There may seem to others little point in torturing oneself with echoes of the past but it is our past that contains the building blocks of our lives and our spirits. I cannot disown my past - no-one can, try as we might. I am partly what I am because of you, just as you are inextricably linked to me through our love and our marriage. Those lives, built so carefully and lovingly over the years can never leave us. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I hope that in the years ahead you too will be able to remember the good in our lives. At the times you seek comfort, when your dreams let you down, whenever there is sadness in your heart, I can no longer be there but know that I will always be wishing that I could have been. I will always long for that closeness and sense of belonging that you brought to my life even though you shot it down in flames in the end, even if now it seems as though it may never have been real. Maybe neither one of us can have that again but my tears will go on as long as they need to and I will forever miss your smile, your gentleness of touch, your hand in mine and your lips brushing my face. God I will miss it all so much

In the aftermath I have lost my job, my home, my wife and pretty much everything but the clothes on my back. Starting a new life for you may have been a simple decision to take but aside from the emotional wreckage you stripped me of everything else in the process. You left so easily and yet mine was so much harder a parting.

With my belongings stuffed in the car I boarded a ferry at 7.30 am. In the cold silence, I had to leave our empty home, so recently built by us both, and that wrench went as deep as all the others. No longer a home, just a shell, filled with no more than sad ghosts and phantoms of a life I once believed to be so rich in good and peaceful things. Tears spilling down my unshaven cheeks, I backed off of the drive for the last time in the chill of a late October morning at 4 am. The emptiness of the roads during that two hour drive to the ferry port was such a sad and pathetic metaphor for the loneliness that engulfed me as I drove. You will never know the hell of this journey; at least, I hope you will never have to.

As the boat left the dock, I watched in the slate grey dawn as our chosen home slowly drifted away from me, knowing it could never again be the same. The country we both loved so much, but now for me so much less knowing that you would no longer be in it with me. We had left so much unfinished and now there was no hope in my heart.

As I drove off of the car deck in Stranraer I was greeted by a somber, fog shrouded port. Weighed down already with the burden of my own inner storm the weather seemed gloomily appropriate. Mile after mile drifted by but it was all accomplished within a bubble inside which the world around me seemed muffled and blurred around the edges. My head seemed full of cotton wool. The only thoughts it could hold were those of you, of us, and of my past life with you. The tears came unbidden. All the way down the blacktop as I headed south, my reflection in the mirror scared me. Nobody looking like that should be contemplating 14 hours of driving I thought. I smoked two packs of cigarettes on the journey and made a start on a third. What the hell: right then I cared about little.

I fought down my breakfast all the way, stopping only to refuel the car. Anger and sadness beat me from pillar to post all the way. And do you know, I still loved you every mile, every signpost, every turn of the wheels. I thought of you because that's what I've always done, when we were together and when we were apart.

I arrived on a rainy and miserable Essex evening after the usual hell of the motorways, my eyes red and swollen, my head throbbing, stomach playing flip-flop and nerves shredded, just to start crying all over again over my first cup of tea in fourteen hours. I wanted it to stop, I really did, but then, as now, the tears catch up with me every day. Always just waiting in the wings for me to let them in and powerless to stop them when they begin.

That night for the first time in over seventy-two hours I actually slept. We danced. You held me in that way of yours and whispered that you loved me, that you would always love me. There was no-one else around. I held on tight and you hugged me back tighter. I awoke at 4 am and was sick in the bathroom. I crawled back to bed to sleep an uneasy and uncomfortable couple of hours more, but sleep frightened me because it had made you so real. It is unbearable to float up from a place where you still hold me, only to be faced with your side of the bed so empty. I nearly hated you for a moment but you inspire only love in me even now. But you know that about me - never could stay mad at you for long.

Rattling around in a strange house, no matter the kindness shown to me, gives me too much time to brood. My mind won't stop trying to resolve all the unanswerable questions. I take a walk in the evening breeze to try and clear my mind. Trouble is, you have to come with me. Our shadows seem to be inextricably linked beneath the sodium arc lights. Hell, I talk to you anyway. That's what I do after all.

At the end of the rain soaked street I find a bench and sit to roll another smoke. Only then do I realize that we spent our wedding day in the pub across from where I sit. Its orange glow looks warm and welcoming and in happier times we could have stepped inside. Out of the wind and rain we could find a quiet alcove, share a drink and some quiet conversation as I got lost in the bottomless pools of your brown eyes, and fell in love with you all over again. But not this time. It's a reminder I don't need. It was a lifetime ago but it's where so much began for us and the agony of memories sends me away. But of course, I can't outrun it and you seem as close as the day we exchanged those bands of gold and the wedding photo tucked into the wallet in the back pocket of my jeans.

After resting for a couple of days and some brief family re-unions it is time to hit the road, knowing that this part of my journey will be the worst. I have not traveled these roads without you by my side in so many years. A journey we both loved, you and I. As you slept beside me in the car, the miles disappearing behind us in the night, it was just another little bit of heaven for me.

I leave the cats. It is hard and they cannot understand but they are safe here and my responsibility to them is intact. I kiss them and hold them and my tears mat their fur. So much sadness and more things to add to the list of what I miss. I will be back for them because my love will not allow me to see them go anywhere else without me. We belong together. We will be the three musketeers again, I promise them before I leave.

The drive is more difficult than I imagined, the past a tangible force and a huge weight upon me. I stop and phone you. It is foolish and pointless. I need so much to hear your voice, knowing even as I punch out the numbers that you will not appreciate why. You answer but your tone is guarded and that alone serves to remind me that you no longer consider yourself part of me or my life. I feel like an unwanted salesman. I tell you where I am parked - in 'our lay-by', the scene of so many dawn stops for coffee and 'country slices' but you are unmoved. What am I hoping for?

'What do you want?' You ask me without saying a word.

If you can't understand I do not need to answer the unspoken question. I apologize for calling, tell you I miss you so much, tell you how my heart breaks, but you have no comfort to offer me and I say goodbye once again. For twenty minutes, with my head resting on the steering wheel I cry without pause until I can cry no more. I pull away and don't look back. Our special place is forever damaged and now carries only that sense of loss that pervades all things.

Arriving in the west country the rain has not abated. I climb from the car into a place I have never been to without you until now. The times we spent here, so happy and carefree, romantic and full of life and the joy of living it as an inseparable pair. I feel I have to be strong for there are those here who feel such love for you too and they have been bruised as surely as I. The welcome is warm as ever but we all know something is missing from this picture. Seeing me alone, bag in hand, the tears come again from both of us. She cries for me, I cry for her, we cry for us both and of course we cry for you. Neither of us knows if you deserve our tears but we give them because we can do nothing else, because we loved you so much.

I spend a full twelve hours drinking. To forget, to remember, to blur or to rebuild I don't know. No matter, it doesn't work because throughout I keep expecting you to walk into the bar, smiling, and to perch on the stool next to mine, give my knee a squeeze and let me kiss you.

Instead I drink alone in a crowded bar full of strangers who see me as just another sad casualty of a late twentieth century marriage gone wrong. And yes, I do feel shame. How can I ever convince them that they are wrong, just how special you were to me and how no marriage could ever have meant more? I can't of course because they all know that all marriages have failings and no-one can surely love as I profess to have loved you. But in a world where gentle souls and kind hearts are rarer than diamonds how can I expect them to understand that that was exactly what I believed you were and the reason that you meant the world to me. I believed you were that special and rare spirit even though you have proved me wrong by the manner in which you have forsaken me. I am too frightened to admit to myself that it is the real truth. I defend you in my heart because it is impossible for me to accept that I never knew you, that deep down inside you do posses all those qualities I love and admire and that I attributed to you. Wanting to believe that you have slipped and stumbled in a moment of confusion, a misunderstanding.

I hate to think of you as lost as me, but fear you are even more so.

I have no place to be and no time to be there and I sleep late this morning. The final moments of the early hours were spent on the couch sipping coffee and wondering why. The rain has finally stopped this morning so I go outside to sit in the peace of an English pub garden, amid the mulch of soggy autumn leaves. No hangover nags at me aside from the one I have carried thus far.

For a few moments I find a little peace as the Sunday lunch crowds saunter in and out of the restaurant behind me. No-one comes to the garden but you. You smile and speak waterfalls, I see rainbows in your eyes and kiss silvery dew from your lashes. You make me whole in that November garden but the time soon comes when I have to leave you behind. You too look so very sad as I turn away. Such a sweet hangover I have never known before, tinged with such pain but possessed of such beauty.

The remainder of the day was sad. Thinking about you always made me so happy until now - the change is so hard to live with. You have given me some of the happiest times of my life and also the most crushing and dreadful sadness, These contradictions seem so out of place in my once ordered world, just one more little drop of confusion in a sea of uncertainty. I know it is time to move on from this place. As though running will put more distance between us and thus ease the emotional overload. If only it could be that simple. Miles will never chase you away I know, but I have to do something, anything. Small steps.

So after another night in this cozy place, where you speak to me in gardens and raise your glass to mine in solemn salute of our love for one another, I pack up my life once more and turn the key in the ignition one more time.

Again my journey brings me no joy. I want it to be over quickly and I urge the car on. Quicker miles will be easier miles I tell myself. I try to ignore the reminders. I try to see nothing but the ribbon of tarmac beneath my wheels and the distance clicking past on the car's odometer. I kid myself that it's working but every copse of trees, every stubborn landmark, every place name pushes you deeper into my head. I make only one stop, high on the moors.

At this time of year there is no fast food van operated by a cheerful smiling woman who hands us warming tea or coffee. The van is locked up tight against the elements and the rest area is devoid of bustling holidaymakers, laughing children and resting truck drivers. Suddenly I feel so small in this windswept and barren place and for the first time I can see no beauty in the rugged moorland, peppered with craggy outcroppings of pale granite. It all seems so permanent and appears to laugh at the eggshell fragility of my life, our lives, and the easiness with which my love was cast aside.

I stand and smoke, staring vacantly at some distant point and am struck by a thought, a fantasy. Perhaps just clinging still to the impossible or at least implausible. If only, I imagine, that the parallel worlds created by authors of fiction could be real. At least then I could know that when we reached this life-changing fork in the road where you decided on your fateful direction and left me to go my own way, I could step across into the alternative place where we walked on down the same road together. The place where none of this had happened and the place where we were still laughing at the world and loving one another without being conscious of why. Just loving because it was the most natural and indisputable thing in the world for us both.

You always told me you believed in magic and I know that I always will, but you let our magic die. I dread to think of you lost in another place without your magic, a place where you may never get it back. My cigarette burns my fingers and snaps me back to the present. Magic or not, it is just another dream now, washed up with the rest by a late night phone call from a stranger.........