19 March 2017 nonfiction, "Letter From the Plane"

One of my roommates got herself in trouble during an ugly breakup. Being the type of girl who is constantly chasing new opportunities to keep herself alive in everyone’s minds (including her own), she broke up with her ex-boyfriend (or so I was told) on a whim, only to chase him down a few months later in efforts to track down what they had before. This was nothing unusual, and, like most things, fizzled out with time.

My roommate, however, couldn’t allow things to go without a specific kind of personally produced closure, and so as she sat on an hours-long plane ride and wrote a long-winded letter. She was attempting with full disclosure to bring a piece of her mind out and onto the page. She could only hope that the person to whom she had already given certain valuable pieces would understand her motivations, and would take the long-winded letter from the long-winded airplane ride for everything that it was.

Of course that isn’t what happened. My roommate kept writing letters, against the wishes of everyone else, and potentially against the wishes of herself. It only ended up making the breakup uglier. People seem to have a hard time hearing faults of a relationship when they’ve just barely ended it.

I’ve recently become very skeptical of monogamy. There’s no telling, after all, when a life spent together with one person will end. How are you supposed to address that? I’ve spent my lifetime examining relationships, remaining perceptive as so many adult marriages fall apart around me, and yet nothing perplexes me more than a life purposefully shared between two people, suddenly cut short. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not really sure what romantic love looks like. Is it as fleeting as I sometimes think it is? It seems like what we’re all hoping for, those stories about people who are meant to be in every way, have to end tragically in order to be realistic. Either someone falls out of love, or one of the two loses the other. Sometimes I think that my happiest times have been when I am not preoccupied with a romantic (or sexual) connection. It’s much easier to go through life with only

And there’s no telling, after all, when a life spent alone will suddenly require the presence of one person—as if they’ve been meant to be there after all.

I find myself wondering sometimes what I might have done had I been in my roommate’s situation. I’ve never personally had an ugly breakup, but I can certainly picture myself sitting on an endless plane ride, staring out the window and watching clouds disappear as if nothing really mattered anyway. I seem to think that, had someone presented me with a pen and paper, I too would have felt the need to explain myself, to try with every piece of me to explain why I had decided to make things happen in a particularly certain way.