Direct Mail: Keep Kissing
Dear Vikram,
I’m sorry to hear that you two broke up, I am. Even if it were for the best or your decision, the dissolution of a couple always hits me in a soft spot.
I want love to be real. I want it to be real for me and for my smart friends and for my weird friends and not just for the girls I went to high school with who still have private facebook groups and corresponding squad names and hashtags.
All of this is to say that I sincerely hope love isn’t just something stupid people get to do.
I read your letter more than a few times, I’ll admit. I had to read and re-read it, staring at it with my head cocked sideways like my dog when she hears sirens. I think we might be looking at the same thing from opposite ends. It’s an enlightening conversation to have.
I’m bad when it comes to Universal Love. It’s hard for me to accept that people will love you to the best of their capacity, not yours. What is a 10 for them might only be a 5 for me and that’s cost me more in relationships than I can say.
I often poked my ex, demanding that he say something nice to me. I took his silence for apathy and he felt I was asking him to lie by forcing him to say something he normally wouldn’t. We agreed to disagree but in my resentment and bitterness I failed to see someone who let me take all the blankets and made bacon without asking; We had different ways of saying the same thing. Even still I find it hard to navigate our post-relationship interactions. We are two people who love each other but the fact that the love that’s there isn’t expressed in shared apartments and butt-touches is difficult.
In the brief period that I was in film school, I read somewhere that television budgeting causes unrealistic relationship expectations. In the probably overpriced, paperback textbook it said that people, in real life, get back with their exes far less than their television counterparts. Characters are always falling back in love several seasons later or “working it out” before the series finale- not because this is a normal thing that happens, but because producers don’t want to pay to introduce a new character and hire a new actor. Still, I root for Tina Belcher and Jimmy Jr. and Nick and Jess and Ben and Leslie and, by extension, myself and all my friends.
It’s very naive. I hope it never leaves.
You ask me what to do, but honestly I don’t know. I still believe that if I am stubborn and and true in my convictions and, damn it, if I just love hard enough I can fix our problems. I envy you for being able to leave something that would cost such an effort to fix. I still find myself going down with the ship.
You say that you found yourself questioning the breakup in the wake of things. I don’t blame you. Life is a little too short for absolutes and if you found yourself with a twinge of regret, I think it’s at least worth meditating on.
Love may cause blindness, sure. I won’t argue with that. I once fell madly in love with a man who couldn’t keep a job, loved wrestling and peed sitting down- but my God, did I love him. I’ve done some of my best work in love, written my best pieces, been the most fun at parties and taken the best selfies. Love is a great thing that changes people and inspires them- the only shame is that it ends.
So I don’t really have advice. Only a story.
A few days after we broke up I had to go to work. I work only a few blocks from my ex’s apartment- not only that but he was away in New York on business so Downtown was a special kind of empty.
When I walk Downtown I keep my headphones in because, well, if I listened to everything said to me as I walk down Broadway I’d probably kill a man, possibly several.
Anyway, I was listening to this song-
Significant in it’s own right, it has the brilliant line:
Take the weakest thing in you;
And then beat the bastards with it.
And always hold on when you get love,
So you can let go when you give it.
…when I came upon a little square of concrete stenciled and painted a little past 6th street.
A clever piece of viral marketing or a sign or some otherwordly advice?
I chose to take it as a sign, but then again I take a lot of things as signs. I see Glenn’s uncertain fate on the Walking Dead as an allegory for the nebulous fate of my relationship. I assume ravens carry messages from my dead family members. I’m the Mulder of breakups. I want to believe.
But maybe they’re all signs. Maybe this tagged piece of concrete was meant to be seen. Maybe it still is for you, too.
Keep kissing, keep going, keep old doors open- I don’t know. But I know, regardless of what you do, one could hardly call you a fuckboy.
All the Best,
Devon.
Direct Mail is a column where friends share their deepest thoughts on the nature of things in the dialectic form of letters.
