My beautiful, beautiful beloved,

After crying daily for nearly six months I woke up New Year’s Day bright and fluttery and entirely over you. It felt like a Christmas present. It was so exciting that I immediately wrote asking if we could be friends. And then I realized you would never answer and promptly burst into tears.

Have I been lucky, never to have had a breakup that meant denying the other’s existence until now? It’s an immaturity and coldness and cruelty that makes me doubt your character like never before. I don’t know if you’re with someone, making love to them, adoring them, caressing them. Of course it still hurts. But does that preclude saying “thanks” or “sorry” to me?

And then I realize I have ached for you every day, and of course I care. I am madly in love and sick with pain, neglecting my duties, destroying my working life, questioning my friendships and every decision and am sick, sick enough to think this must be progress, as if I lost you, the most valuable and important thing, and everything else is in vain, nothing else matters. I have developed a clinical depression, and named it after my love for you. It’s wrong, I know. I don’t care.

I have heard the rumor that not being in touch with your exes after painful breakups is a good thing, and to a certain extent I think this is true. But you cut me out completely. I wrote you the most painful, beautiful letter, and nothing. We have mutual friends, close ones. But you don’t consider me a friend, and never did.

Slightly drunk at dinner a few days after we broke up, I told a casual friend about what happened between us, and laughed a bit. A few months later she asked me about you, and I said, he won’t talk to me, and she said, he didn’t seem to value you at all.  You don’t value me at all, and I can’t even take that personally; you’re a cold narcissist plagued with fake illnesses. But you are delightful. So delightful that it blots all that out, like the most bright and beautiful and soft thing. And vulnerable.

You couldn’t believe or accept my love. It was easier to believe I didn’t love or care about you than to accept my very human pain. All it meant was that you didn’t care about me, and this was an excuse. You didn’t respect me, and this was an excuse. You would never love me.

I am angry and heartbroken and sometimes I fantasize about asking for my letter back, tearing it up to shreds and spitting on each piece in front of you, both of us laughing, and throwing it away. And then I realize I am not angry, only heartbroken, and the heat and fire are love, deformed. I want to take you in my arms and kiss your face and eyes and every curl on your head and every one of your toes and fingers and sob and sob and surrender.

I love you more than the world. I love you more than you love the world.

Certainly we both love you more than me.

Yours, always,

X