I stand outside my door, staring up at the cold Kentucky sky for a moment before turning around and coming back in. My heart is heavy, and I cannot quite seem to draw breath enough so that breathing itself remains an unconscious act. The house, despite the best efforts of my two cats, is still and empty. My once-beloved has been gone for three weeks.

Last weekend I finally let go, but in letting go it seemed to jar her, and she laboured to place me back on her hook. It worked, too well. The longing for her returned, the sense that life without her was in some great way diminished somehow, no matter how toxic we were for one another. We had even pledged to attend couples' counseling in the hope of somehow not merely salvaging, but rather rebuilding what we had let decay.

I spent some time today organising the rest of our things, culling hers into a couple boxes for easy removal. I saved a few pictures and letters, not quite able to scrub every last trace of her from my home. And in doing so, I came across an old letter I had written her over two years ago, and what caught me most of it was that... I could have written this very letter today:

I Miss You...

Mo Chroi stands there, talking to a friend. She hasn't looked at me, not once, coming down the ramp inside, ordering a beer at the bar, making time with a few I know, walking over behind her. But she doesn't have to. We always knew when the other entered the room.

Mo Chroi is animated. Telling a story, sharing a laugh. She holds a Smirnoff in her right hand. She is wearing a flowing blouse, the tight hug on her body, her spilling breasts, giving way to a draped flaring at the wrists. Something new, perhaps, or something borrowed. Her jeans snug against her broad hips, tight in the back. She smiles, and at that moment I see nothing else.

Mo Chroi is bold. She marches towards me, direct, intent. The waves of her nut-brown hair pulled behind her head, she is wearing the regulation-issue red shirt and apron identifying her as a server in the restaurant. My shift is done, I lean against the server line. She confronts me, pulling me from my thoughts and weariness. She thrusts out a hand. Never having met her, I regard her coolly. "Hi," she says, "I'm Mo Chroi." A smile takes hold of me as I take hold of her, my hand in hers.

Mo Chroi is reverent. She sits in church, her eyes rapt upon the elder delivering the sermon from the pulpit. She wears a long, black skirt and a faded blue sweater. It has a slight tear in the shoulder. Her hands, ever weathered and beaten, clutch the Bible in her lap. I've never understood this strange faith of hers, never tried to, the object of passing derision. But it pulls her, compels her. She has already been disfellowshipped, but the rules of man deter not her love of God. A married woman, albeit estranged, she cannot show openly the affection she holds in her heart for me, but when time arrives for prayer, she takes hold of my hand in hers, and squeezes it.

Mo Chroi is entranced. We are sitting together in the audience of the Kentucky Center. The Black Watch, their pipes and drums; the Band of the Welsh Guard, their brass, takes hold of our spirits and casts them ever upward, one song after the next, until she, noticing the tears in my eyes, falls silent. She wears a black dress, she's made herself up for the occasion, and every look from those eyes catches my breath in my chest. She wears heels- an unspoken, unarticulated sacrifice on my behalf, the break in her back from an old lover's battery screaming from the strain until it overcomes her, possesses her. I shepherd her out through the throng at the end of the show, elderly women in silk and mink passing us by in some perverse reversal of age. But my arm is out, she clutches it like a peregrine, and God Himself could not command me from her side, the echoes of the bagpipes fading from our ears.

Mo Chroi is exhausted. She collapses against my bedsheets, the echoes of her cries fading from the room. My soul weeps at the sight of her, for now she is wearing nothing at all. A lifetime of sex as an object of shame, a prurient burden, has ended with her. I am on my back. My hand reaches down, takes hold of hers, our fingers entwine. She laughs, a rich, ecstatic laugh which heaves her bare breasts in the silhouetted darkness and celebrates the very act of life's creation. Still panting, she pulls my face towards hers and kisses my lips all too briefly. "I have to shower now," she says, relinquishing my hand and sitting up. A forbidden thought crosses my mind. "No... lay back down." And she is gone from me.

Mo Chroi is inflamed. Hurt. I have let her go for the third time. The final time. It is done in a flash of anger, but its necessity no less for the sea of red and yellow the act is nestled in. She has asked me to accept much, and with her latest revelation, much has once more become 'too much.' I am incapable of loving this woman in moderation, and the highest pedestals yield the hardest falls. My eyes are drawn to the ruddy complect of her chest and face, the telltale badges of a habit of overindulgence. Balm for the deepest of hurts in a life seeming more filled with hurt than joy. Joy which I tried, and failed, to give her.

"How can you just sit there and judge me?" Mo Chroi shouts. "Who the fuck are you to judge me? I've always resented how you think you are better than me!"

I try to disagree, but she is in no mood for the hearing of it. How can I tell her that I don't think I'm better than her, but that I just simply feel that sometimes I deserve better than what she gives me? That I don't trust easily as once I used to, and that trust, once spent, is a coin so rarely recovered. Couldn't I have tried harder? Couldn't I have overlooked the occasional detour knowing her path was, in the end, headed in the direction she so passionately swore she wanted for herself? Couldn't she have tried harder to understand my fragilities, to steady the wavering of faith I had in her at even the worst of times?

In the end, we both stopped trying. The outcome- my hand in hers, and hers in mine- just wasn't worth the effort we both knew it would take. Perhaps with life as thread on a very finite spool, we became too focused on how much of it we were using, and lost sight on what we together were weaving.

And so the next day after the end found us both in the same bar, both one injured by the other, not exchanging one word, even one look, to one another, before I realised my folly in coming and left. She simply looked too beautiful for me to long regard without giving way to feeling, of longing and loss. Of the vaunted recognition of one another's strengths, but the poisonous fixation on one another's weaknesses. Beautiful in her flowing blouse, and her tight jeans, and beautiful so for anyone but me, for I was not meant to be there that night. Beautiful as one who is accepting the need to move on.

Mo Chroi was ever beautiful. The curves of her body, the weaves of her hair. The fixed stare as she regarded her blessed children, the darting gaze from one of my eyes to the other that told of the depth of her passion for me, a darting she was unaware of but told me the look came from the deepest recess of her oft-bruised heart. But she could never see it, never admit to it or even understand it. "If you say so," she'd say.

Mo Chroi called me that night, on my way home. She tried to play casual, a harmless lie in the crib of the darker ones, that she hadn't noticed me, but broke down and told me that seeing me was too great an ache to bear. I felt the same.

"You looked really beautiful tonight," I told her at the end of the brief, painful conversation, the third time I'd said it. Beautiful as one who is ready to move on, even as she may deny it. As one who needs to forget me.

"Don't waste your time on me you're already

the voice inside my head.

I miss you..."

...but I have to let go, too...