A letter I won't send. Maybe she will find it and read it, but that isn't why I wrote it, I don't think.

 hi. 

Did I love you because you were a project? I don't think so, at least not at first. Although that is certainly what it turned into, later. 

One night, on your way to the club where you worked, the one five minutes from my apartment, you borrowed my slippers and wore them to work. I didn't grow up with sisters or with a mom who I shared clothes with, and so I loved it the way that I love when people make a nickname out of my already simple name. No I didn't want those slippers to touch the dirty city streets, they were for in the house, but things like that don't matter so much when the things that go unsaid behind them mean so much. Not for a person like me, who feels so deeply in light of small, everyday things. 

It is important to me to laugh and be silly and ridiculous with the same people who I can open up and reveal my deepest feelings to. sometimes it's hard to not get discouraged with conversations that skate across the surface. But the first time we met, we rode for three hours in a car and talked about the social justice issues that mattered to us, and I felt inspired, hopeful, excited, when you talked about your lesson planning and the ways you interacted with your students, the ways you hoped to continue interacting with them. I know how smart you are, I saw it, despite the stupid things you did and said. In spite of the way I had to put pieces of myself up high on shelves neither of us could reach, later. In spite of the ways I had to give up control so you could feel some semblance of stability, somewhere, later. 

I fall in love with things like birthday cakes and people who offer to carry something for me rather than letting me leave it and come back on a second trip. I trip into relationships where people hold my hand like it isn't anything unnatural or laced with meaning other than the way it makes them feel. I remember moments where I can sit quietly and watch things like dirt and grass and it doesn't feel like there is anything that needs my explanation. I remember things like very specific smells, the kind where I can say that an elevator smells like that time my grandmother made french toast and told me the story about the perfect pancake for the eightieth time. The way I understand people and emotions and love is synonymous with the way I remember how my childhood dog's ears felt against my cheek, how he followed me from room to room in a way that so clearly demonstrated how much he loved me and all of the things I represented as a whole person. 

I'm impatient, I think, for more things that make me feel alive. It isn't like there aren't plenty of those things, of those moments. Sweetness, gentleness, those are the words I equate with living. Also pain, and the strength it inspires, but I don't get impatient to hurt the way I get impatient to feel hopeful. 

I'm hungry, and I like to stretch. It feels good to be warm, to settle in the sun, to look directly into someone's eyes without being afraid of what looking into my eyes might make them feel or think. What does it mean, to be an easy person to fall in love with, but a difficult person to be around, for the truthfulness, the rawness that I ask for, consistently? I exist in this world just like anyone else, I have days where I work and then go to the grocery store and cook something easy out of a box and label it and myself successful. But just as frequently I have conversations with people that require introspection and open recognition of beauty and of ugliness, simultaneously. I know how deeply I have been loved, but I also know that sometimes I make people tired, and sometimes I make people angry. 

Back to you: 

you were my best friend, in so many ways. You let me live in two worlds at the same time without needing me to explain one of them to you, partially because you were living those two worlds with me. It wasn't until you started treating me like just a piece of one of those two worlds that things started to fall apart. I don't love you less for it, although I do know you are too toxic to keep in my life, as you are now. I can have fun with a lot of people, can match lots of different types of humor, and it isn't that unique to find tiktoks or other social media art forms that make me laugh gutturally in a hotel bathroom. But when we were at that bar playing beer pong just the two of us, no one else watching, why did you start to get so agitated when I started to win, so much so that I felt like I needed to start losing instead? 

Remember on New Year's Eve, when you told me I had saved your life that year? I believed you then, and I still believe you now, even though we don't talk anymore. It felt so good to have you, despite how bad it felt to not have Eli. I'll never delete the silly photos of your dogs, of my dog, of our dogs, together. Those are memories that haven't been tainted by the way things ended; I don't think they ever will be. 

It's hard for other people in my life to understand that you meant all of the things you said to me, and some of them all at once. I didn't hurt you, and I don't think that you meant to hurt me. Things can't really be that black and white, and it wasn't the whole me that you rejected. it wasn't the whole you that rejected me. 

The decisions that you made, they aren't good decisions, and they aren't the decisions that a good, healthy, person would make. But that doesn't necessarily make the whole of you a bad person (although I think the whole of you is an unhealthy person.) I can't help you, or, at least, I'm not one of the people who can help you right now. Maybe that was the most difficult thing to realize, even if it wasn't necessarily the most painful. 

what hurts? I'm not sure at the moment, because you so clearly made it impersonal when you pushed things to start falling apart more quickly. I don't feel wronged so much as I feel like I got grazed by the wrecking ball of a traumatic car accident. Do you understand? Does anyone else understand? My friendship with you was isolating for how I cared and valued you in a way others didn't really understand. But like I was saying before, I interpreted moments with you the way I isolate tiny things in the world that I walk around in every day. I'll carry pieces of you around with me forever, the way I carry pieces of so many people around with me. 

I will probably add to this later