Dear you,

I’ve been writing you all year. Ever since we parted in December, since you confessed your dishonesty and told me I was the source of all things bad in your world, that I was the reason people thought you were a villain, that I was naive and blind and only wanted to see the things that pleased me; I’ve been writing you ever since. This was back when you asked me if I could hear the things I was saying, and I went home and I tried to hear them more clearly, tried to listen for the feedback in my words, and I thought I was crazy because I couldn’t hear it. I thought I was crazy because you could hear it and I couldn’t. But you were so full of contradictions; maybe you were the one who couldn’t hear through the feedback. Maybe it was you who could only see the things you wanted to see—blind to your errors, unable to apologize. A little part of me has cried for you every day. Every day for the last six months I have watched my legs walk or unwalk some path which held the promise of seeing you or of remembering how good it used to feel to be with you. 

I never really wanted to rid myself of you—not the first time nor the second or third. I remember how little regard I had for you in the beginning, how I thought you unattractively competitive and immature, and how over the course of ten months this transformed into a small but sufficient warmth for the way your fingers would tap about surfaces like they had some melody the world simply had to hear and the shocked expression you would don in response to the things people said as though it were impossible those words could come out of their mouths. The emergence of a tender familiarity with the way that one curl at the back of your head that was just a bit finer than the rest would bounce about when you nodded, making it seem as though your entire life depended on an affirmation. By the end of those ten months it was like I had hopped on a plane without giving any thought to my trip home. 

For a while you were one of my favorite people. You were not an admirer of the sappy, but you knew when I was hurting and you knew that your voice could transform my entire body from dead weight to feathers. I think that is what made it all the more effective, knowing that the affection shown me was not something with which many were familiar. But maybe that is what I wanted to think. And maybe when I realized that this wasn’t the case, I began to want more. I wanted more than you, an emotional transient, were able to give. I wanted more of you than you wanted of me. 

I remember when you first began to disappear. Days and then weeks of wondering where you might be, and at that time, distant, wondering who you might be. I remember you lied and told me you went to a wedding in some South American country. You talked more about the turbulence on the ride than anything of the main event. I should have known then that nothing with you would ever be transparent. 

Your last day here I watched you walk away. I watched from the brownstone as you turned your head, telling me you’d miss me. With tears in my eyes I nodded, telling you I’d miss you too. It didn’t feel like goodbye, even though I thought I’d never see you again. For ten months I tried to forget you. The first two and a half I spent in mourning, reminiscing over the past and an imagined future. By May I found new ways and new people to distract me, and the warm months seemed to fill themselves. Though standing 5,267 feet above the ground on a mountain in Maine, I was crushed that I still couldn’t see you even from up so high.  

The first time you returned you felt like a stranger. But then you reminded me that we know each other very well—something you do often because of how easily I forget. Those three months were the best for us. Witty banter, nights enchanted by mischief, vandals in the streets of the city, ringing in the dawn with our collection of personal sacraments. And so, the day you left, I turned away and didn’t look back. I knew you would return.

But in your absence your tracks were uncovered.  Holes were poked in the web you had worked carefully to keep me too spun up to realize I was one among many prey. Slowly unwound, I came to the realization that you survive on the love of others. Sucking whatever they have out of them without giving anything in return, leaving them without soul or spirit, as nothing more than carcasses. I’m lucky I didn’t end up like her and all the others. I told you to stay away, and for a few blissful months you did. And the warm weather returned and the heat warmed me in the ways you used to. I was finally learning to be whole without you. 

But you did not like that. And what follows is a frenzy of confusion and contradictions. All I remember is a great, great high full of promises which were never fulfilled, that you later tried to persuade me were never even made. Somehow I was selfish. I was selfish because after thirty-six months of waiting for you to make up your mind I gave you an ultimatum. The most lenient ultimatum a person can give. I told you to do what you needed to do even if it meant you might hurt me because nothing can hurt too bad when you’ve inflicted it upon yourself. 

Maybe I was too determined. Maybe I, spoiled and my mother’s only child, couldn’t take no for an answer. Maybe it was bordering on harassment, the attention that I gave you. But perhaps you said yes when you knew you meant no, or even perhaps, I don’t know. You had me on this ferris wheel, slow moving but with a miraculous view at the top, yet each time I reached the bottom it was like the entire theme park had shut down, and I didn’t know when you, the operator, would return. So I waited alone in the dark.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not accepting no from the start, and I’m sorry I was too stubborn to decipher it in your later messages. I’m sorry for the attention-desperate things I did when I had too much to drink, and how I let others fight my battles for me. But what I have been learning all these months, and all this time I’ve been writing to you, are all the things I’m not sorry for. I’m not sorry for seeking the affection you wouldn’t give but were so quick to get from me. I’m not sorry for being too loud, or for refusing some negligible mistresshood. I’m not sorry for putting an end to my chase when you seemed to make it clear that was no longer what you wanted. But most importantly, I’m not sorry for being angry with you.  

For the past few months I have been seeing you through a glass wall. Each day it has grown continually thicker, and the more distance between us the more clearly I see you. But last weekend you called me to you, and though at first hesitant, I came. And you told me I looked lovely, and you shattered the glass. I always thought, in the end, the power would be in my hands. Maybe it is. I just didn’t think I would feel so unhappy. 

Six months ago we screamed at one another in front of a church. Now it is the sixth day of the sixth month and you are a year older and in love. 

Happy birthday.

-M