An Attempt at A Perfectly Crafted Email to My Ex-Situationship that I Probably Won't Send
from 2022
Alright,
I’ve written letters like these for years to the people in my life. Present and absent. I guess you’d fall into the absent category now. I don’t usually send them. Even when they are full of mostly nice things. So here’s yours.
I’ve known you for about a year now. Although I don’t think we really know each other anymore. But I have lived in Chicago for a year and met you pretty soon after moving here. I remember the first day I met you; being left waiting for an Uber at the bar and thinking to myself oh. Mostly just a dawning of oh.
A tomato plant. Loaned out book. Insufferable crush all summer long. Eye contact that always lasted a little bit too long. Trying not to stare at your hands. Fat Bear Week. Listening to you talk about things I didn’t quite understand and not wanting you to stop. I’d never wanted anyone this badly and our first kiss was still disappointing. Baking a pie at 2 am. Not eating it until breakfast. My still fucked up Instagram feed. Following you home from work at night. Reading a book on your couch while you took a shower, and leaving before you fell asleep because you like to insulate yourself with routines and waking up next to me was too much of a disturbance.
The scar from when I skinned my knee back in November is still there. I think we’d gotten drinks after work and our knees kept drifting towards each other in the barstools. I tripped on the curb because my knee gave out (like it sometimes does) walking to Lindy’s up the block, ripping a hole in my tights. Later that weekend in your bed I said that it was gross. ‘It’s just a scab’ you said. Kneading my thighs open like dough. Maybe when it finally fades I’ll stop crying over you. I walked past Lindy’s after we ended things and the lights were on so I knocked and Izzy and Keith let me in. They gave me a beer and a cigarette and a glass of water and they let me cry a little bit and then they talked about cults or something else macabre as a distraction.
I gave myself a heel spur in the month of February because I was walking about twelve miles a day in my Blundstones on pavement hoping that you’d fall off the bottom of my feet. I know it's not for a lack of something in me but it is hard to see that sometimes; like if I was prettier, smarter, less melancholic, more successful… whatever. I will say that I wanted to know you like my hometown. Where I can drive for hundreds of miles in every direction and know exactly where I am. Breathing mountain air in from the passenger seat and walking through sagebrush after it rains. I do have pretty homes. Maybe you’ll see them someday with someone else.
I thought you would be good to me. I’m so mad at myself from six months ago for finding crumbs of joy scattered around you and eating them up to find myself still hungry and not wanting to give my fragile little bits of hope away again. I hope you feel a bit sorry. And I’m a little bit sorry too for not asking for much and trying too hard to play it ‘cool’.
It’s so frustrating how mismatched our feelings for people can be, isn’t it? Sometimes the bitterness of you starts to taste sweet like baking lemons into a cake but it's often still just bitter like forgetting to take the seeds out.
And really this is all to say that I hope you’re okay and I still sometimes think about you and sometimes I still miss you but I don’t really want to anymore. I don’t have it in me to be very biting so I'll end with this; I hope you see beautiful places and you don’t have to work so hard in the future and that you’re happy and that you someday have a pet raccoon. And thank you, I guess, for making certain Taylor Swift songs more relatable.
Anyways. There’s your letter that I probably won’t send.
Live well. Cheers.
-Allison
p.s. you pronounce pâte à choux wrong (there isn’t an accent on the ‘e’).
*There's the bite.
"I’d never wanted anyone this badly and our first kiss was still disappointing."
MAN OH MAN
“and thank you, i guess, for making certain taylor swift songs more relatable” line of the century i fear