My dearly beloved,

How are you? How have you been? You look good! We’ve grown apart recently, more than I ever thought we would and it’s gotten hard for me. I thought I’d be fine without you, mostly because I never truly accepted that I was really losing you. The belief and hope that I carried with me for so long, was that you’d come back to me, no matter what, you’d come back. I was wrong.

I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember. I loved you the day I met you and I’ve loved you every day since. Very little time goes by that I don’t think about you and us, or what more I could have done to make things work. Don’t get me wrong, I did everything I thought that I needed to do. I worked hard for us, for you. I loved you more than I love life itself. I woke up to the thought of seeing you and went to sleep with the hope of seeing you again the next day.

In elementary school, I thought you were beautiful. I couldn’t really make sense of why you were so beautiful yet, but I knew that you were. Our relationship was already a strong one, but it had so much more growing to do. The funny part was that my mom loved you long before I found you and that helped us grow together so much more. All the time, I was trying to figure out how I could make you not just my “today” and my “yesterday”, but my “tomorrow”, “the next day” and my “forever”.

Middle school came and we grew together, becoming closer than we had ever been before, but still with so much progress to be made. I started asking others for help with you, so that I could show you how much I truly deserved you and earn a future with you. I went wherever I could to find answers to my questions about you. You were my goal. You made me happier than anything else in the world. Even on my worst days, as soon as I was reunited with you, all the bad faded away and everything was okay again.

At the beginning of high school, we saw one of our first major obstacles, when my family and I moved away. I thought I was going to lose you. I was in a new place, so far from anything ever experienced in my life. It was a hard time for me, trying to figure out how I could reconnect with you, because I knew that if I lost you, I’d lose myself too. I was lucky, that’s the only way I can put it, because that’s exactly what it was. I found a way to see you as often as I could, in this foreign place and you saw me smile again. Our relationship was tough to make work, but we did, for as long as we could.

Then I got lucky again and my parents brought me back home, not just to the place I’ll call home until the blinds shut on this life, but to you. I will be forever grateful to them for that. I had a new motivation and fire under me. We were growing together, and things were becoming real. I was, and still am, growing into a man, and I started to see what I had to do to be perfect, like you deserved me to be, at least what I thought I had to do.

For some reason, right around that time, a new reality began to set in; I wasn’t good enough for you. I had always done everything and more for you. At least more than I thought anyone else would have done for you and maybe I was right, but that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have done more. It was within my power, I know it. There were days that didn’t shine as brilliantly as the day before and with time those days became more and more frequent. It hurt me. Maybe you made things hard too, but that doesn’t excuse what I did, rather, what I didn’t do. Our future became dim, my love for you, ever-there, but not enough to make things work, because I had put myself in an impossible position by that point.

I went away to college and surprisingly, you went with me. No matter where either of us goes, the other never seems to be too far behind. We tried to make things work there, but I think we both knew, by then, it was too late. There was nothing that either of us could do to fix damage already done. Our relationship was much like my first car, a 2001 White Ford Crown Victoria that I lost to a rainy day on US-1 delivering pizzas, a total loss. It pained me, but it was inevitable, after everything we put each other through.

A rift, that I guess had always sort of been there, got larger. I made a fool out of myself because of you, but it was because I wanted everyone to know how much I cared about you. The fatal flaw in that logic, was that I cared so much more about what other people thought about us and making them believe it. I hardly had any energy or time left to show you, the only one that really mattered, how much I cared. At the time, I didn’t realize how poorly I was treating you, because I was so focused on everything else.

I want you to know that I’ve done a lot of thinking in this time that I’ve spent away from you. I want you to know that I’m still doing things with you in mind, like Jay Gatsby for Daisy Buchanan, hoping that one day you’ll notice and come back to me. I think, but mostly hope, you still think of me. I want you to know I’ve gotten better and I plan on getting better and better as the days pass. I understand that our relationship will never be the same as it was before, but Baseball, I’m okay with it being as different as we have to make it; as long as I can still have you, because I’m ready to give you the commitment that you deserve.

While it’s likely that I’ll never be a big leaguer, or get drafted, or even play legitimate college ball, I love you so much, I’ll do just about anything to be with you. I plan on playing club baseball here at my school next year, I’m covering my University’s baseball team for the student newspaper, I talk about you on the FM radio show that some friends of mine and I do during the week, and I hope to one day go back to the last place I actually played organized ball, and coach the sport I love, in the city I love. You don’t have to give me too much, because you’ve already given me so much, but I promise to give you everything I have, for as long as I live.

Baseball, I know I’ve done you wrong, and I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to come to terms with it. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, and take me back. If that never happens I understand, believe me, just remember that I’ll always be here, and you know where to find me.