SERIES: LETTERS I NEVER WROTE

Dear 2,

I remember a cool morning in San Francisco, on the gray sidewalk with our backpacks and an idling taxi. You pressed a small key into my palm, hugged me, and said, “This is the key to the city. Don’t tell anyone you have it.” I laughed and you turned and jumped into the cab without looking back. I saved this key for a long time, with that image of you flying out of my orbit again. And I knew that you were never mine to keep.

It’s hard to define you. Though we were never romantically involved, you were the most formative love of my life. I feel ever-bound to you because of this. I became myself by being in friendship with you. I laughed, loudly. Rode buses through a foreign country. I simplified, felt brave, and was unembarrassed to be authentic and kind and raw and silly. With you, I planted my first seeds. You were with me as I learned things about the world and myself that later became so true that I can only look back and howl. All I wanted then was us, as this intense, committed, untamable us, forever. The full me seemed inextricably tied to you. Life was better at your side in some ways that I’ve never been able to replace. Even though I am very happy.

Selfishly, I just want you to miss me. I want to be special and irreplaceable. I want you to regret not prioritizing me to the extent that it caused you to lose me. I guess this shows that feeling wounded still sometimes overshadows all the love I have for you. I’m working on this.

The other thing I want to say is that I’m sorry. I’m sorry I found and lost myself through our friendship with such abandon that I didn’t know how to be friends anymore. And I’m sorry I wasn’t there when your brother died. I should have set aside my pride and come through for you. I value friendship very deeply, and with you is where I have most grandly failed.

Will we meet again, as you once said we would? You will still know me. I wonder if I’ll still know you. 

Your long lost ricshishca     

SERIES: LETTERS I NEVER WROTE

Dear TA,

On the first night I met you, you told me that one of your favorite books was One Hundred Years of Solitude. You said I should read it. Now, after a month of loving you and another month of living without you, I found an image that perhaps you unconsciously sent me looking for. It’s on page 362, so it took me a while. There’s no way you remember this sentence, hidden in a paragraph hidden in a chapter, but it is the sentence that connects us through these pages and onto the one I now write.

“He saw the gloomy old man with his crow’s-wing hat like the materialization of a memory that had been in his head since long before he was born.”

That is what happened when I met you. When I saw your mysterious eyes, heard your name, and touched your arm in the lunch line. Something stirred in me, like I already knew you in some buried and dark way from before I was born. From another lifetime that neither of us can remember. Meeting you, I had no choice but to believe in reincarnation.

Given this, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that we were doomed this time around. Finding you again brought me alive in ways this life had never known, but I suppose we also brought baggage from the last life into this one. It made things intensely wonderful, but in the end, must have contained something we didn’t know how to heal. You left, eventually saying things were just so good that it scared you. I was shattered.  Our relationship was a wolf in sheep clothing.

Perhaps I owe an apology from something long long ago, but you owe the apology this time around. It matters to me because I feel that our evolutions are intertwined. I want you to be a better, bigger, braver man than this, because who knows what future lives we have ahead.

I’ll catch you on the flipside.

Love,

Recognizing You