But even if I was ready to write you all the truth, what on earth is the truth? How ridiculous sounds all this, how ridiculous I became, how ridiculous my whole existence, my existence without you. Would you understand if I told you that I deeply regret, what happened and that I would undo it, if I only had the power? I love you so inexpressibly, I said once. Nobody would ever be able to love you as I do, I said. I placed our love on a landing, high above the clouds, I said, so high and safe that nobody can reach it, so high that nobody is able to destroy it. You are my queen, my everything, you are my life. This is the love story of my life, I once said to you. Just painfully I begin to understand, how much I loved my love. By all this, I forgot, overlooked and ignored you and in the most difficult moment I chose the easiest way, the way to run away from you and start my large escape. But not enough with that, because the truth is, Tina: I am still escaping. It has to stop; it gets time to stop, time to pause for a moment, to stay and then go a new way. Well, I don’t imagine that my way could lead back to you, how could it. But I hope and I wish myself that I could be a small part of your life also in the future. I still love you. I know that’s hard to believe for you, but I have never stopped loving you. I was a coward, ran away from my own courage. Me, the great Bette Porter, how small and tiny she is. For so long I’d been melting in self-pity and still now occasionally do that much too often.

I would so want to talk to you. Not only here, only with me, not with foreign women on the Internet or with old common friends, no. With you, with you alone, perhaps while having dinner at our favorite Italian or maybe first of all on the phone. Do you think we could do this? Do you think it would work, also after such a long time? Oh Tina, if you could only answer me, if you would just give me an indication. And again I expect the security from you, that I pretended to emanate, as long as we’ve been together. The truth, the truth is that it was you, you were the strong one of us, you held me, you gave me power, when I was weak, and you gave our relationship the foundation. You were the one on whose iron columns I rested myself, against whom I leaned, and who let me be safe never to fall. You would have never let loose, but I had cut the band and had to fall inevitably. In my blind stubbornness, in my career ambition and on the search for acknowledgment of my father, I didn’t want to see it all. But I begin to apprehend now, to understand. Believe me, Tina, I understood. No, there is not a word of apology, no argument. Everything there is is, if at all, then forgiveness. That’s what I would like to ask you for, whatever you would say or do today. I ask you from my deepest heart for forgiveness for all that I’ve done to you.

Slowly I close my eyes and indeed, now can I also keep them closed.

Please forgive me, Tina.