A Letter To My Ex Long-Distance Crush

It’s about the time we started talking first.

It’s spring and I wasn’t living here yet. I was somewhere else, doing something else to pass the time until I could get here, but I’m always doing that. I’m never happy right where I am. That’s probably something that’s wrong with me, I don’t know.

I used to know how to be happy in moments but I think it’s because I was doing a lot of drugs. Drugs that helped me to see infinity, or my place in infinity, or something that approximately felt like that, either way something not real.

That’s the problem with doing drugs like that. You start to see things in almost microfilms, in these tightly wound layers of screenshots, and then you can isolate a moment and pick it apart and weave a meaning behind the things you would have otherwise ignored. Everything’s so suddenly beautiful and particular you get lost in the saturnine geometry of it all, cradled in the atrium of the universe for a second. Whatever that means. I don’t know what that means. It’s just a feeling and I can’t always explain feelings.

Anyway.

Another weird thing about me that I’m not sure you remember is I usually delete my texts after awhile. Most people like to save them indefinitely for some reason (memories? evidence?) but I find it incredibly disconcerting to go back and revisit what past me has said. Digging up old words has something of a necrophiliac quality to it, don’t you think? Like digging up a dead body and falling in love with it all over again.

Although, a similar thing happens in Wuthering Heights which is canonical literature so it looks like it’s not that uncommon.

But I realized a long time ago that even when you try to get rid of things they have a way of creeping back. For example, I thought I’ve been deleting my emails for months but it turns out I was just archiving them. And deleting stuff on Facebook, forget it. It’s like Facebook wants us all to commit shame suicides with the innovative ways they keep coming up with to excavate the past.

Like dipping your heart in liquid nitrogen, the paralyzing chill of an unsaid name that used to make you feel warm.

I guess I never deleted your emails.

There’s your first letter, and second, and third, and your first love letter, and second, and third. Your poetry, anxieties, the textual interior of your soul, words for no one to see but me. The entire list of films that changed your life that you wanted me to watch, that I never watched, but who knows. Maybe someday I will. 

image – Shutterstock