the letter

Hey.

It’s been a long time coming, but it's me.

I know I never really talked to you in English. I think part of me was afraid you wouldn’t understand me as much, or that you would make fun of me for it. You never did, though. You used to tell me you were in awe of my English. You even asked me to tutor your little sister, remember? I did it for three months, and then life happened, and I couldn’t anymore. I hope she’s where she wanted to be. She was bright. Hardworking. I still see her sometimes on Facebook, but I don’t have the courage to go to her page and really see how she’s doing.

I see you’re doing well yourself too. I still see your stories sometimes — your accomplishments, your work things, conventions, travel, all the ways you kept becoming somebody. You’re popular. You always were, in your own way. So many people liking your stories. So many people around you now. I don’t think you keep track of me anymore. You don’t view my stories anymore, and that’s okay. Life happens. People drift. People forget. Or maybe they don’t forget, they just stop waiting for someone else to make the first move. Maybe I’m talking to a ghost. It’s just something that I do, huh?

Every time I see your story, a small part of me dread that it might be a wedding announcement. I don’t know why. I feel like you’re dating someone. Maybe secretly engaged. Maybe still single, still working through your life, still trying so hard to become the man you always wanted to be. I think about the things you told me. Your dad being a teacher. Your mom being a housekeeper. Growing up in the countryside without much money. Getting into college with a scholarship. Starting a side hustle. Making your own money. Trying, over and over, to make something out of yourself.

I know you were just sharing. Maybe you were trying to impress me. Maybe you weren’t trying to upstage me. But in the way you shaped your words, I noticed something. Not insecurity exactly. Comparison. Sometimes you would say things when you were tipsy and think I didn’t hear you. Something along the lines of, How can someone like me be with someone like you?

I heard you. I heard the part of you asking whether you had the right to stand beside me. And I wish I had known then how to answer without making you feel exposed. I wish you knew I never needed you to become some grand version of yourself before you could stand next to me. I wish I had known that too. I think we were both measuring the wrong things. You were asking if you were worthy of me. I was wondering why being wanted still felt so far away. And now I understand. You weren’t beneath me. You were just scared I would see you that way. And maybe I was scared too — scared that if I stepped down from whatever pedestal you imagined and placed me on, no one would know what to do with the actual person standing there. But I could have been equal with you. I think I know that now. When we were together — whatever that was — it felt like my ego was soaring and bruised at the same time. I think I nicked you because you nicked me. I think I made fun of you because you saw the real me, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I think you made fun of me too, even my body, even when I was so skinny, when I was starving myself, because maybe that was how straight guys like you, raised the way you were, acted when they didn’t know how to be tender.

I hope you don’t believe the jokes were the truth. I hope you don’t think I looked down on you as much as I acted like I did. I hope you know I was scared too. Scared that if you saw me clearly enough, you’d know there was nothing polished or untouchable about me. Just a loser starving herself, pretending it was control. Just a poser drinking too much, taking pills, not finishing meals, showing up at your door with scrapes on her knuckles and hoping no one would ask too directly why. I think you saw me when I was very ugly inside, and I confused that with being loved. I think I saw the part of you that felt small, and instead of holding it carefully, sometimes I pressed on it. We hurt each other in ways that made sense for who we were then, but sense doesn’t make it harmless. Maybe in another life, another version, another upbringing, we might have been better for each other. Maybe if you had a little more exposure to the things I loved, more modern things, pop culture things, the references and jokes and little pieces of language that built me. Maybe if I had been healthier. Maybe if you had been less defensive. Maybe if both of us had known how to speak without turning insecurity into a knife. But I know we probably wouldn’t have lasted. I’ve met enough people and loved enough people to know that love is not just about the feeling. It’s upbringing. Background. Culture. Jokes. Anime references. The things you find funny. The things you don’t understand. The little details people call trivial when they’re the framework of a life. We might have worked for a while. We might even have had the time of our lives. Maybe then we would have gone our own ways like every other relationship I had. Maybe then I would hate you, and you would hate me too. Maybe that would have been easier. Maybe if we had actually tried, I wouldn’t have to think about you once in a blue moon like this.

I used to think I looked at you through a distorted, broken pair of lens because I only remembered the good parts. Because I was young. Because I was drunk, high, hungry, unstable, actualizing feelings out of loneliness and lockdown and bad timing. But if it was only that, I think I would have forgotten you by now. Instead I am still here, reciting it over and over again, recalling it more clearly.

I was so fucking in love with you.

I thought it was just a stupid crush. My friend said I was hallucinating it. My mom called me unstable. But being unstable doesn’t make it fake. It’s embarrassing because I should have been in love with my ex-boyfriend then. And I know you loved your girlfriend. That’s why you couldn’t break up with her. She had to dump you first. And when she did, you were so sad that you came to me, out of all people, because you didn’t have people who saw you the way I did. We were two sides of the same coin, weren’t we? It was unfair that you talked to me about your ex, your hurt, your family, your ruins. You showed me who you were. And I never showed you my side. Not because you didn’t let me. I couldn’t let myself. I became the place you came to weep, and mistook that for being chosen. Perhaps you did choose me, in the only way you knew how, knowing I needed more than that. But who am I to ask, knowing all I ever gave you were mixed signals.

I touched you. I kissed you. I hugged you when you cried. I comforted you. And every time I came over, when we were alone, you saw my ex calling me. Every time afterward, I posted stories of me and him. I was toxic and cruel as I could be. And so were you. You never broke up with your girlfriend. You never really told me anything cleanly. You hid me from people I didn’t know. We both wanted to be wanted without destroying the lives we were already standing in. Maybe we got high on the pain. Maybe we enjoyed the back and forth, the mind game, the almost-ness. I don’t even know anymore. Whatever we had, I can’t put it in a clean box. I can’t shape it into something simple. I thought it was two weeks, but now that I’m recounting it all, I realize it lasted almost two years. I kept loving you in the spaces between. Between my relationship and yours. Between your grief and mine. Between what we did and what we never named.

And maybe some part of that love is still alive, but I don’t think it knows how to become anything but a ghost. I don't know how to kill something that is already dead.

If you ever get married, I wonder if you’d invite me. I wouldn’t go. But I wonder if you’d pause on my name. And when I get married, you won’t be there. I would never invite you. But maybe you’ll see the photos someday, and I wonder what you’ll think. I wonder what you’ll call the feeling in your chest, if there is one. I wonder if you’ll remember that there was an us. Not a proper us. Not a clean us. Not one we could explain without making ourselves look bad. Just the two of us.

I remember conversations we had where the words were normal, but the subtext was so clear. We were talking about something else, but underneath it, it felt like both of us were saying: in another life, maybe we would have been something. I wish you had been my friend first. Or perhaps better, nothing at all. Because we would always be in that weird limbo — knowing too much of one another's hidden sufferings, yet oblivious to the ordinary parts. The public versions. The ones other people saw. The daily, boring proof of each other. I felt like I knew who you truly were and then nothing at all, and you knew half of the rawest truth to me, whilst the other half was just a role I performed when we were together.

No matter where you are, I hope you’re happy. I hope you live up to your seemingly unlimited potential. I hope you find someone who loves you for who you are, not for the gifts you buy her, not for the future you couldn’t promise her, not for the version of yourself you keep trying to prove. I hope you find someone who sees you like I saw you for a brief moment. I still remember you telling me the reason you’re so funny is because when you were a kid, nobody would be your friend, so you bought books and comics about jokes and learned them. You learned how to be funny so people would stay. I wish you knew I would have been your friend. I would still have found you funny. You didn’t have to buy your place beside me. You didn’t have to earn your right to be known. For what it’s worth, I saw you. Not all of you. Not enough. Not the way everyone should have. But I saw something real. And I loved it.

I loved you in the spaces between, in a sealed room were we happened and mattered. And I cannot erase the fact that we were awful to one another. And I hope life is gentle with the parts of you that had to learn jokes just to survive loneliness.

I would have found you funny anyway. I hope you know that.