hello again.
if we were sitting together right now, if it made sense for us to be sitting together and for me to still be writing about the pain of losing you, you would turn to me and say: you saved the best for last, didn’t you? and i would shove your shoulder, still smiling, because we both know you have to experience a love very profound to be this shattered upon losing it. because we both know that, six months after being told you didn’t want to be friends with me anymore, i would not still be retracing the steps of our friendship if i hadn’t lost something so important to me that its absence feeling like being without a major organ. my lungs, maybe. or my liver.
i still have the christmas present i never got to give you. do i look like the kind of person who wants to keep a maple leafs cap lying around? i’ve tried to get rid of it. i can never go through with those shaky, slumbering plans. some childish corner of my mind still believes that it represents unfinished business between us. as long as i keep it, one day, you’ll have to come back.
and i’ll be waiting. i’ll press years between my hands like flowers, open a life full of bounty and joy and people who say: why on earth did you ever get involved with him? i can’t imagine that i’ll reach a point where loving me can come without knowing your name. in all honesty, i can’t imagine that someone could understand you without knowing who i am. still the question lingers. why did i get involved with you? there exists an infinity of answers. because you were the only high school student i’ve ever seen reading a physical newspaper. because the only fun fact about yourself you could think of that first day was, i like granny smith apples, and i saw an opening. because one day in the earliest hours of our acquaintance we ended up sitting next to each other around a campfire.
you said: look, stars.
i said: if i tip back on this bench, i’m going to fall over.
you said: i’ve got you, and you put your hand on the small of my back.
and the psychology teacher was singing wonderwall, and it really was a lovely september night, and i really did think you were going to be the one that saved me.
i was in the car with my mom the other day, highway packed front to back, i was explaining the whole sorry affair again. she said: but i thought there was a point when you weren’t friends before, and i said: that was my decision, and she said: so you shouldn’t overestimate the loss. i didn’t know how to tell her that i thought then you and i would find our way back to each other, like magnets, and at no point did i think that my turning my back was going to be the end of it. i didn’t know how to say that for all your flaws, for all your jabs and taunts and overstepping the boundaries of our friendship, for all the things you never said that we both knew to be true, i loved you more than anyone in the world.
anyway it’s just another bout of teenage petulance. i’ll get over it. it’s been six months, so i don’t know when the getting over it is going to happen, but if i don’t believe that it will happen it’s never going to, and if one more person tells me that i should be done with it already i am going to scream in the street and never stop.
i think: there is a time when you would have killed anyone who hurt me this badly.
i think: you said not even a nuclear war could split us apart. you said not even a nuclear bomb, dropped on this relationship, could keep us from shuffling to each other’s houses the morning after, shamefacedly asking who wants to go to the used bookstore.
apparently a text message is stronger than a nuclear bomb.
anyway i live in a past where you love me and i live in a present where you don’t and today i looked at your contact card on my computer and my fingers kept shaking but i deleted it all the same. you were already gone from my phone. i don’t want to know your number, don’t want to dial it ever again, don’t want to see my late night texts staring back at me in the morning. they’re accusatory. they remind me that i would still do anything to see you again.
last month i dialled you from my home phone and you picked up, and then i called you three more times, drunk on your voice, ecstatic to hear you say something to me that wasn’t goodbye. you didn’t know who i was, although you should have. i often wonder whether you would have hung up had i said anything. i have eliminated all venues by which i might try again. i think i could remember your number. i might have to try a few combinations of sixes to hit upon the right one, but i’m hoping that the information bleeds out of my brain, along with your voice and your hands and all the cells of mine you ever touched.
i wish my brain would regenerate too.
there isn’t a natural stopping point to this letter. like the long harrowing history of our friendship, brought to a screeching halt on january 9th, 2024, it spills out forever, it defies language, culture, explanation. there isn’t a natural stopping point to my grief because there was never a natural stopping point for our relationship, because after all of it i genuinely think that we are the same soul in two different people, different faces but the same heart. i made a religion out of my love for you, i built a hundred churches in your name, and i’m still walking in and out of every last one, praying that you will come and apologize.
when i go home, i’m always disappointed that you aren’t on my doorstep. we can dispense with pretence, since you will never read my writing. it’s a shame, because you once described it as a series of odes to longing. in the wake of you, that’s what it’s became, your abandonment of me the stark black hole at the centre of every poem. in a cruel twist of fate, only my poems about you ever see the daylight of publication.
you know, i’ve tried to stop writing to you, tried to stop swapping stories with your ghost, tried to stop thinking about you every time i get on the subway or don’t. the fact of the matter is that i might always be reeling from your leaving me, might never understand, might never be able to get off the floor. and it isn’t your fault that you didn’t have the guts to stay or leave in a way that gave anyone closure. it isn’t your fault that you can’t know what to do with the person i became.
i just can’t understand how you don’t miss me too.
you must be half-dead out there on your own.