Joshua, I wanted to share my story with you because I think it’s different to a lot of the ones you already have. You see, my girlfriend left me five years before I asked you for a spell. It wasn’t like those stories of people who had just split up, and it wasn’t like the ones where the couple had never been together before. It was somewhere in between.
I guess I should back up and give you some background. I read all the stories on your page over and over while I was waiting for my spell and they gave me hope. Most people talked a bit about how they met, so I will do the same.
I met Rachel on a skiing trip. I literally bumped into her on the side of a mountain. We hit it off, went for drinks, then dinner, met up the next day and the next, and the next. She was with her family, so I got to meet them and got on well with them. I was skiing with friends so Rachel met all my best friends as well. It was like a fast track way to start a relationship, although we just thought it was a holiday romance at the time.
We agreed to call each other after we went our separate ways. I had a horrible feeling that when she got back to real life Rachel would forget all about me, but she was as into me as I was into her, because she called me the moment she got back to her apartment — I was still travelling home.
We met up a week later, and stayed at a hotel about halfway between where we both lived. It was our first night together, and for me it confirmed that this was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I still didn’t know exactly how she felt, and I didn’t want to push it. I’d made that mistake with other women in the past, trying to push them into a relationship before they were ready. So I played it cool.
We kept on seeing each other over the weeks and months, fell deeply in love, and when Christmas came I casually said perhaps by next Christmas we would be celebrating the holidays in our own home together. She smiled and kissed me and said she hoped so. My heart melted.
But it was never to be. We spent most of the year kind of but not quite living together. She would stay and mine and I would stay at hers, and we’d spend weekends together. But by November I knew the writing was on the wall. She started making excuses about why she couldn’t come to my place. I always said I would go to hers instead, but she had more excuses about why that wouldn’t work. I knew she was drifting away, and I couldn’t make it stop.
She finally broke things off in mid-December. At least she had the decency to do it in person and not by text or something. I asked why, she couldn’t tell me. She said we just weren’t right for each other. I asked her if there was someone else and she said no. I believed her.
I spent that Christmas alone. I could have gone to family or friends, but I would have been miserable company so I pretended the holidays weren’t happening, booked a last minute flight to anywhere that wouldn’t remind me of Rachel, sat in a hotel room for a week and hid from the world.
The next year was hard. I couldn’t think about meeting anyone else, despite the efforts of my friends to set me up with single ladies.
The second year it was a little easier. I agreed to go on some dates, mainly to appease my friends, but my heart wasn’t in it and it wasn’t fair on the women I was meeting so I stopped that.
The third year I thought I was finally getting over Rachel. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in all that time. I was tempted to stalk her on facebook, but I always resisted. I was terrified I would see pictures of her having a wonderful time with a new man and that would have broken me, so I always walked away.
I went on more dates that year, and wound up with a woman who was very nice, nothing like Rachel, and who seemed to like me. We went on more dates, we slept together, and I thought I was getting my life back on track.
But something was wrong. It took me months to see it, but the fact was she just wasn’t Rachel. Despite my best efforts, I was still in love with a woman I hadn’t seen in years. I confided all this to a very close friend of mine, and she said I was being stupid, that I wasn’t in love with Rachel, I was in love with a memory of Rachel. She said if I was to see her now she would be a different person, with three years of new experiences and life behind her. Whoever she was now, she wasn’t the same person I had been with. I could see her point, but honestly Joshua it didn’t help.
It did convince me to keep trying with my new girlfriend though, and I stuck at it for a few more months.
It was no good. I couldn’t get Rachel, or her memory, or whatever it was, out of my head. I had to end it for the sake of my girlfriend. She wasn’t surprised and didn’t object. She just said, “Rachel, right?” I couldn’t look her in the eye. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I know. I always knew. I hoped you’d get over it, but I’m never going to be her. Nobody is. I hope you find happiness somewhere, Donald.” And that was the last I saw of her.
I went back into depression after that. I was so lost. I couldn’t be with Rachel, and nobody else was ever going to come close. I had to face the idea that I was going to spend the rest of my life alone.
Then one day someone sent me a link to your page, Joshua. I can’t prove it, but I think it was my ex girlfriend. I didn’t recognize the email address, and although I replied asking who it was, I never heard back.
So there I was looking at your page and thinking, is this real? Or is someone winding me up? I expect you get that a lot. I read a love spell story, then another, and another, until I had read everything. It had got dark outside and was late, time had flown by without me realizing it. I went to bed and lay awake for hours, thinking about everything I’d seen on your page.
It sounded too good to be true. On the other hand, what did I have to lose by getting in touch with you? The answer was hope. It struck me that as I had read those stories I had built up hope. As long as I did nothing, the hope would always be there in the back of my mind. It was a feeling I had not experienced in years, and it was like a drug. I wanted to hang onto the hope. So I didn’t get in touch with you.
Instead I threw myself into my work and tried not to think about Rachel. Every time she popped into my mind (it was a lot), I grabbed onto the shred of hope that you could cast a spell and bring us together, and that hope would see me through the rest of the day.
It was madness, I can see that now. What use was hope if I wasn’t going to do anything about it? On the other hand I was terrified that if I took that step and the spell didn’t work, I’d lose the hope.
Finally I had some kind of awakening. I thought, what if you do a spell and it doesn’t work? Yes, I will have lost hope, but I would just be back to where I was before. I had spent years without hope. I would be no worse off than before. I am ashamed to admit it took me so long to see this simple truth.
When I went back to your page and asked for your help, my fingers were trembling as I typed in her name. I had put too much hope in this thing, and now I was making it real.
I have to say, Joshua, your communication was outstanding. Every step of the way you kept in touch and abreast of what was happening. Right from day one. Even after the spell was cast you stayed in touch. In a way that made it harder for me. You see I made the decision after I asked for your help that I would do my best to forget about the spell. I was so terrified of disappointment that I tried to convince myself the spell wasn’t happening and that I would never see Rachel again. I figured that way, if it did work, it would be a brilliant surprise.
Well you know what happened next, Joshua. It took about four weeks, maybe five, and I got an email…from Rachel. I don’t know how I imagined she would try to reconnect with me if my dreams ever did come true, but I didn’t think it would be by email! To say I was surprised would be an understatement. For five years, since the day she left me, I had not heard a word from her. Nothing. It was like she had been wiped off the face of the Earth. And now…this.
She said, (I’m paraphrasing because she doesn’t know about the spell and I don’t want her to ever see this!) that she hoped I was well, that she hoped this email address would still work, that she had been thinking about me a lot recently, and that she would be in the area the following weekend and perhaps we could meet for coffee.
I must have read that email a hundred times. Probably more than that. I read between the lines, desperate to see more than what was there. I resisted the temptation to reply immediately, not wanting to seem too keen. Then I thought if I didn’t reply quickly enough she might make other plans. I went back and forth in my head all night, until some time in the early hours I couldn’t take it any more so I replied and said yes, I would love to meet up, whenever and wherever she wanted.
To my surprise she replied a few minutes later, saying that I was emailing her at a strange hour of the morning (I think it was about 3am). I wrote back and said so was she! We emailed back and forth. I said I couldn’t sleep, she said neither could she. I said I had a lot on my mind, she said so did she. It was all I could do to stop myself telling her there and then that I had always loved her. In the end she said she had to get some sleep, but by then we had arranged our meet up.
Waiting for that weekend to arrive felt like the longest days of my life. I felt like a college kid, worrying about what to wear, how to do my hair, whether to arrive early, on time, or fashionably late. I couldn’t ask my friends for advice because they had no idea what was going on. I hadn’t told anyone about the spell or the emails. I was still kind of worried I had read everything wrong and that after a coffee Rachel would go on her way and I’d never see her again.
Finally, after an agonizing wait, the day and time arrived. I was at the coffee shop first. Of course I was. I wasn’t going to be fashionably late and risk missing her!
When she walked in, I swear I almost fainted. I had spent five years waiting and hoping to see her again. It had been so long that some nights, lying awake in the middle of the night, I had wondered if she had ever been real at all, or if I had dreamt or imagined our time together all those years ago.
Yet finally, here she was, in front of me, as radiant and beautiful and lovely as ever. More so. They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. I always knew what I had in Rachel, and when she went I knew it even more.
I could barely speak. She smiled, gave me a peck on the cheek, and I can’t tell you exactly what happened next because it was just a blur of emotion.
I can tell you that by the time we said goodbye, I had learned (to my delight) that she was single. I’d also learned that she was in the area to see me, no other reason. She told me that. She said that for the last few weeks she had been having dreams about me, and that she kept finding herself thinking about me, and that she had come to the conclusion we had unfinished business. She said she regretted how we had split up. Not that we had split up, but how she had gone and that we’d not stayed in touch. She said I had been her best friend as well as her lover and she had missed that.
I went home confused but happy. Rachel wanted me back in her life. Maybe only as a friend, that was a start.
And indeed it was a start. It was the beginning of how we got back together. We met on the Sunday, for lunch. Then again the following weekend. By the third weekend she told me she thought she was falling in love with me all over again. I nearly died of happiness.
I told her I had never stopped loving her, not for a second. In all the five years we were apart there hadn’t been a day I hadn’t thought about her. She said she knew that, and she hugged me and we kissed.
It’s been four months since we got back together properly, Joshua, and I figured it was high time I wrote this story down for you. I don’t know how you do what you do, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I owe you a debt of gratitude for my life.
Every morning I wake up and I have to pinch myself to check I’m not dreaming, that this really is my life. And then I turn my head and see Rachel’s beautiful face on the pillow, and there is an explosion of joy inside me as I see that yes, this is real, we are together, and we are so in love. I hope continue to bring as much happiness to other people’s lives. You have a gift, and to share it so generously is an incredible thing.
Thank you.
