anotha one

[

so obviously i haven't sent her any of the previous letters. that would be nuts. however, i might email her this after i graduate. i'm sending this one because it's less self pitiful and needy. what she did was fucked up and really hurtful and i stand by my shitty psychoanalysis, but telling someone they wronged you never actually communicates that to them, so there's no point. she deserves an apology for what i did, even though i thought i was doing the right thing, because i did the wrong thing. this letter takes the previous one and removes the anger and a chunk of the self-pitying. why is life and love so fucking complicated? what the fuck is our shit-ass education system teaching us smh.

i tried to take everything i've written about and extract the bits that she would benefit from hearing the most. she doesn't need my psychoanalysis, she doesn't need my whining, she doesn't need the full story of me trying to print my suicide note and killing myself, she doesn't need my movie recommendations.

i hate myself. i hate myself for not acting on her hints and fighting for her early on, even though i shouldn't have had to. i hate that i contained all of my emotions up until the point when i didn't and i imploded. i hate that i fucked this up from a legal perspective, even though what she did is leagues more hurtful and malicious.

i have to kill my love for her now. she needs to become a memory, a concept, a reduction, otherwise she'll eat me alive from the inside out. that's more easily said than done.

i hate how unsupportive some of my friends are. after i confided in a friend that i've know since the 7th grade that i tried to kill myself and showed him the letters, he told me that he understood why she didn't want to date me anymore and that he wouldn't be there for me and has zero sympathy. i have literally taken this man on vacation and been there for him when he needed it, i played magic and video games with him for years, he smoked my first joint with me and confessed his porn and videogame addiction to me. i've been there for him and always had my heart open to him, but he's a chronic flaker, and ever since he dropped out of college, he's just been getting worse. i guess i'm never fucking speaking to this man again.

another friend is completely unsympathetic to me because i broke into my exes house. i don't like the term "broke in", the front door was open. she asked how unsafe would i feel if an ex walked into my apartment and read my journal. i said that i would be flattered if someone cared enough to do that. she said that i was sick in the head. i think that she has litany of her own issues. for instance, she thinks that everyone is deserving of love, even serial killers, because her family doesn't give it to her. i think it's a cultural thing for asian americans maybe, that's a trend in a lot of my asian friends. she also thought that her ex she dated for three years was creepy and threatening for showing up outside her apartment complex to get his stuff back. he's even more harmless than me.

i understand why women are scared of men in general, but i don't understand why their fear is applied so liberally to everyone. maybe it's the risk/reward ratio, where one psychopath murderer justifies distrusting a thousand normal idiots. maybe the ratio is even worse, idk. i don't think women understand that certain men are ruining it for the rest of us, that certain men are sowing fear through their violence, that the predators lurk among us but might as well be a separate species entirely. maybe i'm too trusting, maybe that's my issue, but how are you supposed to love people without trust?

i think that she's more crazy than me. i know how that sounds, coming from the one in the relationship that tried to kill themselves, but i would argue that suicide is not a sign of being crazy. depression and emotional immaturity are not crazy in the same way that bpd, bipolar, psychosis, and schizophrenia are.

i think this is partly why i got hurt so badly. i was trying to empathize with her, really get into her headspace, but i didn't realize that her headspace might be an unhealthy place to be. i assumed that she was making purely rational decisions, but now i think she was being tossed around by intense emotions that she didn't know how to control. she has: depression, anxiety, pcos, synthesia, ocd, divorced parents, repressed sexual childhood, psychotic break. probably not the best person to try and get inside their headspace.

i feel like an asshole writing this shit. it sucks not being able to be there for her. i wanted to be her rock, but i let myself get caught in the turmoil. she asked me a few times if she was being too much, and when i said that i could handle it, she said that handling it might not be enough.

Breaking up like she did, that's not what mature people do. I think I'm more mature than her, which is not to say that I'm good at being an adult man, but I think the reason I was so fucking devastated by this was because she seemed so much like me that I thought her actions were as well informed and maturely executed as mine would be. I've never ghosted someone, I've never given up on something that has such obvious potential, I've never fucked with someone during a breakup, I've never flaked on someone. After the text on the 17th, she blocked me on everything immediately afterward. This was before the whole attempt and letters thing. She went from, "let's get dinner and catch up and try again" to "we're incompatible and we shouldn't see each other and I'm blocking you on everything". I'm starting to see that that isn't normal behavior.

I kept wondering what I did wrong, trying to find my error, and assuming my pain was worth my sins. But it wasn't. She mistreated me, and I didn't see it as mistreatment, and I sunk to her level, maybe even lower. I assumed that, because she loved me, she would know how to treat me with compassion and respect. I let that get to me, I thought I deserved that pain because I trusted the woman that was inflicting it. I saw her as strong and mature because that's what she projected and what I wanted her to be.

I tried to bare my emotions, and I'm realizing now that being emotionally available is much different than being emotionally vulnerable, and anyone who laughs and asks how I could make that mistake can go fuck themselves. It's difficult. God dammit I'm being defensive to my journal.

I don't think I'm ever going to be that emotionally vulnerable again. Never again will I cry in front of someone who's hurting me and not apologizing or giving an honest explanation. Never again will I let my sadness interfere with the plan. Never again will I allow someone to treat me that way.

anyways, in summary:

i don't think that you cared how you hurt me

i think that we're extremely compatible unless you lied about who you were

i think you broke up with me for bad reasons

i don't know if i can fix those reasons but i wanted to try

i think you mistreated me and were unempathetic during the breakup

i think i fumbled multiple opportunities to get you back

i don't think i should've needed to be the one to ask for you back

i regret how i reacted, i thought letting my emotions take over was the same as feeling them

i want to be comforted by the person who hurt me more than anything else

i resent being seen as a threat because that's not even a remote possibility

i understand why i'm seen as a threat and why i'll never see you again

i knew how to love but not how to be in a relationship

i think you don't know how to love and you push people away

i'm scared that i'll never find someone who i can love as much as you

i can't hate you because i can't hate anyone more than i hate me

]

Hey.

This email isn't meant to be harassing, it's the first and last one I'll ever send. I don't even live here anymore.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you or make you feel threatened. I wasn't thinking very clearly that night; what you did hurt me so much that I didn't want to live anymore. I came over to your house to give you those letters before I left. And then I noticed your front door was open. I thought back to how depressed you seemed, I saw on when2work that you had quit, you had just made a giant playlist of songs to kill yourself to, you had a psychotic break around that time the year prior, and the way you completely changed your mind about talking to me again within less than 24 hours was really bizarre and scary. I thought that I was going to find you dead in your tub, probably because that was what I was planning for myself in the next few hours. I wasn't thinking straight, and I thought I was being a good person. I just wanted to do something right. Instead, I made a creep of myself. I'm sorry for reading your journal, there’s no excuse for that, that was fucked up. I texted you right afterwards because I felt guilty and I didn't know what to do. I always just wanted to be honest with you.

I’m sorry for scaring you. It’s easy to forget that I’m a man when I’m feeling small, and that a man entering a woman's house is evocative of a particularly violent and sexual terror. I forgot how many headlines there are about exes breaking in and doing terrible things, that's just not the kind of person I am and I forgot that men are actually dangerous. That didn’t even cross my mind that night; I was more concerned with self-annihilation and searching for any reason to stay. I understand why you feel threatened by me, my actions were juvenile and shameful. I want you to feel safe. In my letters, I think I said several times that I “stalked” you. To be clear, I never actually physically stalked you, I exclusively meant online (aka lore gathering). Finding your address was my mother's idea, I told you she was neurotic. On the other hand, though, the fact that you see me as a threat at all is really insulting. I thought that you knew me well enough to know that I'm not capable of violence. You making me meet in [the library] for that discussion after finals was also really hurtful. I don't know why I continued to trust you after that.

I understand Scrote barring me from [the music club]. I know that she’s just trying to be a good friend and protect you, but I’d be lying if I said that didn’t give me another nervous breakdown. [the music club] has nothing to do with you in my mind; it was a safe space for me since COVID, and losing it was more pain and isolation. However, I will grudgingly admit that Scrote is my favorite roommate of yours, she's pretty cool. I still don't know why [Moon] hated me, they made me so uncomfortable.

After rereading my letters, I realize that I talk a lot about marriage and children. I can see how this might come off as me being weird or spinning empty promises to win you back. The truth is, I only started feeling this way the week of Thanksgiving. Seeing you outside of school, next to my family, sitting in my room, these things made you seem so real and possible. I started having these thoughts and I never got to tell you about them, so I instead obsessed over them during the isolation of winter break. I never meant for you to even read those letters. I was going to keep them a secret, but something in me wanted you to know everything before I left. Now that I'm still alive, I feel silly. They were streams of thought; the epistolary aspect was a mechanism to give my thoughts direction. They weren't designed to show my love, they were a personal diary of my feelings. I’m sorry you had to read them, I know that some of those things were better left unsaid.

I still don't understand why you wanted to hurt me so badly. You could've let me down over dinner, or met me in person beforehand, or called me on the phone, or even wrote me a letter, but instead you slingshotted around my orbit, teasing commitment and feigning care, and then retreated so fast that I snapped my neck trying to see where you went. I know that's rich coming from a guy who invaded your privacy, but it was physically painful to be treated that way. I only wanted to love and to be loved by you in return. The stress of the fall semester, the suddenness of the breakup, the isolation of winter break, the shit ass Lexapro, and the subtle ways that you kept interacting with me all led to me being in a very vulnerable place. You betraying me for a second time over text after being so convincingly sweet the previous day was too much.

You kept saying over the phone, "I'm so sorry, I know you're angry," but there wasn't even a whisper of anger in me. I can't believe that you thought I would be mad; I guess you really didn't know me. I should’ve gotten angry, I should've recognized your patterns and defended myself, but I still loved you as strongly as before, so I took it personally and let it obliterate my ego. You were a tower that blotted out my tomorrow and everyday after, eclipsing my future, and I didn't want to move out of the way as you toppled over and crushed me. I'm sorry for not handling that better, but what you did was truly awful. You have successfully transferred your trust issues to me, thank you and congratulations.

I still don't know how I should feel about you; I want to hate you, but hate has always felt so closed minded and never really meant for other people. I'll never know why you did what you did, you hide so much of yourself. I've written over 23,000 words since you, which is unfortunately more than I did for my second writing requirement, and this is the final distillation of what I wanted to say. I know you find linguistics interesting, so here's a fun fact: running all my previous text through a gender-guessing algorithm will output that my writing is "weakly female", but this last letter reads as "weakly male". I originally intended to mail this to your house as a letter and schedule it to arrive years from now after all the dust and memories have been long settled, but I realized that might come off as stalker-y and harassing. I don't care if it means nothing to you, I just needed to apologize for that night. I'm Sorry.

[yea i probably won't send this either, but it was an interesting rhetorical and emotional exercise. i still haven't lied in any of my writings, so that's admirable and depressing. i hate that i'm never going to get answers for shit. it's really quite unbearable not knowing why. it's incredibly dissatisfying to have the most meaningful event in my life have such a pitiful ending. i wish i had a screaming match or some kind of big blowout, even though i know i don't have it in me to scream at her. i wish i knew what she thought of this thing, even if it's just the word "ew", because that would give me more information than i currently have.

i think one of the biggest things i learned from this is to not love as strongly and to trust people less, which doesn't feel like a healthy lesson. the way i want to love involves giving my soul to someone else, and i tried to do that and got burned. i really don't want to date anyone else now because i'm so full of distrust and fear of investing into someone just to have it go away just as suddenly, which really sucks because i'm craving emotional and physical intimacy right now more than anything else. i really hate it.]