Forgive me

A love letter to my ex partner who killed himself in jail

Ashton Gray, June 20th 1988 – May 28th 2023

I don’t want you to be dead. Your death is the greatest regret of my life and I don’t know if I could have stopped it. I am flooded with the horrible knowledge that everything I do now is too late. You are gone forever.

I want to plead my case to you. I want to explain. I want you to know that I never stopped loving you. That I always told every new partner about you, and not just the bad stuff. I told them that you were the first real love of my life and you were, Ashton. I never stopped loving you. I will never stop loving you.

Everyone who wanted me to live taught me that I had to get ahold of my love for you. I had to wrestle it to the ground, smother it, bury it, because my love for you was so fucking dangerous. I offer this up as my justification for letting you die alone in jail. And I know it’s not good enough. I know I will never forgive myself for not doing more to help you. I will never forgive myself for letting you die without knowing what you meant to me.

I don’t know how to put the pieces of our story back together, and I know that doing it now, after you are gone, is too late. I wanted to tell you and I wish I could have told you and there was a time when I tried. You hurt me so much and you scared me so much and I had to get away from you to prevent you from killing me. I know you would get angry and call me dramatic for saying that, but I also know you were even scaring yourself.

I understand that love itself was terrifying for both of us. I know there was no way for us to be other than how we were. But I have never let go of that other timeline, that other story, where somehow, something intervened. And while I find it brutally painful to imagine that other brilliant beautiful world where you got the help you needed and you lived, I also need to imagine it. It is a reminder of how unbelievably we have all failed you. It is a reminder of who you could have been if you were given any chance.

I will meet you again, on the other side of the veil. I hope you can forgive me when I arrive there to meet you. I forgive you, and I am so sorry. I am so sorry that we both betrayed each other in the most painful way possible. I am sorry we enacted the worst traumas we could on each other. I’m sorry that I got help and got out and you didn’t. I’m sorry that I let you die. When we meet again, I hope it will be safe for me to love you this much. Because I do.

I spent so long reminding myself that you were dangerous. I spent so long convincing myself that it was necessary to bury my love for you. And maybe it was necessary. Maybe if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have got out either. I kept going back to you, because I needed to, because I loved you so fucking much. I told myself that I couldn’t love you and I used all my strength to let you go. I buried our photo albums under a waning moon in the Don Valley and I let you go. Now I don’t even have a picture of us and it sends me into a panic knowing I will never see us together again.

When I found out you were dead, it wasn’t the violence I thought about. It was only the love. The blinding brilliant sharp and glittering impossible life changing love. I only wish I could have used that love to help you. I only wish that love had not been so dangerous, or that I had found a way to make it less dangerous. I only wish that you could be safe and free. Even if we could never be together, it would be enough to know that you were safe and free.

If there is a way for these words to reach you: I love you. I am sorry. I forgive you. I know who you are. I know the child you were, and all I want is to rescue him from that horrifying pain and aloneness. I understand that your violence and your rage and your degradation were a fight for your life against the annihilation of the humiliating dehumanizing violence that you lived. I know who you are underneath that and all I wish is that I could have reached you. You are so worthy and so important and so irreplaceable. The world is not the same without you in it. There is nothing that can ever make up for the loss of you. I am so sorry for how you were treated in this life. I know how much pain you were in and you did not deserve to die in that pain.

I love you Ashton. May you be safe, and happy, and free. May you receive the justice you never received in this life. These words are not enough and are so much less than you deserve, but I promise you my love is a light that will never go out. It’s not enough but it’s what I have. I will never stop loving you. I will always remember who you really are.