Three weeks after I’d sent my first letter to Christopher, I’d still not received a reply. Every morning, I’d wait as long as possible before leaving for work in the hope that I would see the postman and he’d have something to give me. But no, nothing. And every morning, I felt a heaviness in my heart.

I was driving home with Jane after school one evening when she told me about a blind date she was going on at the weekend.

‘It’s strange,’ she said about the man that she was meeting. ‘We barely know anything about one another, but we’ve arranged to meet for dinner and spend the evening together. I wish we could speak for a while before, you know? Just get to know a little about each other before.’

‘Why don’t you ring him?’ I’d asked, sure that this was a possibility in this day and age.

She looked shocked at my suggestion. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘He’d think I was desperate.’

I hadn’t the heart to say that he probably thought that already. She had shown me the advertisement she’d placed in the local paper and, though it didn’t explicitly state that she’d settle for anyone, the subtext spoke volumes. ‘Personality valued over appearance,’ she’d written. ‘Age not important.’

When I got home that evening, I imagined Jane meeting this man. I imagined their awkward silences after they’d ordered their meals, and their general attempts at conversation. No doubt they’d talk about the weather, their jobs, the places in which they grew up, all the while looking for some middle ground, something they had in common to act as the foundation of a relationship. And when I imagined this situation, I saw how similar it was to that of myself and Christopher. For to him, wasn’t I a stranger? A man he probably barely remembered? More than likely. So how could I expect him to want any form of relationship with such a blank canvas?

With Mario and Luana out for the evening, I sat at the dining room table and wrote the date at the top of a page of A4 paper.

‘Dear Christopher,’ I wrote, unsure of what to write. ‘I hope you don’t mind me writing again. Looking back on the last letter I sent, I realise that perhaps I should tell you more about myself if I am ever going to know more about you. (Again, please remember that I am not expecting anything from you. If you choose to write back, then I will be happy, but I completely understand if you choose not to.)

I suppose one of the things you need to know is that I never stopped thinking about you after your mother and I split up. You might thing that I did, but I didn’t. And I wrote to you, too. After you first moved to Canada, I wrote to you every week and called once a month. Perhaps you never got my letters, or perhaps you just didn’t want to reply. You had a whole new life, and I had nothing to do with that. Now, looking back, I can see that I should have tried harder to stay in touch.

Perhaps I could have visited, or simply called more often. But whenever I thought of doing so, I always asked myself who I was doing it for: you or me.
When your mother and I first separated, I used to come round and take you out at the weekend. We used to go to the park together and I’d play with you on the slide and swings. You loved the roundabout, too. I could never push you fast enough.

After a few hours, of course, you went back to your mother, and I to the flat that I was renting at the time. I’d count the days until I would see you again.

Not since I was a child myself had I so looked forward to the weekend.

About three months after I’d moved out, I came to take you out and your mother came along too. We were watching you on the swings when she told me that her mother in Toronto had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I remember I tried to put my arm around her out of habit and she looked at me as if I’d slapped her. She said that she was going to go out to Canada to spend time with her, and I asked what was going to happen to you. You were going to go with her, she said, but she didn’t know how long you would both be out there.

I understood, of course, but I couldn’t bear the thought that she was taking you away and wouldn’t give me an idea of how long you’d be gone for. But what right did I have to tell her what to do? So I said nothing other than that I would write.

While you were gone, I moved back into the house we had all shared. It was strange being there with only traces of you both, and the silence was deafening. It was a month before your mother called. It was winter, and when she passed the phone over to you I asked what you thought of Canada. You said there was too much snow. I imagined you covered up in a hundred layers, barely able to move.

A month turned into two, then three, until you had been away for half a year. When your mother called the last time, I asked if she was ever going to come back and she said she didn’t think so. She had taken a job at a hospital over there, she said, and you had settled into school. I couldn’t believe you were old enough for school already. You read to me once, a Christmas poem that you’d written in class. You must have only been about six or so and I remember thinking how bright you were, how creative.

After you and your mother had gone to Canada, everything in my life began to fall apart. I started drinking more and more, first a bottle of wine a night, then two, then a bottle of vodka. It wasn’t long before I was missing mornings at work, unable to function in meetings or meet the deadlines that they set. You probably think I deserved it (I did too), but it felt as if my world had just stopped. In the back of my mind, I’d always hoped that you would come back to England and your mother and I would come to some arrangement about my seeing you. When she told me that wasn’t the case, I can’t think of any other way to descrive how I felt other than that it was as if everything has turned black.

Every morning, just getting out of bed and showered had become a chore that required all my effort. I stopped bothering altogether, and handed in my notice at work before they could fire me. In the days that dragged by, I was drinking more and eating less. It wasn’t until I spent the whole weekend in bed that I realised something was wrong. It had been weeks since I’d finished working, and I’d not written to you or called for as long. And I’m sorry for that. I don’t know what you must have thought, but I didn’t want to contact you in the frame of mind that I was in. I was afraid that I would only scare you.

I was soon diagnosed with clinical depression and prescribed antidepressants. Though I’ve never agreed with taking medication for mental health, it seemed like the only option I had, and so I swallowed them down with a glass of water every morning.

After a few months, I began to feel better and wrote to you, but the letter was returned a fortnight later with ‘no longer at this address’ stamped on the front. I thought there must be a mistake and sent it again only to have it back once more. I suppose I knew what had happened, but still it was a shock when I called the number you’d been at and was told by a machine that the number I had called was no longer in service. You must have moved, and I waited for a few months to see if you’d turn up back at the house in London. You didn’t, of course, and I’d been fooling myself thinking that you would.

I did all that I could to find you, but this was back in the early 1990s and it was near impossible to find someone in the UK let alone abroad. I’m not offering you excuses, I hope, but rather explanations for why what happened happened the way that it did.

After you’d been gone for a year, I put the house on the market. There was no point me living in a place that size on my own, and it became clear that you weren’t coming back. It sold quickly, and I put everything of yours and your mother’s into storage. It’s probably still there.

Soon after, I moved down here to Cornwall and trained as a teacher. I couldn’t go back into journalism, and I liked the idea of somehow helping others. I work in a secondary school now, teaching history. Sometimes, I look at the students in my class and think of you. But though I know you’ve grown up in time, in my mind you’ve never been any older than the five year old that reached my waist. Perhaps that’s strange, but that’s the way that I thought of you until I saw your picture in the newspaper. And even that didn’t look like the you I can imagine.

Anyway, I think I’ve written enough for you to take in. I hope that this answers some of the questions you may have and that nothing I have said has upset you in any way.

Again, I have enclosed an SAE in case you wish to reply, and, again, I do not expect anything.'

I read the letter twice before taking it into my bedroom and slipping it into my briefcase. I would take it into school in the morning to photocopy before sending.

Perhaps that seems strange, but I like keeping track of my correspondence.