. x