Hi Taverners. I'm still here!
I'm not sure if we were on the same Turning Tavern threads - I was on III and IV. Nice to meet you, if we haven't "met" here before.
A recap and update from me (it's a bit of an epic) - I came to the thread nearly two years ago now, as I was in a bad relationship with a guy and had fallen in love with my female best friend, M. I'd had brief relationships with women in the past, but nothing quite like the way I felt about M. We met in January 2012 and immediately became close - spending time working together at her apartment (she was a freelance writer, like me), going out for drinks, attending events.
It took me a long time (and a lot of encouragement from the Tavern posters!) for me to tell M how I felt about her, after the breakup with my ex-boyfriend. There were many things standing in my way (or so I thought) including her being older than me, her never having been with a woman before, never having found love in the 20 years since her husband died, and the fact of my not wanting to jeopardise our friendship. However, in July 2012 I finally told her how I felt, and she confessed that she'd felt the same way all along. We began to plan for the future together, and life looked pretty perfect.
We had a week together before she fell sick with pneumonia. After an emergency medivac to HK (we were living in mainland China) she had a brain haemorrhage. It turned out that she had undetected lung cancer that had spread to her brain. She died on August 20th. It was such a shock - I'm still not sure how to put it into words. I punished myself for a long time for having waited so long to tell her how I felt. We could have had 8 months as a couple, not just a week.
The months after she died were a sort of odyssey - visiting her home country to see her family and tell them what had happened, settling into the idea of mourning a person whom I had known for so few months, writing a novel and a poetry collection about it, dealing with the people who refused to believe that we had been in a relationship (since we had only just begun, and she hadn't told anyone in the days before she got sick).
Writing about it now, 18 months later, still feels slightly surreal, even though I've come a long way since then. A lot has happened. M left quite a legacy, and I have been lucky enough to be able to continue the work she was doing for various societies and establishments in the expat community here in China.
Anyway - this has turned into something of an essay. I hope it hasn't created a bad atmosphere in the thread - I just wanted to update you!
Thanks for reading.