PostScript

Hey

I've been doing a lot better. I wrote the theatrical pretentious epilogue letter a week after I left the hospital. I’m writing this a week after that, just to give you a sense of time.

I still think you're wrong, we are very compatible. but I think that you might be bad for me. I've been turning my social life around since the whole suicide thing. I joined [a singing] club (they call me [nickname], why is Russian and space culture following me since you?) I talk to my coworkers more. I'm applying for jobs. I'm watching movies again. I'm listening to happy music. I'm not romanticizing my depression.

When I was with you, I gave it my all. I spent all my time with you, all my energy with you. I invested my soul into you. I didn't have the experience to properly apply it, but I invested my soul. I chose to love you, and even though my love wasn't perfect, it was pure. I don't think I did anything wrong. But I think I didn't do some things that were right.

The way we functioned together kept me down. I feel like I kept trying to elevate us and be happy. But you were insecure and maybe didn't trust my happiness. You thought I was using you for sex, or shallow and superficial maybe, I don't know. But I was choosing happiness with you.

I believed that you could see through my eyes, that I could see through yours. Past the color, into the void black of the pupil, landing on the surface of your soul. Your words painted such beautiful shadows of your mind on the wall. I know that's not very scientific, but that's how I felt.

You're only going to get these letters when I graduate, what with the University's no-contact order and all that jazz. I will also (hopefully) have a job in a different city, maybe a different state. Hopefully this will help prove that I mean what I say in these letters.

That I’m not trying to track you down or stalk you and force you back with me. I mean what I say, and I mean it in the most loving way. There’s definitely resentment and anger buried in here, but I don’t particularly like to aim those emotions at people, especially not at you

Maybe you're a liar. Maybe you lied about your personality to me. Maybe you led me on. But I don't like to think that, because that would mean that you're an idiot. Because only an idiot would waste their time like that, and you're not an idiot.

I think that you surround yourself with things that are bad for you, like your roommates. I think that they're really interesting and funny, but they definitely have some toxic traits. I think that Moon is chaotic and contributes to your stress and maybe doesn't always want the best for you. I think that Sun is fucking awful (I mentioned her to some people and apparently she has an extreme reputation). I think that Scrote is actually not bad, just a lil weird sometimes, keep her around please. I think that you tend to dwell on negative things; I do too, but I've been trying to be a force of positivity, and it feels like it’s working.

Some days are much much worse than others.

Some days I still can’t get out of bed and I cry and try resist the urge to look at our pictures.

I see the name "Elizabeth" on a roster and I start to shut down and cry.

I find myself anxious because I’m waiting to receive a text from you telling me a joke or something about your day like you used to.

I want to kill myself again because I feel guilty about what I did and how I fucked up my chances of being your man by giving you those letters and showing you that I'm even crazier.

I want to run to you and tell you I'm sorry for being a fool and grovel and kiss your knock-off sneakers.

I stare at your Spotify and cry because we have the exact same music taste and I'll never be able to sit with you and listen to our music again.

I fill my amazon shopping cart with all the books you had on your floor and hover over the order button.

"Lover, You Should've Come Over", "Rockin the Suburbs", or "Big Me" plays at full blast in my head and I can't get it to stop unless I slam my head into a wall a few times.

I wake up and turn my alarm off as fast as possible because I know it hurts your ears, and then I realize I’m alone in my bed.

I felt awake with you. You must have been a dream. Why does it feel like I'm asleep again? Why does it feel like my life is back on pause?

But some days I feel like dancing again.

I look in the mirror and I find myself sexy.

I fold my laundry the same day I wash it.

I do the Wordle and don’t try to guess if I beat you.

I get absorbed in a book or movie and digest it on my own.

I laugh at a joke without thinking about how much you would laugh at it.

I eat three meals a day like I did when I wanted to be strong for you.

I see all your flaws and become indignant at the way you treated me.

I feel the capacity to be angry at you, to decry your actions and mock your decisions.

I’ll be talking to someone else and realize that I feel attracted to them, if only for a second.

I was very scared that I didn’t have that in me anymore.

I think something that’s working for me is adding stuff. I hate a lot of things about me, and I've tried to remove them. But one of the reasons I felt happy with you was that I added you, and you forced the negative things I hated out of my life. If you fill yourself and your time with things you want or things that are good, you will have less space and time for negativity. I've known this for years, but I'm only now internalizing it. Maybe you already knew this and I sound like an idiot to you. I'm not trying to talk down to you at all if you've already figured this out, I'm just excited that I'm finally understanding it and reaping the rewards.

I think that [your language club] is good for you. I think that you should lift or run more, it's also good for your mental. I think that you shouldn't smoke or drink as much (especially drink, you're on an SSRI, like why the fuck do you risk it). I like weed too, but sometimes it seems like you use it as a coping mechanism. I don't mean to tell you how to live your life, but I know what’s working for me, and I just want you to feel healthy.

I think that you're kind of unstable. The way you jerked me around preceding my suicide attempt was very very uncool. Honestly, it was a complete asshole move. You could’ve let me down over dinner, or slowly distanced yourself, but instead you atomic love bombed me and then cut me off like a psychopath. You hit me like a fucking train and painted my brains across the floor. I did not deserve to be treated that way, I deserved better than that. Suicide was an overreaction, but I was very unstable then. I loved you a lot, and I assumed you still loved me, so to see you hurt me like again that was too much to handle.

But now I see with clearer eyes and lighter heart. You are full of fear and anxiety, and easily influenced by your friends and the internet. I don't think you really cared how you hurt me. You were impatient and unempathetic towards my stress. You knew that the next semester would’ve actually been different, and yet you chose to do this anyways. You tried to break up with me twice over text before all this without really talking it out, and I convinced you each time to stay. Each time you stayed, you told me that you had overreacted and you didn't know why you did it.

In this final breakup, you weren’t very forthcoming with your reasoning, all I got were short half baked texts full of passive aggression and impatience, and an unsympathetic talk that you rescheduled at the last minute. Meanwhile I’ve literally written over 15,000 words about us since you dumped me. I know I’m not entitled to anything, but I feel like I’m deserving of something more substantial than some bullet points.

I think you like to pull triggers on things because it makes you feel like you're making a decision, which is the same logic that cutters use to justify their cutting. I remember us talking about our exes, and it just hit me that you've never been broken up with. Kind of a red flag, a sign that you have a habit of self-sabotage. Again, I don't know, we don't talk anymore so I'm making a lot of assumptions about your motivations. Sorry if I offend you but you really fucking hurt me.

I'm sorry for entering your house. I was very unwell and I thought I was going to be dead in a few hours. I forgot that I, as a man who can easily overpower you and your roommates, might be scary. It's weird to imagine myself as threatening, I just don't see myself that way. I didn't mean to be scary. I thought that you were unwell and unsafe, and I had some weird saviour complex because I was still madly in love with you. But I see now that I can’t be there for someone that just pushes me away.

I'm not sure if you understand why you pushed me away, all of your rationalizations seemed like they were just that: rationalizations. I'm sorry for reading your journal, that wasn't cool at all. I just wanted it all to make sense because reality was really starting to not make sense. But maybe it was just you who didn't make sense. Because I was giving you all my thoughts and letters, I felt like I deserved to know what you thought. Sorry for that, that was wrong. Definitely a sign of my immaturity.

You have a lot of strengths:

You read and write well

You think and feel deeply and meaningfully

You have fantastic music taste

You're very pretty

You have great political opinions

You're extremely funny

You can see me

But you have a lot of weaknesses:

You're terribly insecure about your love

You're don't try to exercise or push yourself (you're very skinny and beautiful already, but I value exercise as a means of self respect and improvement. It makes me uncomfortable that you don't value that too.)

You seem scared of men

You think you always need to perform and it exhausts you

You don't know what you want and you're a bit impulsive

You romanticize and bask in your depression

You idealize happiness and intellectualize zen

You seem guilty about liking sex sometimes

You struggle with communicating your needs directly

There’s so much going against you, it’s actually insane. Anxiety, depression, psychosis, PCOS, synthesia, a bit of OCD, a complicated family dynamic, womanhood (half-joking, but I’m trying to appreciate how unfair and hard that can be sometimes). Not sure if synthesia is a detriment to you, but sometimes you seem self-conscious about it. My therapist thinks you might have BPD (insert scott pilgrim reference) and a disorganized attachment style and that you're projecting your parent's divorce onto our relationship. Yeah, I know how shitty that is for me to say, but I tried to kill myself and you were an asshole to me, so fuck it. She's not your therapist, so it's not a real diagnosis.

But you’ve been so strong, and you’re so smart. In spite of everything, you’ve made it to [a prestigious university], maybe even grad school. But please never ever treat someone like this again. It's really fucked up.

Elizabeth

I love you, and I still want to be with you, but I feel like you might be bad for me because you're so bad to yourself. All I want is to be there for you, to be your rock, and you continuously pushed me away and self-sabotaged. I realize I'm also bad for me; I'm going to get better on my own now. I hope we meet again far in the future when we're better. I can see that not happening though, going into your house was kinda crazy.

Your mind is only one I've ever felt truly attracted to, and its hard not to want to be connected again. I need more practice and I have more learning to do as well. There was so much I wanted to do with you.

I wanted to show you my favorite movies and read your favorite books

I wanted to meet your family and see your town

I wanted to treat you like my princess and my bro

I wanted to paint a house with you

But us being apart might be what happens (read: it eez what it eez).

ps-

Reading back through this, it seems a bit reductive. By this point, we've been incommunicado for long time. I don't know how close the version of you in my head is to the actual you. The version of you in my head will always be a reduction now. I don't know what I can do about that though.

All I know is that you've hurt me a lot. Like, a lot. But it’s hard to think of you as a bad person. It’s possible that you're an asshole that doesn't care about me. It's a very real possibility. But I'll never know.

I imagine while reading my letters you might be fuming and screaming at me at points. Maybe I’m coming off like a narcissistic jerk. I wish you would tell me, I have no fucking clue if I am. I’m trying really hard to be honest with myself and do good self-analysis, but I only have my memories and mindsets to work with, both of which are fallible.

Anyways, I'm going to go watch La La Land now to feel something, and then probably jerk off later to my reflection using icy hot as lube so that it stings (you must first taste the sour in order to taste the sweet - sun tzu or something). That's an attempt at humor, not me being creepy; just trying to give you a laugh with my juvenile dick jokes.

pps-

Sorry for mailing these to your house, I hope this doesn't freak you out. I hope you don't just throw these away, that would hurt. Then again, I'd never know. I still see your thoughts as valuable, so I'm sending you mine.

I wish you'd debate me on this stuff. Life's less interesting without you. Also, please treat your car to a deep detailed cleaning, it has taken enough abuse from your roommates.

ppps-

I was rereading a lot of my letters, and I realize that me talking about marrying you and having kids seems kind of crazy. We never really discussed them that much, so it might seem like love bombing. I really only started having those thoughts right before we broke up. Seeing you in my home with my family before Thanksgiving really made you seem so real, so tangible. Seeing you outside the context of school made you seem so permanent. Our breakup gave me the time to process a lot of my emotions.

I never really intended to show you those letters unless I was dead. They were my private thoughts; I wanted to break them to you slowly and gracefully, so I'm sorry if they seem weird or creepy or offensive or out of left field. I was in a state of mind that I hadn't told you about yet, and it hurt me a lot when you broke up with me because I was in a domestic headspace. Anyways, hopefully no more postscripts, that quadruple p just looks cursed.

pppps-

Goddammit I knew I said I wouldn’t go for a fourth postscript but here we are

…

In this postscript, I had originally written this long sprawling treatise on what I thought of my recent reading of Anna Karenina. I reached about two pages of philosophizing and analysis, trying to connect with your memory, and then I realized: you don’t give a fuck.

I asked you why you found Tolstoy so compelling when we were together, and you never gave me more than a few sentences. I really wanted to get you to geek out and be vulnerable with your thoughts, but you never did, so now I’m thinking, why the fuck would I talk about something that you never even wanted to talk about with me, even when we were in love? I think I’ll keep these thoughts for me.

I had also written a very long winded hate-letter, meticulously designed to prey upon your various insecurities and fears so that you would hurt like I do. Reading back on it, it’s kind of heinous and evil. I don’t know if I should feel guilty about writing it, but I don’t think you should ever have to read it; it’s absolutely vile and damaging.

Anyways, I think that I’m going to print and seal this letter now, and stop thinking about you. The more often my synapses fire about you, the deeper those wrinkles with sink and strengthen, and the more you will pervade my every thought.