Letter to You, Sep 19, 2005

Well, I've been putting it off, but it's time to write to you. I try to read old emails, other's writings, other's secrets, and it's worked up to now, but somehow, the time has come. It's been three and a half weeks since we ended, since my forever stopped being, since I stopped justifying all the wrong, and started to try to heal. I'm emotional all the time now. My normally balanced moods change with one word, one action, one thought. My normally controlled emotions have been taking charge and stopping me from doing my job, from being kind, from being healthy. I don't know how to deal with this. Last night, with friends, a story would be told and, without fail, to me it was simply another story about you. Memories from their past, shared statements, new knowledge learned from the open and highlighted textbook in front of them, to me, like always, it was all about you. They told their stories, and when the silence fell again as they turned back to their studies, I stated simply and quietly, "I hate Her."

Don't you understand? I don't want you to be my everything anymore. Why do you think I've stopped writing to you? Why do you think I put this letter off for so long? Of course I won't send it, I never intended on sending it, but I don't want you to be everything anymore. I don't want my only way to deal to be you. Because here I am, telling you about my problems, telling you about you.

I've been trying to focus on someone else. I've been trying to take all this emotional energy, confused as it is, and put it on someone else. I've read my new favorite author and gone against her sage advice that I'm better off healing on my own, sitting alone in a restaurant with only a cup of tea to help me through.

I'm trying everything to help me through. I've cut my hair—it astounds me that you don't know that and haven't seen it and made me believe how beautiful I am—I've started drinking coffee every morning and alcohol almost every night. I take sleeping pills and sleep on the couch. I think about getting tattoos and smoking pot.

I sometimes carry my medal with me, hidden in my pocket; that happened before you. I won that medal years before I knew you existed. I hold it in my hand, and wear it around my neck with only underwear and a tank top, feeling it's cold medal penetrating through to my white skin. You used to kiss my stomach to make me feel pretty. Was it because you think I'm pretty, or because I asked you to and always smiled when you were finished?

Sometimes I'll rub the engraved front with my thumb, trying to take this physical evidence into account as I plead the case of a life I once had before you, and the possibility of a life without you in the future. I've only known you for 4 years, 7 months and 5 days. I remember the first time I saw you, looking up from a bed on the floor, in the warm light of morning. We still both know our first words to one another and laugh at the memory.

My life once existed without you. I had over 17 years where I lived and breathed and walked and ate and was without even knowing of your existence. You've been in my life for only a fifth of it, and yet I cannot remember those other four fifths. Every story I had, every experience, it feels like you were there, somehow hidden inside my heart, just waiting for me to take a vacation to come meet you. Waiting for your emails fighting for my friendship when I was too scared. Waiting to move out here with so little support, but definitely with yours.

I'm here and you're not anymore. You don't know I went to the football game with Beth on Saturday or that I'm the staff advisor for the Vagina Monologues this year. You don't know what a great game we had last week and that when we went out for a beer afterwards you were my "ex-girlfriend." I choked on the word and couldn't understand it coming from my mouth, but I said it and that's who you are now.

I find myself pleading for you to be around, to call me, to drive here and see me and tell me that you can't live without me. Drive here and say that you'd do anything for me to be with you.

I don't know how to live without you. It's been three and a half weeks and I'm still here, sitting, hurting, forcing my way through the day. There are good times. There have always been the good and the bad times, but I don't come home to you.

How can you no longer be a part of my life? How can I go on living without you? How can I ever kiss someone else, or hold someone else the way I held you? No one fits inside my arm as we sleep the way you do. No one knows me the way you do, and what if no one else ever will.

Will you stay in my life? Was that our problem from the beginning? That I, or we, allowed our friendship to always be number one, and that way our love could never surpass. Has my love surpassed? Will I ever be able to be your friend without needing to be your love? Will you ever be anything other than my love?

I hate you and love you all at the same time. I want you to need me. I want you to need me so badly. I know I pretend to be strong and everyone tells me how great I'm doing, but if you did something and asked for me back, if you showed your love somehow and compromised and asked for me to be there, I think I would be there. If you just wanted me in some way.

Laura H asked how I was doing this morning. She asked if I was alright and I gave the bullshit answer of it being hard but I'm getting through. Then, in her silence, honesty crept in and I looked her in the eye to ask, "Isn't it supposed to get easier?"

It's not easier. It hasn't gotten any easier to be without you, to live a life without you, to go home and not have you there. I have not gotten used to it. I truly can't imagine that void ever being filled. Perhaps there will be someone else, and that someone can find their own way and fill me in in a way I didn't know I needed. No one will ever fill in your holes. You are different from anyone on this earth and you're the only one I want.

It hasn't gotten easier yet. Is it true that time will heal my wounds? "They say, time will, make all this go away, but it's time that has taken my tomorrows, and turned them in to yesterdays." I don't want Ben Harper to be right.

When I called you, when I wrote to you, when I called you crying and pleading for answers, you responsded simply and without emotion. You didn't want anything to be "too soon." Too soon? For what? For pain? Do you not feel it? Does it not control your days and nights, keeping you from feeling any sense of control or love?

It is not that I am alone. I'm not. I have so many friends giving me support and love. It is that I am without you. That's different than alone. Alone means the lack of people around me. Alone means the option that it will be better again as soon as the people return. I am not alone. I am without you. For that, I fear, there is no cure. There is no way that you can walk in and things will be the same.

No, it has not gotten any easier. Not by any means. It has, in fact, gotten harder. The faith I still hold in our love that may never go away, grows weaker and weaker hurting me more and more each day. Each day without you is not a day I grow stronger, but a day I grow sadder.

This letter, this failure to fight the unhealthy urge of continuing to give you all of the power, this only hurts me more. I fear I will never stop wanting to write to you. I fear the only way for me to survive this awful experience and turn in life is to continue to write to you and give you all the power. If I just write to you every night like I did oh so many years ago, if I continue to live in my world where my love for you overrides and cures all, I do not know who I will become.

I need you. I hate you. I want you. I will never stop loving you.

I will never stop loving you.

your starlet