four; Things I Said in Letter Form 1
Dear [you],
You hurt me, you know. More than you realize. More than you’re willing to realize and more than you can ever realize - not just because you refuse to acknowledge that anything happened but also because you didn’t and don’t and will never know the true extent to which I loved you.
I think it was in August, when I was feeling apprehensive about the future and Khoa was saying stuff about moving home and I was just in mourning for the loss of my future. Only you would understand this. I haven’t told anyone else. I made a blog post back then, or whenever it was. I tried to count the number of people I truly, truly loved, not just those whimsical I-love-you’s that leap out of my mouth before I even realize they’re were even in movement. The ones that lie on the top of my brain stem, the ones I’m so afraid to verbalize because they mean so much more, and once I say them, it’s like they’ll just wither away like all words do when they contact air. I counted maybe three. There were two definites. You were one of them.
I remember telling you things I never would’ve told anyone else. I remember telling you things I barely wanted to acknowledge were true. But I told you.
I remember loving you. Not the kind of love that you melted down and shaped into an accusing finger with which to point at me when we hit that last wall and went our ways. It was platonic, yes. But it was deeper than you can imagine. You of all people should know this. I don’t trust easily - not with my soul, not with my heart, not with my mind. But I trusted you, then.
---
To be honest, I don’t know if you’ll even ever set eyes on this letter. It’s become a habit of mine to write these letters in which I bare my chest for all the world and never, ever send them. It creates the illusion that I’m actually telling someone all these things, when really I’m not. If you ever do read this, then by then my hurt has subsided. It’s still there, because time eases pain; it makes pain fade, but it can’t and won’t erase pain.
I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few months and weeks, about us, about our relationship, about where and how and why it came to end. I still don’t have an answer other than the one I’ve programmed myself to say when people ask. “We had our differences.” But that’s about as specific as saying that the two of us were fellow beings.
I don’t regret being friends with you. I don’t regret showing you what I was and giving myself to you to shape as you wished until finally, you didn’t want to mold me anymore. I don’t even regret the fight, or whatever you could call that end of ours. It probably had to happen and was going to happen sooner or later. I don’t regret any of it. I never will regret any of it.
---
This letter is probably the only way I can communicate my true feelings to you without my rage and pride and hurt getting in the way. That’s all I can feel every time I see you. Maybe more so because you refuse to acknowledge its existence when everyone else our whole world can see it as plain as the green on a leaf or as clear as the sky after rain. Maybe more so because you sound like you’re making a joke of it every time someone confronts you about it. Then again, you make a joke of everything these days.
What heats me to boiling point each time is when I remember what you said - that you don’t think you stepped over any boundaries at all. I just can’t believe that you would think that. That isn’t very fair to me, nor is it very fair to the truth, nor is it very fair to your feelings. Blame me as you’d like - I probably deserve it - but the entire blame? It’s either I’m far worse a person than I thought and deserve to die in the worst possible way or you’re lying.
I still go back and reread what you last said directly to me sometimes. I keep telling myself that it’s been long enough and that it won’t hurt anymore. My skin isn’t thick enough for it, even now, no matter how much I want that callus to just grow or no matter how much I want to just burn the nerve endings off so I can finally be able to tell you “You’re stabbing me in places I can’t even feel anymore.” I can never finish reading it before I just have to skim through it.
Even the first time, I must’ve tried to read it at least five times. I wasn’t even angry then. I was just confused and hurt. How could we have fallen so far? Surely it was my fault, but surely it wasn’t all my fault. Aren’t my feelings valid as well? Or had I degraded to such a point where I was filled only with vile, despicable balls of black ooze and hatred?
It took a while for rage to settle in and even when it did, it only acted as my exoskeleton to shield my vulnerable self from all those words you sent flying at me. It’s trained now, to bubble to the surface the moment I catch you in the corner of my eye or the instance your voice reverberates over to me.
I won’t romanticize this and gloss over my feelings with some lacquer to make them shinier and better than they are. I hate you a lot of the time these days, the same kind of hatred I’d previously kept just for my father. Yes, the one and same very man who caused the same feelings in me for which you’ve judged me. It’s some sort of form of divine righteousness in a way, and in any other perspective, I would likely find this sardonically hilarious. Yes, I hate you. I’m fine with using that word, “hate,” here because you make me hate myself more than I already do. I’m sure you’re aware of this. You belittle everyone around you, whether with patronizing jokes or backhandedly insulting them by proving your superiority. You elicit the inferiority complex in everyone around you. And you do it on purpose, I know.
In my angriest moments, I want to retort to every accusation you made. To be honest, you’re just as guilty of those as I am. I don’t know if you wrote that with a secondary recipient being yourself or not, but if you reread it, I’m sure, if you’re allowing yourself to be truthful, you can see that it applies just as much to you as it does to me.
It makes it so much harder to be around you all the time these days, when the last thing I want is to see you - because seeing you makes everything explode again. It hurts even more when I try to avoid you to the best of my abilities and I see you doing nothing but invading on those borders from which I’ve backed away.
I give up! I give up. What more do you want? Just because you were the closest to me doesn’t mean in the settlement, you get to take everyone else to add up to some entity that might, altogether, be as close to me as you were. You can’t calculate someone’s value like that then just rip them from me.
You can call me weak. You can call me a hypocrite. You can call me bitter and self-indulgent and terrible. Because I am all those things. I’m every single one of those and hundreds of thousands and millions and billions and more, and just because you accentuate every single of the negative ones doesn’t mean that there isn’t more to me. Above all, I have to remember that myself.
---
I read it, you know. That blog post of yours. I tested my skin again, to see if it was thick enough, and I read it. I started this letter long before it, but I found myself here again, adding to it. If our relationship had gotten to the point where neither of us was at all comfortable with each other, then it was for the best that it ended.
But before you assume things again, I didn’t take Jenn away from you. I never planned to. I never did. If you’d asked her yourself or struck up a conversation with her, you’d know that I left things alone. I keep things to myself, you know. I’ve long become a practitioner on my way to mastering the art of repression. Few people have realized we are no longer what we used to be, and I don’t plan on spreading it.
Talk to her. Continue your friendship with her and with any and all of our mutual friends. And, please, take this at face value. I mean nothing more than what my words are saying. As much as my pride and rage may flare, I would never want to nor would I be able to take away what isn’t mine. At this point, I have to issue a disclaimer: as calm as I may be here, behind this monitor, my hurt is not the same when I have to act upon it. I will not act the same when I see you at school and I cannot control my emotions. They aren’t weak enough for me to be able to do so. Rest assured, I will try my best to prevent any conflicts from happening.
---
I loved us. I love the us from then, I still do. I don’t feel any pain when I reread our old logs. They’re fond, old memories of mine. That’s why I can say that I don’t regret ever being as close to you as I was - because those feelings of warmth are just as valid as the ice I feel these days.
I know we can never be that way, ever again. Nothing can make us that way, because we stopped being that way and the knowledge that we once stopped and the reasons for which we stopped are still going be real. There's no escaping the truth.
I don’t even remember what my aim was when I started to write this letter. The feelings were just surfacing and I needed to get them out, I guess. But this is too personal for sharing with anyone else. It’s a side of me that’s too precise and too vulnerable for the world. This is the me that you left me as when you stopped shaping me.
But it’s fine. You had your reasons. I stopped shaping you, too. Other people do that, now. I have other people shaping me, now too. Some might try to undo or redo what you did, but their actions can’t change that what you did happened. And somewhere in this clay manifestation of me, I’ll always feel and know that you were there.
If you ever get this, it means I’m ready - really, finally, truly ready - to say good bye to you.
Sincerely,
[me]
You hurt me, you know. More than you realize. More than you’re willing to realize and more than you can ever realize - not just because you refuse to acknowledge that anything happened but also because you didn’t and don’t and will never know the true extent to which I loved you.
I think it was in August, when I was feeling apprehensive about the future and Khoa was saying stuff about moving home and I was just in mourning for the loss of my future. Only you would understand this. I haven’t told anyone else. I made a blog post back then, or whenever it was. I tried to count the number of people I truly, truly loved, not just those whimsical I-love-you’s that leap out of my mouth before I even realize they’re were even in movement. The ones that lie on the top of my brain stem, the ones I’m so afraid to verbalize because they mean so much more, and once I say them, it’s like they’ll just wither away like all words do when they contact air. I counted maybe three. There were two definites. You were one of them.
I remember telling you things I never would’ve told anyone else. I remember telling you things I barely wanted to acknowledge were true. But I told you.
I remember loving you. Not the kind of love that you melted down and shaped into an accusing finger with which to point at me when we hit that last wall and went our ways. It was platonic, yes. But it was deeper than you can imagine. You of all people should know this. I don’t trust easily - not with my soul, not with my heart, not with my mind. But I trusted you, then.
---
To be honest, I don’t know if you’ll even ever set eyes on this letter. It’s become a habit of mine to write these letters in which I bare my chest for all the world and never, ever send them. It creates the illusion that I’m actually telling someone all these things, when really I’m not. If you ever do read this, then by then my hurt has subsided. It’s still there, because time eases pain; it makes pain fade, but it can’t and won’t erase pain.
I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few months and weeks, about us, about our relationship, about where and how and why it came to end. I still don’t have an answer other than the one I’ve programmed myself to say when people ask. “We had our differences.” But that’s about as specific as saying that the two of us were fellow beings.
I don’t regret being friends with you. I don’t regret showing you what I was and giving myself to you to shape as you wished until finally, you didn’t want to mold me anymore. I don’t even regret the fight, or whatever you could call that end of ours. It probably had to happen and was going to happen sooner or later. I don’t regret any of it. I never will regret any of it.
---
This letter is probably the only way I can communicate my true feelings to you without my rage and pride and hurt getting in the way. That’s all I can feel every time I see you. Maybe more so because you refuse to acknowledge its existence when everyone else our whole world can see it as plain as the green on a leaf or as clear as the sky after rain. Maybe more so because you sound like you’re making a joke of it every time someone confronts you about it. Then again, you make a joke of everything these days.
What heats me to boiling point each time is when I remember what you said - that you don’t think you stepped over any boundaries at all. I just can’t believe that you would think that. That isn’t very fair to me, nor is it very fair to the truth, nor is it very fair to your feelings. Blame me as you’d like - I probably deserve it - but the entire blame? It’s either I’m far worse a person than I thought and deserve to die in the worst possible way or you’re lying.
I still go back and reread what you last said directly to me sometimes. I keep telling myself that it’s been long enough and that it won’t hurt anymore. My skin isn’t thick enough for it, even now, no matter how much I want that callus to just grow or no matter how much I want to just burn the nerve endings off so I can finally be able to tell you “You’re stabbing me in places I can’t even feel anymore.” I can never finish reading it before I just have to skim through it.
Even the first time, I must’ve tried to read it at least five times. I wasn’t even angry then. I was just confused and hurt. How could we have fallen so far? Surely it was my fault, but surely it wasn’t all my fault. Aren’t my feelings valid as well? Or had I degraded to such a point where I was filled only with vile, despicable balls of black ooze and hatred?
It took a while for rage to settle in and even when it did, it only acted as my exoskeleton to shield my vulnerable self from all those words you sent flying at me. It’s trained now, to bubble to the surface the moment I catch you in the corner of my eye or the instance your voice reverberates over to me.
I won’t romanticize this and gloss over my feelings with some lacquer to make them shinier and better than they are. I hate you a lot of the time these days, the same kind of hatred I’d previously kept just for my father. Yes, the one and same very man who caused the same feelings in me for which you’ve judged me. It’s some sort of form of divine righteousness in a way, and in any other perspective, I would likely find this sardonically hilarious. Yes, I hate you. I’m fine with using that word, “hate,” here because you make me hate myself more than I already do. I’m sure you’re aware of this. You belittle everyone around you, whether with patronizing jokes or backhandedly insulting them by proving your superiority. You elicit the inferiority complex in everyone around you. And you do it on purpose, I know.
In my angriest moments, I want to retort to every accusation you made. To be honest, you’re just as guilty of those as I am. I don’t know if you wrote that with a secondary recipient being yourself or not, but if you reread it, I’m sure, if you’re allowing yourself to be truthful, you can see that it applies just as much to you as it does to me.
It makes it so much harder to be around you all the time these days, when the last thing I want is to see you - because seeing you makes everything explode again. It hurts even more when I try to avoid you to the best of my abilities and I see you doing nothing but invading on those borders from which I’ve backed away.
I give up! I give up. What more do you want? Just because you were the closest to me doesn’t mean in the settlement, you get to take everyone else to add up to some entity that might, altogether, be as close to me as you were. You can’t calculate someone’s value like that then just rip them from me.
You can call me weak. You can call me a hypocrite. You can call me bitter and self-indulgent and terrible. Because I am all those things. I’m every single one of those and hundreds of thousands and millions and billions and more, and just because you accentuate every single of the negative ones doesn’t mean that there isn’t more to me. Above all, I have to remember that myself.
---
I read it, you know. That blog post of yours. I tested my skin again, to see if it was thick enough, and I read it. I started this letter long before it, but I found myself here again, adding to it. If our relationship had gotten to the point where neither of us was at all comfortable with each other, then it was for the best that it ended.
But before you assume things again, I didn’t take Jenn away from you. I never planned to. I never did. If you’d asked her yourself or struck up a conversation with her, you’d know that I left things alone. I keep things to myself, you know. I’ve long become a practitioner on my way to mastering the art of repression. Few people have realized we are no longer what we used to be, and I don’t plan on spreading it.
Talk to her. Continue your friendship with her and with any and all of our mutual friends. And, please, take this at face value. I mean nothing more than what my words are saying. As much as my pride and rage may flare, I would never want to nor would I be able to take away what isn’t mine. At this point, I have to issue a disclaimer: as calm as I may be here, behind this monitor, my hurt is not the same when I have to act upon it. I will not act the same when I see you at school and I cannot control my emotions. They aren’t weak enough for me to be able to do so. Rest assured, I will try my best to prevent any conflicts from happening.
---
I loved us. I love the us from then, I still do. I don’t feel any pain when I reread our old logs. They’re fond, old memories of mine. That’s why I can say that I don’t regret ever being as close to you as I was - because those feelings of warmth are just as valid as the ice I feel these days.
I know we can never be that way, ever again. Nothing can make us that way, because we stopped being that way and the knowledge that we once stopped and the reasons for which we stopped are still going be real. There's no escaping the truth.
I don’t even remember what my aim was when I started to write this letter. The feelings were just surfacing and I needed to get them out, I guess. But this is too personal for sharing with anyone else. It’s a side of me that’s too precise and too vulnerable for the world. This is the me that you left me as when you stopped shaping me.
But it’s fine. You had your reasons. I stopped shaping you, too. Other people do that, now. I have other people shaping me, now too. Some might try to undo or redo what you did, but their actions can’t change that what you did happened. And somewhere in this clay manifestation of me, I’ll always feel and know that you were there.
If you ever get this, it means I’m ready - really, finally, truly ready - to say good bye to you.
Sincerely,
[me]