This is my official “done with it” sendoff letter.
This is the last thing I ever want to write to you, whether or not you ever see/hear about it.
I am sitting here, looking into my phone. Typically, I know exactly what to type here, am totally sure of exactly what I need to get off of my chest so that I can feel like I’ve said my peace. Usually, I have all four rhetorical cylinders engaged. I’m full throttle. Usually I’m all in.
These days, though, as I become more open about my private feelings and become more publicly transparent. I feel a kind of reactive internal backlash against speaking fully my mind and my heart. I have become painfully aware that the emotion of a day or a week or a month (or a minute) may not be ultimately representative of me or how I’m really feeling. My recently espoused confessionalist-style public persona has been an experiment in social bravery and a concerted effort to weed out the people in my life who aren’t doing due diligence as my purported friends. This has been working very well, but that’s not necessarily a happy development. I recognize that sometimes this can even give me the appearance of— well— not being self-aware, and maybe the idea of such social self-immolation seems excessive and necessarily the product of poor judgment to those at the periphery of my life. One way or another, I have to face the fact that I wake up every single day with myself and only myself. I have to accept that these are my thoughts, my feelings and that often, verblizing them can feel very much like stripping down naked in front of a crowd. Holding steadfast in my resolve to demonstratively love the emotional form within myself by making no endeavor to mask it has been a means of tempering my high self-monitoring in the interest of developing relationships in which I feel as though I have real emotional breathing room, where I can be what I see to be my authentic self, so that maybe (just maybe) I can learn to accept and love even the parts of me I think of as impurities.
Wow, that was a long explanation for that.
I am sitting here, still staring at my phone. I am trying to think of how I would want to address you if I knew it was the last time, how I would want to talk to you if I was sure I never would again.
I think I would want to be gentle, despite all my justified anger at you.
No amount of talking will ever properly outline our relationship, its impact upon me, or the damage it ultimately did to me (and why). No amount of talking can create an adequate facsimile of my feelings inside anyone else, and I’m not even 100% sure what they really are.
The ugly thing out of the way first, though. I do not like who you currently are at all. But I think explaining that would be redundant. You have a working memory and a conscience, should you feel motivated to use them. It serves little purpose to wave the things about yourself that you hide from in your face so that you can better resent and deride me. I’ll refrain. But the point must be made: the fact that there is no longer any home here in my life or heart for the current you needs to be communicated, gotten out of the way, before I can keep writing. I want nothing to do with you anymore. Nothing at all.
And again I’m sitting here, looking at my phone. Eight years of memories are passing through me. What could I say that could even approach sufficient? I don’t know. I feel like there’s absolutely no way to fit such a seminal, foundational, substantial chunk of my life and emotional development into one letter. I am diminished in the face of such a monumental task. So often it feels like the right thing to say is hanging in the air just above my head. But I can’t seem to catch it.
Rather than swinging with open palms at the air, then, let me instead tell you about me seven months ago editing and cutting hours and hours of footage on my computer. I had decided to make a movie. You know what happens when I get something in my head. It was intended to be an inquiry on love, on why we do it even though it essentially guarantees our eventual misery when we are severed from the object of our love.
I ran around the city, filming location after significant location: my basement, RPL, the stairwell at edgebrook where we first kissed. I endlessly drank coffee and kickstarts. My eyes were chronically red. I slept poor. I ate in huge caloric bursts followed by long fasts. I wrote down ideas for my narration and execution of shots with an intense, passionate fervor. I was creating something dynamic, something compelling. I was creating the largest love letter I’ve ever seen or heard of. I captured old footage of my family from a vhs player, did many interviews. I thought only of making something to externalize my love, to further align myself with the role I had played since before I met you: the hopeless romantic, the soldier of passion, the last bastion of beauty in a barren landscape of what I saw as cynicism touting itself as pragmatism. I was nearly halfway done with a full feature-length film created solely with my cracked up iPhone seven with the dubious battery and a tiny Samsung microphone for narrative purposes only. I resuscitated my very first flip phone and pulled up old footage and messages from you. I wanted to be the miracle worker I had always been, the ace, the impossibly deniable force, the magic boy who could always and had always won you over with his unbelievable dedication to whatever it was he believed in, my legs shaking as I insisted on getting up off the canvas floor of the boxing ring one more time to prove to the world, through sheer grit, that love wins, that one voice can drown out a fucking hurricane if it tries hard enough.
You know what I’ve been thinking about a lot? That phrase “when does a collection of sticks turn into a pile?”
I don’t know when. And I don’t know when this romantic interplay of you telling me no and me just believing a little harder to endear you to me a little further turned into you exploiting my love and using me for momentary sexual satisfaction or comfort at an emotional expense to me so deep that I was never able to talk about it... But I said this letter wouldn’t be about that...
I’m so used to knowing: knowing what to say, knowing things other people don’t, knowing what’s right, knowing how to make something right. I think I always knew that I would eventually be at capacity, but looking back my capacity was so large. I forgave you so many times over in my heart. And that’s because, wow, did we ever have a story. All those years are a blur to me these days, with so many special and unique highlights. You were the first piece of what I can only accurately describe as “bliss” I encountered in my life. The limerence and the explosions of discovery of oneself within another, those moments were potent and poignant. I still have such a clear memory of me laughing at myself in the mirror feeling young and attractive and loved as I waited excitedly for you to come over for the very first time. That was my very first significant life victory and it stood to me as proof that my modality of living was the right one. Loving hard and working hard and believing hard and manifesting my reality every single day was going to be the mechanism by which I would enrich my whole life. In so many ways, our love made me, Mary. It helped me form my identity. You kept refueling the tank, kept showing me that love was about dedication and you kept filling my life with things to be happy about. I really believed that the feelings I felt about you were you. For whatever reason, it took a few romantic encounters for me to fall in love and my heart landed so hard on you. Everything about you was just another reason to be in love, even the way you moved could stir within me such an outpouring of attraction and appreciation. This revelatory feeling sustained me for years. Doing drugs had made me reimagine my view of the world, but romantic congress with you made me reimagine myself, my capacity to feel something, suddenly there was music inside me everywhere, fireworks exploding within me. I externalized all this energy and that was my art. Even pieces that had nothing to do with you were fueled by what you had given me, be it motivation to get you or the joie de vivre having you created for me.
Again, I could go into a lengthy anamesis of all the different significant moments between us, but you know them. I am only talking about you, the force, you, the space in my life and mind. You were oxygen, you were gasoline, Mary. It is so strange to me, then, that the coda of our relationship was marked by behaviors that some might go so far as to color emotionally abusive.
I am sitting here, looking into my phone.
I am sitting here, staring into your face.
I see myself discovering that the world could be meaningful and exciting beyond the expectations that had been propped up for me by my parents and teachers. I see myself figuring out that sometimes emotions are physical feelings. I see my preserverance. I see my idealism. I see my capacity to experience joy. I see myself here on this couch wondering if I could have done a better job, wondering if it’s okay to allow my fatigue with writing this letter to take over now, if it’s okay to close this chapter on these words knowing full well nothing would really feel sufficient, and just like when I had the realization I had while working on my film, deciding to no longer push myself because sometimes a person is no longer worthy of your effort. I see me in you. I see myself growing into you, through you, and, now, out of you.
In the letter to me that you wrote at Kairos, your eighteen-year-old fingers actually scrawled out the words: “the best days of my life are the days I believe you love me as much as I love you.” But, Mary, that’s never been true. The truth is, I loved you so much more than you could ever love anyone, at least as you are. For everything you gave me: the meaning, the drive, the focus, the laughter, the happiness, the depth of feeling, and of course the love, whether it was illusory or not, whether a contrivance or not, I thank you sincerely and wholeheartedly. Thank you for the support and the insight throughout those years, too. Thank you for everything you chose to share with me. Thank you for entwining your life with mine for such a long time.
Go be a better person. I’m gonna try, too. I don’t know why we love, for the record. I just know I couldn’t avoid it.
I knew I’d feel like this wasn’t enough,
but it’s not worth it to me anymore.
