The facts and in-betweens of it

You seem to have misunderstood. I’m so sorry I never took the time to clarify; I thought you knew when you wandered into my bed that what was ours was mine to write.

Let me start by getting a few things straight.

I don’t still love you, but I do remember loving you. I don’t still check in on you, but at one point I did. Unlike my other exes, you don’t show up in my dreams. I rarely talk to my friends about you. I hope you’re doing well in that vague way that one does, but believe me when I say I truly don’t have any interest in seeing you ever again.

It was only when you read the things I wrote and reacted the way that you did that I realized you thought I was haunted. I’m haunted, but not by you. I’m broken, but no more than when you loved me.

You knew I wrote. On those East Coast nights I wrote you long distance love letters. I wrote you planned-out paragraphs explaining my anxiety, and my appreciation, and my apologies, wrapping it all up in the types of words you liked. I wrote you impromptu emails: “I love you. That’s all. Thanks for being mine.”

I wrote down the nights we spent trying tiny portions of overpriced food, delighting in the hilarity of some chef deciding on Asparagus in its own jus for the third course. I wrote five-year plans involving trips across the country and escape routes and fallbacks. I wrote my move to San Francisco, finding the words to describe the taste of eucalyptus breeze and the claustrophobia of short buildings. I wrote myself onto your skin.

To clear the air — to clear my conscience — you should know there are lines I’ll never write across.

A laundry list:

I’ll write the worst of you and the best of you, but never the whole you. You get to keep the things you said to me when you were dreaming out loud of a life that might be worth something. I won’t touch your relationship to your family, and if I have to I’ll leave Florida alone too. The way you felt about our meeting grounds and your fierce defense of fully reciprocal friendships are yours alone.

There are bits of us I won’t touch either, not because they’re yours but because I wouldn’t know what to do with them if I tried. Somewhere along the way while I washed myself clean of you I stopped knowing how to feel about the drunk voice mails you left, ebullient and insistent. We spent hours staring at each other through screens, trying to find intimacy in metal and LCD. You can keep those, and the things we did to prove distance wasn’t the adversary of touch.

I have to write the bad bits; it’s how I come to grips with the worst of me and build a skeleton that my future self can climb into and breathe in. But rest assured, I’ll leave the mapped out trips and tickets and receipts buried in a box in a closet until I move and throw them out.

You seem to be forgetting your part in all of this too. You’re free to scream your piece into a void, just like me.

You write the version of this whole tale where I pushed back on life’s adventures, saying no to the lavish trips and drink-fueled nights that you thought were part of any romantic twenty-something’s existence. You can write my neuroses, the weight I put on, the fucking unbearable insecurities that came out when I was drunk. You probably hated the way I picked at the corner of my nose when my hands were unoccupied, and the way I turned my back to you when it was convenient, pulling my hips ever so slightly away from yours to say, “Not tonight.”

I don’t want to know your story, but you’re free to write it. I will probably never be sorry for the things I’ve written. I’m just sorry for the misunderstanding, and that you couldn’t bear to know me after I wrote my piece of you.