Yours

October 24th

Dear Sophia,

I love you. I’m sorry if I looked down today. That’s definitely not the impression I want to give you. I don’t want to seem a gloomy sort of a person. I don’t want you to feel like you’re stuck with me. I had all the energy sucked out of me this morning and I struggled to get it back. It was nothing to do with you.

Maybe it would have been better if you’d seen it all so you could have understood a bit better. I would have been even more embarrassed if you’d seen though.

I should tell you what happened. Before you came in I got up to go to the toilet. Someone had left the back of their chair a bit far out in front of the toilets door. My foot got caught and I tripped and fell a bit. I managed to stay up on my feet and I put my hands out to stop myself before I hit the wall. It made a loud noise though. It was one of those things where you know that every eye in the room is looking at you. I hate things like that. Even though everyone looked busy I knew deep down they were still thinking about what I just did and judging me. They were all laughing at me on the inside.

I spent ages in the toilet trying to get myself together so that I’d look calm when I came back out. It was even worse when I came out and saw nobody was looking at me. It was like they were all deliberately avoiding looking at me. They were trying not to let me know they were all smirking about it. That just made it even worse. I’ve always hated the idea of everyone looking at me and judging me. I knew they were. They couldn’t hide it.

At school I used to always hate it if I had to do anything in front of people. I remember in English once the teacher went round the class and put us all in order. We were each given a line of Shakespeare and the whole class had to read it one by one in order. I couldn’t listen to anything anyone else was saying. I just got more and more nervous waiting to hear the voice of the person next to me. Then I knew it was my go. When he stopped talking I started and raced through it as quickly as possible. I mis-pronounced every word and my voice came out all funny. I sounded as nervous as I felt. Even though the voices carried on around the room reading their lines I knew everyone was thinking about how stupid I’d sounded. They didn’t seem to understand I couldn’t control it. They were all thinking about it and secretly laughing at me. I couldn’t stand it. The rest of that day I could tell it was all anyone was thinking about. They all carried on pretending to be normal but I couldn’t calm down. My face felt really hot all day. I could tell everyone was looking at me. That’s exactly how I felt today. I hated it.

I sat back down and tried to breathe slowly. I wanted to calm down before you got there. I’ve always heard a good way to calm down is to focus on your breathing. It’s stupid. It’s impossible. If I focus too much on my body I get too aware of my pulse and the sound of my breath and I start thinking about how fragile my body is and how I’m not in control of so many of the things my body does to keep me alive.

Obviously when I’m with you all that goes away. I don’t care what anyone thinks. Nobody could think anything bad about me when I’m with you. I’m with the most beautiful woman in the world. Nobody could judge me for that.

That only really dawned on me once you were leaving. I noticed how much more comfortable I felt. I just don’t like the idea of being judged by people that don’t know anything about me. They make all these assumptions that are completely wrong. That’s why I’m so happy to have you Sophia. You make all that go away. I know nothing matters but us.

I love you.

Yours,

Andrew