There is a long time in me between knowing and telling. —Grace Paley

When I was seventeen, I fell in love and it was so glorious that I felt I had invented love myself. I saw colors I hadn’t seen before. Inside me, there were spiders, everywhere, tangling their webs in between the crevices and moving through my skin with an exercised caution. I felt the core of me open up like a melon, ripe and stiff, but begging to be eaten. It was — frankly — humiliating. I wanted to be wanted, to be seen by the world — in motion, in stasis, in any kind of way at all — and I desperately clung to any touch of affection. I kept telling myself to keep opening up. More. More. More.

I had all these dreams that were so imperfect and so made up. They were a bit quiet, languid in melancholy, and doused in blue. I felt small hands at my jugular. I wanted to light everything on fire and there was a tightening at my core. But I resisted. I wanted the close-up. I was all steady weight, and I felt rooted in everything like a tree. Fixed to fantasy. I splayed my fingers open, and I waited. I looked down at my body, desperately wishing to be someone worth seeking, and yet somehow, I would look at everything blindly.

Somewhere along the way the fantasy dwindled, like a too-short fuse being blown. I have a few stories I don’t tell anyone. Like the time when you were speeding in your car and I was holding my aching stomach trying to make the nerves fade. You kept looking at me asking if it hurt. Does it hurt? Everything about you does.

I held out a projection of you, and we were once so alike that it felt like an extension of myself too. I loved the chase. The adrenaline. The bruise developed somewhere in between my heart and my ribcage. I liked to hold anger in my breastbone and feel it splinter into my hands. I would puncture nail marks into my palms and think of flash paper burning in the wind. I was terrified and I held the crown of your head and imagined you unsealing all the parts of yourself that you didn’t want anyone else to see. I was begging to be consumed. I was begging for you to let me in. I was all ribcage and spine and you were the kind of skinny that meant you were growing into something firm for the both of us. It’s funny, looking back at it now.

Do you remember all the parties we spent looking out at the world, begging to be part of it, always a little drunk and a little awkward, shifting in liminal spaces and trying to find our footing in places where we didn’t yet belong? I’ll always think of us like that if it helps. Somewhat sideways and slanted. Sometimes sad. Sometimes too joyful to be careful. A part of me will always be 17 and in love with you, and maybe I should’ve said something when I could, but I’m saying it now, because I know that sometimes, words are just words, and we invent meaning even when we know they’re a little daft.

I stopped waiting. I stopped begging, too. Growth felt a little bit like death and I’m sure that’s something everyone understands. When I was 18 and I saw you again, a few seasons after I stopped reaching out to the ghost on the other end of the phone, I thought about how I wanted to be something like a prized fruit and I took careful, prideful, strides. You didn’t look at me enough. You hardly looked at me at all. I had the instinct to bear the ache if it meant something, but I had stopped weeping for something a long time ago. Things felt less like penance. I said ‘hello,’ in the kind of way that meant I knew you, but the version of you from a long time ago. I was holding onto someone else, learning to write different sentences, and you turned toward the gate and nothing ached. It was sweet to not hurt so badly around you. It was nice to see you without being drunk. What an indescribable relief.

I practiced self-care. I slept next to someone else for months and we talked about things I never told you. All the painful decisions and regretful ones. We generated new words. I created a new kind of language so we could speak in between silence and mundanity. When he kissed me for the first time, in the living room where I once ached to be near you, it felt like I could finally breathe. I ran out of muddy sighs and at last, my plea released itself.

He identified all my little patterns. He knew the timing of my habits. He was terribly naive, and I was overwhelmed with the possibility of being loved back. I bore it on my face as if I had somehow miraculously constructed independence.

Then, I was stirred and made desperate again. I felt like life had forced me awake, suddenly. I was in the abyss and the depth of it all. In the middle of everything. I saw our reflection in the water and then everything became a sputtering rust and my brain was sick and I had seen the knife and drove it into myself.

There go all the things I never told you. All the marvelous things turned sour. I bruised like a fruit left in the sun for too long. He left me somewhere where no one could find me and I had to find my way back. I stopped talking. Everything became mute.

All I wanted was to be a passenger in your car again. Maybe it all stemmed from the same pain, of having nothing but wanting to be a part of someone. Of putting your life back into someone else’s hands.

I was careful in the tearing myself apart portion of the journey. I deconstructed myself with no words necessary. I started from the belly and cut outward, shaping myself into something that couldn’t fold into itself so easily.

I went looking for trails of love I could go home to. I searched for metaphors. More allegories. More similes. I opened books where everything went wrong. I, suddenly, thought of myself as being the dumbest person to ever walk the earth.

And then, there you were again. Popping up in my life like you had nowhere else to go. I kept to myself this time. Perhaps, more poignantly, was the darkness suddenly around us. I thought of how love is meant to protect you from harm and not overwhelm you with it.

I didn’t exercise caution this time. You didn’t look. I didn’t bother. I felt the touch of your hand again and I didn’t retreat into a world of isolation, hoping you could pull me back out. You said something about your jacket and there was no recollection of guilt. I don’t remember being in love with you, but I know I did once, and that moment is still alive somewhere.

That night, my past came back to me and I didn’t let it get past the door.

We drove past my old house, where you would never visit me, and I saw how much of myself was still within those walls, waiting for the moths to catch flame in the dark. The world turned from blue to purple. The streets were alive in a way they weren’t before.

I remember the hallway where I kissed till my mouth ached. Where I slept beside someone. I saw, in my head, the bedroom where I debated calling you back one night before the drinks set in. I saw the living room and the space on the floor where I had laid my back and waited to be popped open enough to finally gain some kind of affection. I remember the room where I felt his hands open me up like a book and some kind of bruise appeared on my stomach from where he kissed it.

I drove past and away, never once looking back. Never once trying to decipher something new in the memories that only come when the past returns. There were no epiphanies. No distraction. No fervor to find meaning.

Around me, someone laughed and it broke the surface tension. Something else broke. It could’ve been me. Maybe it was.

Truth is: I have no clean memories. The city still speaks of you. I go to different parties now, and you appear there too. But everything is different.

Everything is different and slightly heartbreaking, still.

I can’t help but wonder if we just keep meeting different versions of the same person. What if that person is just us?

When I see you again, the next time, I wonder what version you’ll meet. Hopefully, it’s a version of myself that has new memories. Ones that aren’t eroded with time and heartbreak. Hopefully, those new memories will be more uplifting, and I’ll get to write you another letter detailing the moment I feel my heart open up, fresh and inviting, like a mango in the summer sun, waiting for something soft to bite into it. Waiting for a love that doesn’t hurt.

Hopefully.

p.s. here’s a poem I can’t stop thinking about <3

& a song ♫ Drifting - Night Tapes

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