You were everything to me, once upon a time. Smart, funny, beautiful, talented, short-tempered and stubborn, thoughtlessly generous, and with a huge soft spot for an underdog. You were the first person to make me feel I was important. You always understood me. You were my best friend.

Can you blame me for thinking we would be together for ever? All through my childhood we were thick as thieves, inseparable. Teachers used to mix up our names, though we looked nothing alike. Was it really so naive of me to be unable to imagine my life any other way?

By 14, I knew I was in love with you. I spent years telling myself the things that gay teenagers do – that it was just a phase, a silly crush that would pass in time. It didn’t. By 17, I knew without question that you did not, and could not, feel the same way about me.

It wasn’t until my early 20s that I was able to acknowledge that my unspoken and unrequited feelings were slowly destroying our friendship, and would eventually destroy my whole life if I let them.

Deciding to break ties with you was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I had absolutely no idea how to live without you. Maybe you were confused about why, or maybe it was mutual all along? Maybe you, too, realised this relationship couldn’t go on as it had been?

You might ask why I never told you how I felt, instead of forcing that slow, painful drifting apart. I suppose I was embarrassed. I suppose I was afraid. But most of all, I think I was ashamed that I couldn’t be a stronger, better person for you; that I had betrayed our friendship so badly. We haven’t spoken in more than five years. I wonder how long it will take for you to stop appearing in my dreams?

I’ve got a good life, now – friends, a job I love, a girlfriend – and I’m very happy, but I still wish things had been different, sometimes. I wish we could have grown up together, as we had always planned. But I think, in the end, we could never have been what the other needed us to be. We both deserved better than that.

I hope you’re as happy as I am. And more than anything, I hope that you never think of me, at all.

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