This Modern Love

by Will Darbyshire

  Whenever I wake up I think about you, whenever I go to sleep I think about you.

  You’ll always be in my soul, my mind and my heart.

  My love always,

  J

  Dear Emmanuel,

  Watching you talk was my favorite. The passion and the drive I heard in your voice were present in every conversation we had. It’s why I could never stop falling in love with you. You were damaged and artistic. You were intelligent and intriguing. You were not afraid to challenge me on my bullshit. You weren’t the ideal boyfriend. Not at all what every girl wants. But you were everything I could ever want.

  Watching you grow personally is an experience that I will always be thankful for. Your drive and your optimistic pessimism inspired me and grounded me at the same time. Something only you and I could understand. There were a lot of things about each other only you and I could understand, things that won’t ever be understood by anyone else. I am who I am today because of whom you are. I don’t need ten years to go by to know that you will be the one who got away. I can’t do anything about it: right person, wrong time. I will forever be thankful for you, Emmanuel, but God does it hurt to lose you.

  I miss you. Like a lot more than I would like to admit. I feel like at this point, days after we finally decided to end things for good, I’m still a little numb to the pain. It comes in 30-second waves. Little things will happen that’ll make me remember you and will make my eyes tear up, but I’ll be fine a few seconds later. I’ve never felt like this. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I don’t know if the pain is going to gradually come back and then hit me all at once. I feel like I’d do anything to get you back. But at the same time, I know that at this moment we can’t be happy with each other because you just don’t have the ability to try right now.

  I miss you so much though and I really wish it weren’t that way. You were my everything, you were who I pictured spending the rest of my life with, raising kids with, all of it. It’s so weird to think it won’t be like that again. It’s weird to think I won’t wake up to you or go to sleep next to you every night of my life in the future. It makes me so sad, I cannot bear the thought of anyone taking your place in the visions I had for us.

  Before you I never gave a fuck about anyone else’s happiness. After you, your happiness was all that mattered to me, even if it meant compromising my own. I’m so in love with you that the only thing that brings me true happiness is seeing you happy.

  I remember when you had that bad experience with your dad, and you cried to me. It took everything in me not to break down. It hurt me so much to see you hurt. I had never felt that much pain from seeing someone else hurt. That was the first time I told you I loved you. Because I knew I did. That was a week after we started dating, four months after we started talking again. As fast as that may have been, I had no doubt, I still have no doubt that I did and do love you so much.

  All we need for us to work is to try. I tried so hard without success because you made no effort whatsoever. I want so badly for you to tell me you miss me and that you want to try this again, because I think it could work. That probably won’t ever be the case again though.

  Even when you’re a total asshole, I’d choose you over anyone else on the planet. I don’t know how I feel about you being so indifferent. I’m happy you’re not in the amount of pain I’m in, but I’m sad I’m in so much pain over someone that could not care less about me.

  Ivette

  USA

  Dear Wince,

  Thank you for giving me the best remembrance that I’ll treasure for a lifetime, our son, Ryze.

  Love,

  Karen

  Philippines

  Dear Father-of-my-Child,

  I wish that I had never told you I was pregnant. I wish that I had broken up with you as soon as I found out, and carried on with my life having you never find out that my child was also yours. I wish that it was possible for me to have this wonderful human being without you.

  I wish I had never given our relationship a shot, I don’t think the pain was worth it. I sometimes wish that you would wake up one morning and decide that you just don’t want to be a dad anymore.

  But mostly, I wish that you would just see how much pain you have caused and how much heartbreak you continue to put both myself and our child through.

  Catherine

  Canada

  Dear G,

  Timing is everything and my were we too early.

  Patricia

  England

  Dear Collin,

  Thank you for being the guy to help me realize I’m utterly and completely a lesbian.

  Rachel

  New York, USA

  Dear breakfast waffles and that fairground ride, tickle fights and twitches…

  The first to hurt my heart.

  With 40 minutes between us, also a job or school, you became my Saturday and my Sunday.

  I loved you, pure and simple, would have done anything to have kept it up and am sorry that wasn’t enough.

  A weekend of heartbreak and lonesome thoughts, you say we’re just friends now.

  “Go away”, “just leave” my heart a darkened mess, “I love you” “I miss you” you tease me a glimpse of hope.

  To crash again with these feelings in my head but you’re gone, you’re gone again.

  I tried your password just to see, not expecting it to work but nothing to hide you said?

  She messaged you a Wednesday and asked you to come round, you messaged me that same night, just happened to say something else?

  Monday night I called, shaking and distraught, you so calm it made it worse, “what did you do that Wednesday?” a numbing tone did answer, chased by a text, a simple “go away”.

  Curled up in my covers, all contact cut and that heartbreak haze.

  A strange numb feeling… I feel I miss you yet goodbye.

  With memories,

  Anonymous

  Dear you,

  I would love if you would give me my heart back, so I can actually mean the word “love” when I use it again.

  Yours even though I know better,

  Habiba

  Egypt

  almost

  I think almost is a pretty good and epic word to define us. We were almost there, we almost made it. Like Frank Sinatra once said, the pieces almost fit. You almost loved me the way that I loved you.

  Patricia

  Portugal

  Dear Ethan,

  You made me little. You shrunk me down. Slowly at first, then all at once. Your comments and critiques turned you into a sculptor, scraping away at me piece by piece. With careful precision you crafted me exactly to your liking.

  The vitriol in your remarks became apparent, and your words in passing became demands. With each day my body would parade how little you really had made me. You left me with no self worth, you left me with no sense of who I was without you, and then you just left. You left me feeling as though I would never be enough. As though I had become too little for you.

  But then, I realized all along, that it was you who was little. You made me feel little to make yourself feel big. You kept me in my little box because you were afraid of how big I could become all on my own.

  In the end, the best day of my life was the day I realized that I could grow without you. I made big plans, that didn’t include you. I dreamt big dreams, that didn’t include you. It was from your seeds planted in bitterness that I grew. You made me big. Thank You.

  Meaghan

  Toronto, Canada

  Dear David,

  Please, be a better friend to her than she was to me.

  Anonymous

  Dear guy who I used to know,

  I wish you never took me to the movies in my favorite cinema. I wish you never took me to my favorite restaurant. I wish you never spent christmas with me. I wish you never took me to Amsterdam. I wish you never kissed and hugged me in my room. I wish you never told me that you loved me at my favorite spot in my
hometown. I wish you never gave me my favorite book for my birthday.

  You’re gone now, but all my favorite places and things still remind me of you. They aren’t my favorite places and things anymore.

  Anonymous

  I’ve never been in love, and that terrifies me.

  Trisha

  USA

  [and Trisha wrote again, later:]

  I do want to let you know that my story about love has changed.

  I am 26 now and think I am in love, it still terrifies me!

  Wish me luck!

  All the best,

  Trisha

  USA

  Dear Lost Lover,

  The sound of your voice has slowly d r i f t e d from my memory

  Lately I have found it hard to remember your favorite color

  Or the shirt of yours I once loved

  I’ve realized that I am slowly forgetting everything about you

  Similar to a sandcastle too close to the water

  Slowly washing away with time and eventually completely vanished

  As if it was never there

  Slowly traces of you have faded away and soon you’ll be just another broken dream

  A dream that I held too close to my heart for far too long

  Kayley

  USA

  Dear T,

  When I came to stay in your family home last summer you said something to me that held so ironic, so beautiful and poignant, so unfair. You hushed each syllable as gently as you’d hushed my lips close after rubbing cocaine in my gums. You said to me: I never really feel like I'm living, you know? Like not a lot of life goes on when I'm at home. But I feel like what we’re doing now is what I’d always dreamed living would be like.

  You had no idea that a month prior to me being wrapped in your duvet I’d tried to kill myself and a month later I’d be pregnant with your child. That living to me had become tiresome and the potential of life we'd made together and make together, those four days that I still talk about as though they still mean something, were the most alive minutes for the two of us even if only for a moment. They made me effervescent.

  You arsehole and you brute, you boy and you human heart. You gave me purpose. A purpose that could grow to call me mother and a purpose that could teach me how to love the world I was existing in. You gave me splendour and you gave me haikus, you gifted me a fluttering in my veins that I hoped to be eternal.

  When you stole those things from me, when you proposed to split an abortion like a dinner bill, when you stopped calling at 4 am to read me Leonard Cohen, when you decided some other girl’s hand was more worthy to hold I thought you'd taken everything.

  Now I dive from sleep to awake in a hurtled flailing most nights, thoughts that tumble through pirouettes and languid movements, they all bend and curve around my flat stomach that could still be round. They fill its emptiness with a heavy confetti of a thousand tiny expectations of what this baby could’ve looked like. What they might have achieved. What we could have brought up in a broken unison.

  What I fear you misconstrued, when I told you I was pregnant after you’d got back with your ex-girlfriend, is that it meant I was pregnant with a future of us. A future where you still kissed me outside of your dad’s office or where you touched my breasts under my shirt at the back of the bus. I wasn’t pregnant with those broken nostalgias, I was pregnant with the hope of a new life. The notion that the unborn could spur me reborn and that rebirth would stop me wanting to curl up into the foetal position and drown.

  I thought you’d ripped my inner most feeling right from the gut of my passion, you denied me the right of motherhood and you denied me the right to hold your love. You denied me.

  What I didn’t realise you had done, what I am still working so hard to imagine when I wake every morning – is that even though my rolled cigarettes don’t taste like the tips of your fingers from honeyed toast, I am fine. I am strong. I am wise.

  And thank god; in a broken hallelujah, I am not yours. I’d never meant to be. I am mine and mine to learn to love as wholesome as I realised I could for the living and unborn.

  In a bizarre conclusive curtain call, I’m only writing to say – thanks for teaching me the B side of Etta James is better, that egg whites should be whipped before folded, that my body is worth worshipping. That ‘exquisitely exquisite’ is a phrase to be versed more often. You dissolved a lot of goodness from within me but you built me tools unknowingly that would make me see beauty again.

  C

  UK

  gallery

  love in 10 shots

  by

  Christina, Deborah, Jessica, Katy and Loeka

  Close

  Closer

  Comfort

  Uber

  Surprising

  Dangerous

  Stings

  Hold on

  Infinite

  Love yourself

  Dear —— ,

  I see love as dedication, just like writing a book.

  Last summer, I had surgery on my left (dominant) hand, which was not initially supposed to render my hand unusable, but there were complications – aren’t there always? It has taken me an entire year to regain the range of motion and strength in my wrist/hand, and I had to re-learn how to write and play my violin. It was a stupidly long and painful recovery, but here I am today writing pages and pages of words that mean so much to me.

  I have shared a photo of a page from one of my journals that I used during my recovery (hence the wacky handwriting). The photo is a reminder that I wrote to myself, ‘I love you,’ because sometimes you just need to say that to yourself until it feels true.

  This experience taught me to love and appreciate the imperfections life throws at you, and roll with the punches.

  Love your lumps, bumps, battle scars, birthmarks and the things that make you you! Perfection is overrated anyways.

  Katy

  thanks

  This Modern Love was a dream of mine; it’s a dream come true thanks to everyone who submitted. Words cannot describe how grateful I am to all of you who wrote a letter, sent a picture or tweeted.

  Thanks to my mum, my brother and especially my dad for all your help and encouragement. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without you; you eased a lot of the pressure from my shoulders.

  Thanks to my girlfriend Arden, for your unwavering support as always. To Giles Cowan and Nick Hayward at The Narrative, for overseeing the project and for providing the emotional backup. Thank you Laura Chernikoff, for keeping everything organised, and for being there to aid any creative ideas. Thanks to my lawyer Brian Carr for all his wonderful work.

  A huge shout-out to Tim Barnes for designing the book and for putting up with my meticulous emails. Thanks to my publishers at Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster for all their hard work. The biggest thanks to Ben Brusey, my editor, for giving me this opportunity and for keeping me afloat. Your ideas and support are this book; thanks for putting up with me for a year.

  Finally, a massive thank you to my friends and my viewers for sticking with me. Your constant positive reinforcement keeps me going. I love you all terribly and I hope you like the book as much as I liked putting it together.

  Will

  Photo: Harry Hitchens

  Will Darbyshire is a 23-year-old British film-maker. He has over one million followers across his YouTube, Instagram and Twitter channels. His videos span a range of subjects including relationship advice, mental health issues, career plans, popular culture and travel. This is his first book.

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  Copyright © 2016 by Will Darbyshire

  Published by arrangement with Century, a division of The Random House Group Ltd.

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2016 by Century

  Front cover icon by Limitless

  Quote by Christina Nakhla

  Back cover photograph by Loeka Stoop

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  First Keywords Press/ edition August 2016

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