because i was in and out of love with 1 person over the course of 7 long years, there was a period i thought and wrote a lot about endings. i wrote us many endings, trying to find one that would finally give me closure or stick with me. i called him the love of my life for the longest times. eventually, i think these letters just became written to endings — practices in the art of giving me a story i could live with. i played at them, finding the grooves and twists of every goodbye. maybe i wrote so many gorgeous loving endings i could never let go of the real thing because i was hoping for it to be perfect.

when things finally fizzled out it was with a whimper — a conversation that killed all feeling i had entirely — and suddenly i didn’t want to write goodbye love letters anymore; had nothing left to say. that in itself was a sad, dripping shock, the way your pants hems get when you step into a rain puddle and you feel the cold water rush into your shoe and think what the fuck lol. but for years i had written love letters, and maybe i thought i was writing goodbye love letters to the man i loved but it turns out i was writing love letters to endings too.

*

just one more ending. do you think i could get one more trip to new york? one more me, compressed into a seat on an airplane for more than ten hours at a time, dead air-breathing and flying through the clouds near enough to almost see the stars? one more wary morning on the train into the city where i’m staying in somebody else’s apartment, one more shower before i meet you again for one more dinner, one more round of drinks at the bar around the corner from your place, one more walk down your street to the little red door beyond which lies that flight of steps i could climb up one more time, down the corridor into your bed with its sheets of tiny blue flowers for one more rainy, pattering morning? you see i’m hoping that if the answer to these is yes then i can sink my teeth into the flesh of this delicate dream and let it drip down my chin like something messy and real and sticky. that if i get to have all these then they will pile up like fruit in the cart in the bodega on the other end of your street, tessellating rows made up from units that i will never make my way through and so i will never grow hungry. or maybe i get sick of the fragrance and tang of all my individual fantasies of us, and the way they make the roof of my mouth feel raw the more i eat them. so in this case could we rip open just one more foil neck to get to the fermented bits, the buzzy bits, the wine? because i can see the end of the bottle from outside of it and eventually if i drink enough i’ll see the bottom from through the neck too, which is to say that eventually i will come to terms with and confront an ending, and acknowledge that the bottom of this stares out into a shortened, distorted reality on the other end, which i can count on to look better than from inside this glass.

i guess what i’m saying is i understand that this finishes, and understand that there exists a cold surface, on the other side of which is a memory wiped clean of nostalgia and longing, no matter how car-crash- or rapture-abrupt. at least for you. i know there is a truth to aspire to and one that i inhabit. inside my space i turn circles until i am a spinning top that discerns if this is dream or reality and i find it to be both, so i turn so transparent and light spins through me until it splinters at a tip. when we look through the glass again it’s a different universe now and nothing is where we remember it. my desire just an orange peel dried at the bottom of the bottle, yours the drop and trail of alcohol staining the side of the neck. desire ends like we all do. i don’t know yet if love does.

*

wednesday morning: ash grey sky and a cold under your skin because you left the window open while you slept again. it happens, and you’re just lucky the icicles between your toes have quit forming ever since you started wearing socks to bed. you think about it: the last time you took an actual shower and came out warm in your bones was when she was here, standing across you under a hot shower and complaining how you were like a space heater. now you’re tired no matter how much you sleep, full no matter how little you eat. you lie lazy and still for awhile, the rain coming in through your windows. it weaves its way into the stream beside your bed and dances archly along the path, cutting into your wall and going on into your sister’s room.

If pressed, you could maybe articulate a sense of missing or regret, but like this you just feel a little suspended, like you are a shape that floats nebulous around a core of feeling, but doesn’t touch it. Better not sit up then. If you do you might jolt the fine balance so that everything is squeezed out of your skin uncontrollably. better to stay like this, cool air shifting loosely about you, cocoon-like, feelings in a careful sous vide package. better to grieve in measured amounts, like when you put on the TV show and let yourself cry for the amount of time during which a touching dialogue or scene is played. after that you’ll put feeling back in a chamber and go back to everything else you have to do.

there are paintings to complete and places to be (school and work and with your family), and there’s not much time to be weepy about her, one world away and inaccessible. later you’ll remind yourself she put up the wall first, then you’ll text to say with finality that you’re leaving her life. you do finally get up, cook yourself some eggs or slap together some bits of bread or buy some aloo pies from downstairs. eat it all even though you hate the smell of eggs.

feeling seeps out of your feet and grows roots somewhere, and in a bid to outrun it you return to an older shape of yourself; pray hard to become a tree so it doesn’t recognise and catch up to you but anyway it does and plucks your hair to wear as a crown. somebody else wears your words and breath and touches and gilds them, puts them on her head as a crown. still because they are frozen so solid they don’t quite fit her fight and she shrugs her shoulders, wriggles them off. you dismiss the dream into your bedroom mirror and look at yourself in the glass, shadowed and heavy. you could very well be a strong, tall tree, and you feel she might still know your shape and the rings inside you that tell your age. you feel she might appreciate this greek myth retelling, if you ever told her about it. she might even say there’s tons to unpack in the imagery. 

you check your phone. she doesn’t say much, so you never text back.

*

the ending i give myself: you pick up the phone and call me to tell me you’ve finally booked tickets to travel the world. you tell me your itinerary; you’re not coming to where i am but that no longer matters because it’s not like that anymore and we’re in a good place. if i have to picture meeting you again, it takes place in an unending field with a lake and a mountain in the distance, where the air is cool and where, when i breathe in, my body fills and sags with affection. it takes place in a space uninformed by anything we’ve been through, untouched by all the ways we couldn’t manage to love each other. in this space there is only a floating sort of light but we’re here face to face, a million miles from anything we’ve had before, and everything vast and wide open lives in our bodies, which feel like they have unmeasurable capacity for every shade of every good feeling. i wake up with this love letter clear and ready in my head: i am not hurt, just here.

*

i wish i could say i was sorry for writing it all, for turning someone i loved into a character, an archetype in my own mythmaking, a frozen statue that leaves no room for the person. but i’m not sorry, and i know full well the character i wrote into being isn’t the person i love. these days, to borrow the words of another author, i cross the road to avoid him, and i love him anyway.