A Letter Of Gratitude To The Ex Who Told Me She Had Cancer When She Did Not

Dear S,

In previous civilizations, we would have been the age of adults. But in this one we were children, with all the innocence, beauty, and carelessness being children entails.

I found it such a breathtaking coincidence, the way we’d met randomly in at a hostel in London, lost touch when I mistyped your email, and then found each other again as I wandered down some random street in Amsterdam…

…and that you were also living in New York–a struggling actress sharing a small one bedroom with a struggling model in the walk-up slums on the Easternmost edge of the Upper East Side.

Carl Jung’s word for this is synchronous: we were two souls, linked as if by magic for a moment in time.

Like the first time we had sex, and at the end there were fireworks. Literally! Fireworks booming in the sky over the East River for who knows what reasons as we lay in each other’s arms, soaked in sweat.

I fell for you so damn hard.

And like a scared child, I never said so.

I remember spooning you while we watched a Hitchcock film…maybe it was The 39 Steps, and thinking “I love this woman,” but for reasons I still don’t understand, I did not tell you what I felt.

Then one day, out of the blue, you told me a lie.

Another way of looking at it was that I trapped you in a lie.

Something about money. It was weird. You had a wire transfer coming in and you needed to pick it up. From an acting job, you said.

You asked if I wanted to go do something else while you dealt with it, but I wanted to hang with you and sensed something off so I went to wherever that Western Union outpost was and I watched you confirm a transfer from someone that was not a professional acting contact but was instead your mom.

I remember feeling the floor falling out from under my feet.

I don’t know why it was such a big deal for me, this decision of yours to cover up receiving money from your mother.

But it was.

I felt like you had just punched me in the gut with spiked brass knuckles that had the liquid form of the iocane powder from The Princess Bride on the tips of the spikes.

I was just so unskilled. I didn’t know how to talk about my sudden onslaught of tangled emotions, what had happened, or why it affected me so much.

So I just started to pull away.

I don’t even remember when our relationship ended or how, but when it did end things got really weird.

Broken. Careless. Chaotic.

We were such children, but that began to end for me when, on the roof of your apartment building on Houston St, you told me you had kidney cancer that may have spread to your liver.

The freshly collapsed ruins of the Twin Towers were just over a mile to the south, and that day I’d visit them for the first time since they fell…all mangled steel, chemical air, trucks rumbling out loaded with debris, and lights so bright it seemed like daytime even though it wasn’t.

I had a new girlfriend by then, and to her credit, she stayed with me while I grieved your near-certain impending death.

One time, she and I were watching that show Six Feet Under and it was the episode where Brenda takes Nate to a funeral home while dressed up as a cancer patient so she could show him how strange it was to help people plan their own memorials.

My then-girlfriend came back from a bathroom break to me bawling on her bed and was so kind and caring, even though she couldn’t help but laugh at the painful absurdity of the situation and also to cut the tension.

And when, 10 months in, the cancer you had turned out not to exist…to have been a fabrication…my whole understanding of reality broke apart.

Because I still loved you. It was unfair to the girlfriend who cared for me while you were fake-dying, but yeah, I still loved you. And I thought you were going to die so young and then it was all some beautiful dark twisted lie.

It took me years, over a decade if I’m honest, to get over that.

I’m proud of a few things, though.

Even with the heart-shattering turns our relationship took, I only ever wanted you to find happiness. I never wished you ill, and I always felt sadness rather than anger and resentment that you would go to such lengths and degrees. It was less that it happened, and more the complete confusion I felt, the lack of closure, that made it so hard.

But ten years later I discovered meditation and once I’d been meditating for a few years, I accepted the lack of closure and clarity with an open heart.

We all do things we don’t understand, and some of those things we wish we hadn’t done and wish we could undo.

It’s just one of the weird little facts of being human.

I wish I’d told you I loved you when I first knew. I wish I’d handled the situation that embarrassed you and led to you fib about money from your mom with 1,000,000% more compassion and grace.

And I imagine you wish you hadn’t told me you had a deadly cancer when you did not.

So I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry that when I was so young and afraid and clueless and confused about so much, I dealt with all of it so poorly. I’m sorry I wasn’t better than I was.

And I forgive you for hurting me. I more than forgive you. I am grateful you exist, and that we met that summer evening in Holland Park, and for the best, most romantic parts of our romance and that there were fireworks going off in the sky the first time we slept together.

Parts of our time together felt like magic, and while I’ll always be a little sad how careless we were with each other’s hearts, I cannot be mad at the children we were for knowing so little about how to be whole in this fractured world.

Our relationship was my whirlwind. It was a life-changing, passionate, exhilarating, mind-fucking, heart-breaking ride. Its weird, devastating conclusion also planted seeds of compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance that, 16 years later, would blossom in my awakening heart as a growing sense of unconditional love.

Thank you for it. All of it. It was worth every moment for me.

I hope you are happy, healthy, and free, wherever you are.