N,
I miss you. I’ve been working on another letter to post here. I’ll submit it soon. It has a story of how I think our reconciliation would go if we were ever mature and brave enough to see how necessary that is. This is a place where I can grieve you and process in a way that I never was allowed. Grief is a thing you can’t escape and the waves never stop coming. I have spent years weeping. It quite literally was as if you suddenly died. And not just you, your entire family that I loved.

2020 was my most recent breakdown and after those, I usually have a few years of reprieve until nostalgia hits hard again. But I didn’t get that this time around. Instead, I was inspired. I read all your music and I’ve written almost 50 songs in response. It’s been quite helpful to process but in some ways, not so helpful. I see things through rose-colored glasses. I forget that you were unkind, selfish, manipulative, and loved yourself. All I have to do is read the one song I know you wrote me into, “girls.”

Whenever I read those lyrics, I see it pretty clearly. But I don’t want to believe it. I want to believe you were honest. I want to believe you loved me the countless times you said it. I want to believe that you wanted a life with me and would suffer our relationship “a thousand times” over. My innocence, my body, my love, my care, my devotion, my heart, my trust; those are hard things to have cast away so easily by someone you love and even harder to grieve.

You know, I promise I don’t hold it against you. I get that we were young and self-control is hardly a thing in high school. I think there was a lot of self-preservation going on for both of us, in different ways. I don’t hate you for it. I hope you don’t hate me.

I’m having a rough night tonight. I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that I will never get to care for you again, listen to you, and simply do life with you. But, I live it in my dreams and sometimes when I make tea. Most of the time, I push it back where it belongs in a dusty corner of my past but, lately, it’s been banging down those old doors. I’m the fool who doesn’t know how to forsake when promises were made. I am hoping counselling will help eventually!

Please, some closure and truth and healing; I know a future with you is not right so, just some reconciliation, some processing, some laying it all down, some forgiveness, some moving on, etc.

At the very least, reach out and forgive me for my poor comma usage,
A