Don’t respond to this.
I first thought about speaking to you again after Mother’s day, last year. Your first without her. Still and always a glutton for punishment, I was browsing through your photos and notes and stumbled upon your entry about her death. We talked about it when we were together, I’d seen this love and this heartbreak before, but mostly I saw confusion and anger. Reading your words, I was reminded that you had lived a life that I had never heard, had a full heart cultivated by a woman I would never meet, and a soul so vulnerable that it took everything in me not to love you again just because I wanted to absorb all of your pain. I was reminded of that version of you that you had worked so hard to, and succeeded so well at, hiding away from me. This pure, emotional, kind, and genuine person who bares all of his teeth in photos and holds his arms wide open at his sides to capture as much of the world he can possibly hold. This person she raised, this person she left behind when something inexplicable blew through and flipped the switch in his world.
This has been a theme throughout our time together. Me convincing myself that you are a genuine person, and it’s what’s kept me coming back. Welcoming you back. Falling so clumsily and shamefully back into you. You wrote me a letter once, and placed it between the petals of a bouquet of flowers. It listed out things I have heard some men say to me before, some…
