I can’t pretend to know how to do this. Any of it.
I’m not like you. I’ve never been in love before. I’ve never been in a relationship before. You’ve learned things I haven’t learned. I didn’t want to break up with you, but I knew I had to. I didn’t want you chained to the impossible. I left the way I left because I believed it was the best way to leave you. I’m sorry if it wasn’t. I didn’t know how to do it, and the only person I could have talked to about it was you—but that seemed wrong. I should have talked it over more with you. Even if it meant having the same conversation over and over again until we hated each other’s guts—at least it wouldn’t have felt so sudden.
I don’t want to ask you questions because I don’t want you to feel obligated to give me answers. But I guess I will say that only to ignore it, because of course the biggest question I have is: What do you want to do now? I will do whatever you want me to do. I made the decision last time. You get to make the decision now.
A
A
Day 6103
A,
Sorry. Fell asleep last night. Have to get to school soon. So this will have to be quick.
I guess I understand that while this specific situation is (very) new to me, the whole relationship field is new to you. Welcome! It sucks! (Except when it’s amazing.)
So, keeping in mind that you have no idea what you’re doing, I’ll educate you when I say: You can’t make it my decision. I understand what you mean, but this isn’t the kind of thing where we take turns. The point is that we should always be making the decisions together.
It feels wrong to type that. It feels wrong to say that there’s a “we.” There is no “we.” You took apart that “we.” And I’m not going to put it back together as easily as typing a sentence with that two-letter word in it.
I don’t even know what our options are. All I know is that absolute silence is not the way to go. We tried that. It didn’t work. At least not when it comes to moving on.
Gotta go now. Promised Preston a coffee run.
R
R,
I don’t know what our options are. I’m frightened by how excited I am, just talking to you.
A
A,
There’s a part of me that’s like: This isn’t happening. Not again. Don’t do this again.
That’s the smarter part.
But the other part of me is welcoming it. Even as the smarter part tells me to shut up, don’t type that—well, I guess I just overruled any sense I have.
This doesn’t mean that I’m over being mad at you. I am still mad at you. But I’m also on the cusp of finding out what the next part is.
Who are you today?
R
R,
I’m myself. I’m always myself.
But I know what you mean.
Today I’m Christopher Mowrer. He has a pug named Gertrude that sleeps in his bed. It was hard for me to leave this morning.
That said…if there were any way for me to walk over there right now, I would.
Which is probably why it’s best I can’t.
Who are you today?
A
A,
I’m a girl caught in her own confusion. I can’t even tell if I’m its prisoner or if it’s the only thing keeping me going.
Preston tried to help. He thinks I’m having problems with Alexander. He gave me the all-relationships-have-rough-patches speech, like he’s been married for forty years instead of dating someone for two months. I played along, because I could tell he was enjoying how useful he was being, and because he was reminding me that I have a boyfriend who treats me well and who is, if I step outside of the confusion and see him for who he is, a pretty awesome guy. I wish I had met him another way.
But that’s not what happened. And it’s easy to pretend that he could have gotten my attention even when I was with Justin, and that he could have gotten me away from Justin. Except…that doesn’t feel true. You were the one who did that. Because you were the only one who saw me and understood what I needed. At least at first.
What happened to us?
R
R,
What happened is that I started to not be myself. I started to see myself through your eyes instead of through my own. And I imagined a judgment there that I couldn’t escape. I’m not saying that you were judging—you weren’t. But there are some people you want to kiss more than others. There are some people you can imagine being with and some you can’t. That’s human. It’s not the way it should be, but it’s the way it is. And I kept worrying each day when I woke up that I wouldn’t be good enough for you. And, even worse, I couldn’t get out from under the burden of knowing I would always be leaving you.
So I left for good. To stop leaving you day after day. And to preserve myself before I started taking my frustration and insecurity out on the bodies I was in. I see people harming their bodies all the time. I didn’t want to become one of them.
Again: These are not things that you did to me. They are things that are part of what my life is. And there is no way to change them. No real way.
A
A,
But we didn’t really try, did we?
(I can’t believe I’m saying that.)
R
R,
What do you mean?
A
A,
I mean, we gave it a couple of weeks. YOU gave it a couple of weeks. You were never too far away. And even when you were too far away—if we had known that there’d be a next day, and a day after that, it wouldn’t have mattered as much.
Here’s the weird part (okay, there are lots of weird parts): The whole time, I thought we were talking to each other, being honest. But now I’m seeing there were all these things we weren’t talking about—like how you were afraid of how I might see the body you were in. And how we needed to figure out that a relationship could work even if we weren’t seeing each other every single day. But instead of having those conversations, we stopped having conversations altogether.
Until now.
R
R,
So are you saying you’d want to try again? It’s still impossible.