First, you have to understand the things I have come to believe about myself, true or not. I do not believe that I am unlovable, as comfortable a narrative as that may be for women in my particular situation. I understand that I will be loved, and that I can love. So let us dispense, for now, with that trite story. And I believe too that we are too complex, as individuals and as a mass, to have anything be simple.  So I know that  I can love and be loved, and that the loving therein will never be something simple and pure.

But I can’t help but listen to the stories of happiness that seem so unencumbered and wonder what  I am doing to keep myself from that. I understand this to be at odds with what I know and believe to be true. And I can’t keep myself from wanting it. I don’t want it to be simple, but maybe I do want it to be easy, in some respect or another.

You have to understand that unraveling love has been the preoccupying force of my life for as long as I can remember, despite my whole hearted resistance to this seeming quest. I want it yes, and I have had it – of that I’m certain – but I want to understand it. And it goes without saying that this is a foolish enterprise, it’s a quest with no end and no satisfaction. If I could keep myself from it, I would. But I can’t. It plagues me in the middle of the night, in all of its various forms. The truth is, I simply can’t take it at face value. If I could I know that I would be far more content.

Which is why I am here, more confused than I have ever been in my life. In retrospect, it seems so much easier to be who I used to be – so sure of my ineligibility. But I know what I feel, and what I’ve felt. I play this game, I am no longer a passionate bystander. And those things make this so much harder.

All of my zines have been unsent letters to the people I have loved. They are ways of saying the deepest  cries of my heart without having to be direct. I know that, and it is pitiful in the worst ways. But it’s the best I can do.  Watered down, it might not seem so piercing.

It has been almost a year, to the day, since my heart was pulverized. I feel like I should place a caveat here, make you understand that the breaking was not because I wanted something that couldn’t be given, but because I woke up and the reality I saw was devastating. You see, in the process of unlearning things, there is a hierarchy. First I had to learn that I could be loved at all. Then I had to learn about love that is real and vibrant. Then I had to learn about the way in which  I could survive in love. I made the mistake of thinking this domino train of lessons had come to some sort of finale.

A year of girls. 2009 was nothing but a list of belt notches that happened to correspond to lessons learned. Which is ironic, because the last of those notches – the one that seemed to fit me the best – I almost said to her last night “how can you say of  me – I am a lesson learned? Am I an afterschool special to you? Am I nothing more than a cautionary tale? Are your feelings for me entirely denied?” Because that’s the trouble – I can boil each and everyone of them down to what I have learned from them, and that will never tell you the depth of who they are and what they meant to me. I don’t want to be someone’s lesson about waiting until they are ready; neither do they want to be whatever lesson I will chalk them up to.

But I can’t begrudge her that. I hope she learned something from me, and from the us that existed. I still don’t know what I was supposed to or will learn from her, and I think that is why I am writing tonight.. I thought of her as the prize as the end of this awful road. But that’s never true, is it? Even if she were the last girl I ever wrote about, it wouldn’t be the end of this quest.

I keep trying to see myself as something more than the interactions I have with other people, but I am beginning to believe that isn’t a fair task to assign myself. I spend lengthy hours espousing the values of community, of the importance of having space to be who we are in relation to other people. I can’t exclude myself from that reality, no matter how much I wish I could, no matter the high falutin’ rhetoric I can stymie myself with. I value relationships of all kinds, and I won’t divorce myself from that simply because it might make things analytically easier. I know who I am because of the ways in which I have loved and been loved, and even if that is pitiable, its true.

So this is nothing more than a letter to each if them. In actuality it is, of course, a series of letters to myself. But I want you to know they are more to me than lessons learned. They are moments in my life when I came to believe things about myself I never thought would be true. And they are brilliant, kind, beautiful, wonderful beings. No matter the role they happened to play in this year that Saturn decided to return to me.

But I still don’t know how to do it. It doesn’t help that the timing makes this whole experience reverberate with echoes of that story. It doesn’t help that as I attempt to piece together who I am and what that means, that this also echoes what I have learned. I do not like how closely this aligns with both the things I want to rid myself of, and the things I have newly discovered. It would be so much easier to discount it entirely if it was fully entangled with the bullshit. But it isn’t. I’m going to have to reckon with the fact that very little is only useful or only false, very little is only anything.

But still I am so scared that the Universe has tricked me, that I’ve tricked myself. It felt like only hours after I busted through my last bit of resistance that I was facing this awful anxious vulnerability. Like I let myself fall in love and now this . . .and now this.

I can’t be mad. Or sad. Well, I can be sad, you can always be sad. But I always think there should be some logical injustice when I am sad, and that does not exist here. Not unless I consider the injustice of the universe, and that seems silly. I can’t comprehend the universe having any malintent. In other words – its just the way things fucking are. And my response to ‘the way things fucking are’ is to buck up and take it. If I can’t change it, its not worth shedding tears over.

But I’m sad, and I’m shedding tears – worthy, or not. And I don’t want to be. And I don’t want them to mean what they do. I don’t want them in the context I believe them to be. I don’t I don’t I don’t.

But how can I not believe that the moment I began the steep descent into ‘in love’ with her, that she changed her mind. That is my greatest fear, it is the thing I am the most vary of, and therefore the thing I believe to be the most true. Quick turn of a page, a step over a threshold, a fast sidestep into vulnerability. Up until two weeks ago, I just thought I wanted to be in love with her. And then, then I was. And then, then . . .then?

And the trust, oh fucking trust. What kind of mind games do you play? I TRUST her. I believe, more than I ever have before, that she is genuine, that she is real, that she knows what she thinks and feels and will tell me, no matter what. That just makes this all the more awful. If I trust that she will tell me, then I can hardly believe this fits into the story I have already written. But I haven’t got any other way of making sense of this, except for the story already written.

I wish I could just tell myself that I want this because it makes so much sense, instead of because I feel it so deeply. I tried for a while to talk myself into thinking thats why I was so into this – because she loved my family, because she loved my dogs, because my family said yes she is amazing we have never seen you so happy, because my friends said ‘we like this for you,’ because she was smart and cute and laughed at my jokes. And its true, that would probably be enough to get me signed on. And wouldn’t it be lovely if that’s all there was to it? If I could call it ideal and then take it or leave it based on facts and figures? But I can’t. Because there is something beyond all that which is so entirely right, or at least, which felt (feels?) so entirely right.

Like how I didn’t bat an eye the first time I was naked with her. Like how I believe, in the realest, truest sense I ever have, that she finds me attractive. Like how she shows up in my dreams all the time. Like how I can be with her, but not WITH her . . .live my life in conjunction but not enmeshed. At least, that’s what I thought.

All those goddamned songs are true when I think about her. Like, I have never felt like this before. Like, when the sun is on my face I think of her. Like, till now I always got by on my own – I never really cared until I met you. Like, I could see my life running parallel to hers for a long long time and not get scared about what that meant or being trapped or what if what if what if.

And now I am terrified for that to be real. Because what if it scares her to know those thoughts were racing through my mind? Because what if she only thought she felt deeply for me? What if I was merely a comfortable place for her to rest along her journey out of something she didn’t want? Because what if I let myself fall hard for someone who, once again, thinks I’m real neat but would rather I just be their buddy?

I am so afraid of being a time bomb of emotion. What if I told her I was sad and she saw the intensity of it and runs? How many people before have done that? How many have I imagined doing that so I didn’t have to live into a different reality?

Tonight I sat and told the girl I call myself (10 years younger) that being real is the best we can do. That sitting back and taking what we can get is the worst possible option, to always always always say what we feel because it is the surest thing we have. I told her – break that girls heart if your realities don’t match up. And here I sit, hovering on the other edge of the coin, too afraid to be 100% real with this person who I, yes, adore because I don’t want to scare her off.

I need a good talking to, and its embarrasing to know that if I were just a little on the outside I might be able to say the things I need to hear:

This is probably not about you. Be real, be honest, and decide based on what works best for who you are, heartbreak is a part of what this is, sometimes the timing is just bad, change and alteration does not break things but can make them better.

But I am on the inside. And it is scary in here. Just me and the realities I have known, which are not the ones I want to replicate. I try and remind myself that my most recent experience was with someone who tried so hard but just never really knew what they felt and so I was confused and broken with a lack of information; try and comfort myself with knowing that THIS is not THAT.

And what hurts the worst is that  am reduced to that most basic of human truths: I want to be loved.

How do I tell her that it is not the form but the intention that matters? How do I say, its how you feel not what we call it? How do I convince myself that saying that and meaning it is not settling? That saying that and meaning it will not scare her away? Because that is how I feel: call this what you will, name it how you like, shape it how it suits you, I don’t care. But please don’t let me be a fool for loving you and thinking you loved me, and having it be a lie.

I don’t want to reify what I have become: someone so careful at the outset that they come across as insensitive, hateful, hurtful, distanced, withdrawn, unavailable, wish-washy, hot-and-cold, hard. But I have done this because of what I perceive to be true: that once I roll the guard down, I will become so insatiable and intense and crazy and needy and explosive that I will be unattractive.

In simpler terms: its safer to be unavailable than to have poured your passion somewhere and have it rebuked. Except, there are consequences to that  - consequences I don’t want to face anymore.

So I have to learn how to let go of the story I have written, even if its true, even if it perversely comforting. Because it will never be always true. it will never be entirely true – not even now.

So I have to breathe – and blog- through this. And remind myself that no matter the outcome, what has happened here has proved something to be true, the thing I thought made it ‘real’ (and maybe still does) – that I can be loved easily, organically, beautifully – regardless of time, of circumstance, of extenuating circumstance. And more than that, that I can handle whatever tiny truths in my fucked up narrative might exist in my life because they are always also connected to the truths I never thought I could believe in.

I have commited myself to trying new ways of being. You are an excellent test case, because (for the most part) I do not gravitate towards the patterns I have grown accoustomed to when you are around. But I cannot entirely rid myself of the things I do, the ways in which I think about the world.

I can see myself through a lens of anxiety. I am learning more and more about what anxiety spells out for me in my life, perhaps because the last 6 months have brought my anxiety into such sharp focus. I never would have guessed that I would deal with the most substantial heartbreak of my life with lip chewing sleepless anxiety. But I did. I was forced to abuse drugs or seek out herbal therapies in order to be able to sleep even a few hours a night. I found myself vibrating to a mind numbing pitch, shaking and squirming even at my most seemingly relaxed. Even now, having slowed the baseline, I still find evidence of my otherwise invisible anxieties marked across my body – bloody cuticles and lack of fingernails, a giant sore on the inside of my lip.

I chewed that hole yesterday, and it was because of you. The situation which brought about the circumstance for this sore is obvious and even understandable. But when have I ever stopped there? I was rattled by the subsurface potential meanings, the bulk behind the swelling in the lip.

I have to stop and really think about what you said, even the things I would rather brush over and consider unimportant. Someone once told me that when a girl tells you she is a mess, you should run in the other direction immediately, no matter how strong the inclination to think it doesn’t matter or that you can fix it or ride it out.

I didn’t really hear that when you said it, maybe because it came as no real surprise to me, although the rest of what you said did, or sort of did. I know that you are a mess, have witnessed it (to some extent at least) unfurl in front of me. But your messiness is so familiar that it doesn’t feel shocking orr scary. I can handle existential meaninglessness, it is a perpetuality for me, although my methods for handling it are vastly different from yours. But I understand how the brain can pre-empt the heart, or vice versa. I understand the insanity which this causes in light of a frustrating self awareness. I can relate to the ability to be able to name everything that is happening and still be powerless against it, and to lose even more of your sanity when your realize that your knowingness, the thing you most prize, has fucked you over.

What I was surprised to hear was that I make you happy, or that you are happy in my presence. That’s what you said, I think, because you are as precise as I am when language is involved. You are happiest in my presence, which means that I do not control your happiness, but I can possibly create the context for it.  Surprised too, that this was something you  valued, that you found appealing about me. Surprised to hear that you think of you and I as a potential youandi, that you consider a reality of that something attractive.

I did not respond immediately, something which I am proud of. I did not jump at the potentiality, and I always jumpp at potentiality. Maybe its just because I was stoned, maybe it was because I wanted to be careful with what you had told me, indicate my ambuguity while affirming yours. Because you did not force your desire on me – how could you have, when it is as illusive as it is? I waited until hours later to say, well, lets see what happens. Lets keep doing what we have been doing and see where it goes?

I don’t even know what I meant by that, although I may very well have known more when I said it. I still have not unravelled the great lesbian mystery of friendship-love-sex which eluded me so many years ago.

I love you. I know this. I know it because I almost said it to you, felt it bubble up from my throat as I was hugging you goodbye and stopped it not because I thought you might rebuff me but because I spent concentrated hours just weeks before telling you that I did not  believe in love, because I don’t. I love you and I know it because I think of  you when things happen and wonder what you would say. Because I want you to see all my complexity when usually I strive to keep it nuanced.  Because I am both terrified and excited that you will see me at my rawest.

And I am attracted to you. I know this because I caught a glimpse of your belly the other night and felt a swell through my body. I know this because when I looked at your face the other night, after you had told me how you felt, I saw only radiance and none of your flaws. Because your eyes were deeper and more reflective than any I have ever seen. Because I still remember the smell of your sweat and the fragility of your bones, although it has been so long since either were in my reality.

But what does that mean? Because I could go on loving you in the way I have for the last year and not be so terribly troubled. I would still find you both engaging and enraging, I would still feel both intense comfort and decided disarray in your presence.

And I am afraid that when you tell me that you are happy in my presence, when you tell me that you are comfortable exposing me to all of your varied nuerotic states, that you mean to tell me I am a great friend, that I am a love in your life but not one of passion or depth, simply one of  comfort and happiness.

And maybe this wouldn’t be in such stark relief if I hadn’t witnessed the particular way in which she can still undo you.  I believe that you do not want to be with her, that she causes you a pain you no longer wish to be in the presence of. But I know, too, the flipside of those truths. I know what must have preceeded them, which must have been passion beyond belief, must have been depth of feeling unfathomable. And I do not believe that I will ever be able to incite those feelings in you. And that causes me some heartache, even now as unattached as we remain.

I do not want to be the comfort you slip into in the face of great pain, although I do want to comfort you. I want you to think of me with longing and desire, although I know that desire will never be as inflamed as it was with her, a fact for which I am grateful. I do not want to be what you settle into as you try to get your life back in order.

I do not want this because I am afraid that while you are regaining yourself in my midst, I will fall in love with you, and then when you realize that I am not the deep passion you once had, you will turn away. And you will think of me fondly, and with great appreciation, but not with great passion.

It is funny that I find myself in this place, because I think I may have been that inflaming and unleavable passion for her. I may be the one she cannot leave behind, as bad as I am for her. One person’s great first love, another’s rebounding comfort. . .the irony isn’t lost on me.

And I could be wrong. I hope I am. But I rarely interrogate questions I do not already know the answers to. And I ask them anyway, persue them anyway.  I am saddest with this thought, but I cant keep myself from its truth.

and I’m drunk, can I justify it that way?

I don’t know what I want, and that confuses me. The unknowing is not tangling me up, and that confuses me even more. It is true that touching your naked skin for the first time incited a more familiar and unpleasant anxiety than I have ever felt with you before, but I have surprised myself by the extent to which it does not matter what you call me or how you think of me.

Only that you do. If only on occassion.

I am doing my best not to replicate my role in the grand game of love and like and connection and persuasion. I find myself falling back on those patterns, if only because they are the only grooves worn into my brain at this point. Anything else I do at this point is trailblazing, and I find myself falling out of the forage and back onto that fucking road again. I hope you will see when I venture off of it, and that when you do, that is what will resonate and stick with you; not the times when I trip on the road well worn.

I hope you understand that I have been reduced to cliches, and I never thought I would be. It was not my intention, but perhaps there is something endearing about it nevertheless? 

I want to tell you, but cannot, about how deeply undone I was the other night, how remarkably terrified I was. I fear you will (understandably) read this as your fault, when I say it. But it isn’t true, not in the least. I was wracked with fear, but it was entirely self generated. I was taken by the enormity of my attraction to you, and its unusualness. I often wonder if my usual attraction has more to do with the idea that someone desires me, that my desire is entirely encapsulated by the other person’s want. And while I still want and need to know that you want to be with me – in whatever way that comes – I was terrified, i think, by the realization that I was doing what I was based entirely on my desire for you, and not on the flimsy hope of reciprocity. And so the experience was not caught up in a torrent of wondering, of angling myself towards your desire. It was deeply freeing.

But still I find you far away. As compulsive as I feel about spilling my proverbial guts at your feet, I still find a veneer of distance between you and I, one which I think may be irreconcilable. Perhaps we are too deeply similar? Maybe just as neither of us can tap into the deepest recesses of ourselves, despite so many desparate attempts, we will never be able to get wholly into one another. The approximation may become untenable, I fear.

But, until then, I will keep trying. Perhaps I will try even when defeat is imminent.

Partially, I know, its just spring. No way around it, 70 degrees and sunny will lighten your load a bit. But it seems like I am turning a great corner, as well; that there is something (things?) remarkable beyond the bend. Not remarkable good, necessarily, just immense and different, viable. Life feels possible in a way it hasn’t in so long. Today someone mentioned a great big faith based arts and music festival in the UK in August, and though its highly unlikely I’ll be able to go (what with officiating James’ wedding the same month and my very small pool of vacay time) the potentiality still hovered in front of my face. Logistics didn’t seem quite as limiting as they have before. I got a casting call for a rock opera today (how could I possibly add another thing to my overwrought schedule?) and I thought about what I would audition with. I don’t mean these were idle dreams, fantasies waylaid by real life. I think I could do these things, these things and more. My boundaries are expanding, reworking themselves, becoming more fluid.

In the back of my head, I am nervous. But not nervous like I have been for so long, with carefully measured steps and obsessive over-thinking. I want intention, and I hope my caution will breed it, but I do not want stagnation in the face of anxiety.

Tonight I went out with the ladies from choir, even though none of the ones I *really* want to know went. I did it because I am remembering the person I was for so long, the creature who can and will talk to anyone, just because the story is worth it. I thought the other day about  how I hadn’t written in so long, not because I haven’t been generating enough stories of my own, but because without the reflection of other lives, my stories are just selfish preoccupations, and not worthy of analysis or repetition. Now that my ideas are pinging back and forth with other lives, I feel like a worthwhile human being again, like I’ve got a good story to tell, and a deep desire to hear the stories of other human beings.

In September, it will have been two years since I last published a zine. Cleaning out my art space, I found my letters from fellow zinesters, and realized I don’t know what lb is doing, if Stranger-Danger is even still up and running. I wonder if they dropped off my radar because I dropped off the planet (zine planet anyway) or if something happened to that world? It feels like another project is around the corner, but I wonder how that will work with the thesis writing? It doesn’t much matter. Zines happen, I don’t control that shit. Blogs haven’t replaced them, why would a thesis?

Dear Andie Lyons,

Thank you for the presentation you gave to our class. I was so inspired by the way you presented yourself. I know its probably been difficult to make others accept you for who you are; however, you have overcome all that negativity and turned it into something positive.

Your ability to teach others in such a way makes it possible or them to understand your perspective. Beacuse of you, I have realized that all people, including my classmates, aren’t as judgemental as I thought them to be. I know I can be mysel more comfortably without fear of being judged.

There are so many people that can and will be accepting. And now, if I wanted to, I feel that I can come out to others, who are close to me, with such comort and trust. I see that you have great courage to share with us, and maybe someday I’ll build up enough conident and be proud o who I truly am. Thank you so much!

For all the days when I am so exhausted, when crankiness is on the tip of my tongue, when I feel dead inside from navigating a thousand different fucked up systems, there is this. And it is so fucking precious.

2) The manager at Costco totally, blantantly hit on me when I went to buy soda for the alley. Like up-down sultry smile flirty comment about the soda. I guess I still got it, with the older suburban ladies anyway.

3) My buddies at the alley found this for me. I would say its pretty accurate: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Andie

So, just in case I start to feel really shitty about myself again, I got all that under my belt. And maybe a few other things, too.

Last spring, though, in my rememberence, does not feel nearly as wonderful. If I recall correctly, it was torrential, hurricane downpours instead of gentle infusions of rain – on a metaphorical level, of course. But too, I remember late late snow storms, one the week of Queer Prom, which was the same week that I got buried underneath my own sad and self inflicted victimhood, so maybe the metaphor is more than just skin deep.

I remember other springs though, and they have always felt so full, like when you pour water in a cup and it glasses over at the tip top pushing past the rim, and you are daring it to spill over and also praying it won’t. I remember a time walking bikes through Cheesman park with Mac, and we talked about  how spring means change and ability. A superhero season.

There is somethin, too, for me, about the presence of lent and holy week – the section of the Christian liturgical year that I both have the most conlict with, and find the the most meaning in. There is an opportunity to really understand what it might mean to become new in old ways, to critically reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, to whom we belong. In all of that possibility, the possibility of spring, there is something deeply tentative as well, wholly fragile. Incarnation and its inevitable end is the pinnacle of this; cruxifixtion is perhaps its most tragic archetype. But still, in the midst of that, there is deep and life altering change, a reversal and ascendence of potential.

It has been so long since I’ve felt so much. Maybe it was last spring when I felt, deeply and truly in the pit of myself, as much as I am feeling now. What seems so awful is how crisis laden those feelings were, how gigantic and spun out of control they were. I would like to feel deeply, but I do not want to feel torrentially, not like that – sustained for so long – ever again. The crisis of spring segued into a brittle summer and a disconnected fall. Winter has been icy and so, so lonely. It is a relief to be, again, the girl I understand myself to be – overflowing with feeling, in awe of minute beauty, entirely capable, deeply strong, incredibly fragile. I feel like I have come home to myself, and while that has been terrifying in its realness, I am ultimately very grateful that I am back.

Whereas the world had felt so narrow and absolute, its now brimming with unknown possibilities. There are still tugs towards that old way, towards the constricting path (so fucking painful but so comfortable too) but I’m digging my way out. slowly, slowly, but surely, surely, surely.

For the longest time, I thought I would be a musician. I mean, of course, a professional musician. I spent years in college studying vocal performance, mastering music theory and vocal technique, avoiding the cat fights that broke out between sopranos and trying to socially insert myself with the percussionists, the composition majors, anyone who wouldn’t sweetly shit talk me to my face for no other reason than sharing the same repertoire.

Eventually, the emotional toll exacted became too much for me; I love, and love, singing in a way I have never loved anything else, but the constant defense of my voice and my musicianship stripped the beauty from it all. I dropped my music major and switched over to religious studies, where I had a minor already. The rest, they say, is history.

Since then, my half-trained voice has mostly been put to use at karaoke bars, where I sing Patsy Cline, Pat Benetar, any music that originates in genuine talent but isn’t so intense that my prentension might be noted. I don’t know for certain that you could find Handel on a karaoke list, but even if it was there, I wouldn’t put it on my slip. I even shy away from anything to intense from the musical theater genre. I don’t want to be a show off, which is probably the reason I was an outcast as a vocal performance major as well.

But a voice is what I have. I wish I could tell you what I sound like when I sing, but I don’t know. The sound is pleasing to me as it flows through the bones and sinews in my face and throat, but given what people tell me, I’m afraid the sound I hear isn’t anything like the one that ricochets through the air to someone else’s ears. This was always a challenge when I was a singer, because I didn’t have an understanding of my volume, my color, my timbre, or my range. I had to learn how to sing by feel, which is still what I do. I can read music, but it is a concept I can’t explain. I see a “C” and know that it vibrates in a certain way. A “C” feels a certain way, an A another, E is even different. My favorite notes to sing are C-D-E, it is a musical spot that feels liberatory and existential to me. My pitch I feel in my chest, my volume in my face, the color is at the roof of my mouth. All of this is logically governed by the laws of aural physics, acoustics. 

I enjoy it when people praise my singing, when they say things like ‘you made me cry’, ‘you sound like an angel.’ But that is not why I sing. Music, the kind I make, is something that escapes my grasp of understanding. I don’t know why the way I feel when I’m sitting on the middle pitch between two other voices is suspensory in its beauty, why it erases every other feeling. It is not that I am thinking of what I should be doing with my voice – when I sing my best, it is effortless, hazy, unfocused, flowing. It pours out of me from a place that I didn’t know was even there.

Singing is why I believe in God. What comes from me when I sing isn’t mine, its poured through me.

Lately, I have been singing again. I joined the Denver Women’s Chorus last fall, and was met by a community of awkward women who loved music. It was wonderful to be confronted with the mystery of music again, to be pushed and prodded and find the tiny niche where I fit. I’ve been singing at church too, soaring voice in the half abandoned sanctuary where we meet. I wonder, in these moments, what would have happened if I could have ridden out the awful social pain of being a music major. Could I have done this for a living – by which I mean, could I have found work, and could I have loved it? I still don’t know.

Things are accelerating in a new and reckless way. Even as my sadness has deepened and widened to an enormous extent, I find myself reveling so easily in things that used to feel stuck and impossible. Like the turning of some great machine, gears have clicked into place with such precision that I am left only to marvel at their make. All of a sudden and with seemingly no effort, things have burst forth: my job has become gloriously, minutely wonderful. My friendships have flourished and returned to their easy wonder. My thesis has bubbled up from an underground well that I didn’t know existed.

I have begun to see again the small tragic beauties that life is washed in. The bizarre moment where a man passed my parked car, kissed him fingers and touched the hood. A blessing, or a curse, of the unknown stranger. The ways in which people cock their heads towards one another in conversation, uncomprehending, forever. The strange ways in which I can place a stranger into the mundane moments of my life.

It is not her fault that I kept my blinders on so long, it was a choice I made, and perhaps would have made regardless of who I trained my myopic view on. But I can feel an emerging gratefulness that a situation arose in which I could be forced to remove the cloudy mask and squint towards the light again.

I think that in the turning of a season I will have brought this realization into me more completely, a quarter turn will and the dust will have settled.

There is a sucking hole in my chest, anxiety coursing through my veins. I am betrayed, heartbroken, sick with anger. But all of it is quietly contained. I said before it would be easier if you had left me for someone else; and so it is. The pain is deeper, it is truer, but it is more comforting. Somehow, the loss of the potential for your love feels so much better than the idea that it might be drifting unthethered.

But tell me now, the entire truth. You owe it to me, there is nothing else to lose – it’s all been obliterated, all of the somethings existing in the world that could have been lost between us. All we have now is what we were. 

As I unravel the seemingly obvious truths of this reality now, in retrospect (as always, 20/20) I can see it all staring me baldly in the face. Your code word (weird) translates to love. Your blindly seeking me when she left you wanting. our pretty words, ill directed towards me, where you knew they would be received.

Perhaps this deception was as oblique to you as it was for me. I still want to believe that you are a good person buried underneath emotional confusion. I would still believe you if you told me that you didn’t know you were doing this. But I know now. And I’m telling you: You used me.

And maybe you used me all along. Like a sponge, I absorbed whatever droplets you flung in my general direction. I am not saying this was your fault. I am as much to blame for the imbalance of this situation as you are. 

As much as I don’t want to, I am forced to contemplate the truth of anything that transpired. How much fact was buried under your myriad ‘I don’t know’s”? Because you told me you didn’t know this time, and you did. You knew you loved her, you know it still. You say it so plain, which is, apparently, a quality which you possess in the right circumstance, in the circumstance of her.

Perhaps she has become the perfect foil, exactly what I needed in order to truly, truly realize what was so undeniably *wrong* with you and I. Because your ambiguity, for 18 months, I could categorize as misunderstood love. I could tell myself that you were so thick skinned you couldn’t even feel your own heart, let alone mine. But you can feel your own heart, you just couldn’t tell me what its truth was.

I feel both disgusted and lucky that this godawful technology exists. I am glad that the anonymity of the internet gave you the courage to say what you truly felt. And I’m sure you will think it is a deception that I sought it out, perhaps you thought you were safe from my prying eyes. But nothing is safe on the world wide web, it will always be found. And I woulnd’t have even known how to find it if you had not sat in front of me and gifted me with the single phrase I needed to find you. I wonder if you didn’t want me to find it, you must have. And after all, this deception is no worse than the ones you’ve committed against me. Seeking the public website you post to seems almost laughably innocent in comparison to your searching through my in-box. Ironically, we experienced the same deep heartbreak in both cases, didn’t we?

She is your mirror. You are better off with her, in whatever form you will have each other, than you ever would have been with me. I am not jealous of her. I am not a mess. I am deeply angry, but more at the world than at you. I am mad that God let us play this game with one another so long. But ultimately, I am grateful that my mistakes we so clearly illuminated for me.