May 10th 2012
Email from me to Stefan
[This is, believe it or not, edited down.]
I wrote this months ago It was a response for when you emailed me. If you ever emailed me.
At this point, I doubt you ever will.
I’ve been going back and posting old photographs on my tumblr from the same date but years prior. Yesterday I found the photographs we took during that grey day you took me to a graveyard. That was two years ago, now.
I’m preparing things and tying up loose ends. and so, I’m just going to send this. I guess I need to say what I needed to say, even if it doesn’t matter anymore.
Do with it what you will, but at least I’ll have…. I don’t know… finished.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I’ve never felt an emotional loss so severe, i had never been caught so off guard as I did when things went bad and weird between us. I never felt such grief and loss as when we became distant. Not ever. Not in my entire life.
……
You really were everything to me, and I really thought…
well.
What I really thought was really wrong. You’ve made that clear. I WAS WRONG. I had a fantasy in my head which did not match reality. For example:
There was no romance on your end, so you’ve told me, and to you, our friendship meant that you felt it was ok to have intimate friendships and sexual relationships with other people and keep that from me….
(but pleeeeeaaaase understand, to me in my rose-tinted brain, speaking daily, calling each other our favorite human for whom we’d each gladly die, and having unprotected sex, that meant such things were unfathomable)
… meant you felt it was acceptable to skew stories and leave women out when telling me about the social life you kept me separate from, and revile me when I digitally befriended your other lady friends, or invited your roommates over;
(when to me, I thought we shared the complete content of our lives with each other, and couldn’t understand why you’d not want me to associate with people in your life);
… meant you had every right to abruptly end our intimacy through avoidance without speaking with me about it
(which left me in the dark, and desperate to fix something that couldn’t be fixed, my becoming a pleading confused and pathetic mess).
Now, maybe you were right about some of it.
Maybe it’s ridiculous for me to expect so much from people.
Maybe I’ve been lying to myself about a whole lot of things.
Maybe I’ve been wrong all along in every way.
Maybe I’m naive to think that a fellow would willingly bind himself to monogamy without being directly asked to do so. I mean, at some point, <Mutual Friend> had even asked me if I thought you were sleeping with other women, and I answered with total incredulity with something like:
“We talk every DAY, and we tell each other just about EVERYTHING. Besides, he gets so upset and disgusted about the idea of sleeping around within a friend group, or having casual sex, or sleeping with more than one person. Also, he never even MENTIONS other women he even just hangs out with regularly, which he would, if he were. We are each other’s most important person in the world! Why would he sleep with someone else? And if he did, he’d tell me.”
<Mutual Friend> told me I was being ridiculous and naive to think such a thing. But I truly believed that without question, even when the facts started to counter my fantasy. I lied to myself.
Stupid and naive me. I did this. I look at the world with desperate hope, and cling to it, because reality is almost always disappointing and painful. But I convinced myself that my vision of you (my vision of US) was the REAL thing in my impossibly hopeful world.
I know you didn’t mean to break me or hurt me.
Regardless of whether these actions of yours were right or wrong, whether it was understandable for you to do or not, whether my notions were totally ridiculous and delusional, that isn’t the point.
The point is: what our relationship actually was in reality turned out to be universes away from the kind of seamless and honest relationship of emotional togetherness I thought we had with each other, which is what made it so special and precious and why I let it became so life sustaining to me.
No, I didn’t think we knew everything about each other’s pasts, but our present? I thought we were comrades in survival, and thus, bare to each other. Yes, I know that you’d literally die for me, fight for me, but feeling psychologically safe and understood, knowing that I can always trust what you say as infallible, knowing that I can TRUST you without question, that’s far more important. That keeps my life worth living. Your having relationships with other women without my knowledge could not exist given the amazingness I thought we had with each other.
I found out it wasn’t reality.
And that broke me. I don’t think you understand exactly how much. It wasn’t about the SEX. It wasn’t even just about romance.
No, that isn’t the romance that I had in my mind, but neither is it the best friendship that you claim.
You were the only person I had in the world. The only one that mattered. The only thing I trusted.
You constantly doubt that you could be any different to me than anyone else has been. You are forever questioning how you can know that I really mean it. Can you perhaps try to understand this? Can you comprehend that what we had between us meant so fucking much to me that I ended up literally bedridden for months? I ended up weighing 118 pounds.
Maybe that’s not emotionally healthy, but it’s fucking devotion and passion like most people can’t even dream of.
To say you broke my heart is too simple. It wasn’t so pedestrian as a “bad breakup”. I really meant it every time I referred to you as my “everything person.” I looked to you to fill the space of lover, boyfriend, business partner, muse, co-collaborator, confidant, buddy, honesty dealer, art judge, etc etc etc. And that was probably a whole lot of pressure for you to be under. And in everything I thought most importantly we were bare to one another. Bare and real.
And after my everything came crashing down, I lost my mind. I lost all reason. I screamed myself at the world. I couldn’t hold in that kind of pain to myself, but I didn’t have anyone to turn to, so I ranted at the internet.
That, in turn, broke your vision of the kind of trust we had. But to me, you’d already killed it.
I’m sorry.
You said in your last letter to me that we both have our own problems. I’ve got mine, you’ve got yours. But see, I didn’t think that’s how we were. I thought we were PART of each other’s lives. I thought that’s what made us so amazing. I always thought more about your problems than my own, cared to try and make things better for you before I’d do so for myself. I still do. I thought that was how we were. Taking care of each other. Trying to make every day just a little more bearable against tiny ways life slices at us that nobody else understands. Finally finding someone else in the world who gave more than they take, and was worth doing so.
Every single day. Every SINGLE fucking day, I think of you. I think of you, I wish, I worry.
And I still try to think of how I can fix this, or why why why. Constantly.
It’s not healthy.
And the headaches are not going away.
And my emotions are bleeding.
And the hurt is not going away.
See my point?
I’d like my brain to stop hurting. Literally. Figuratively.
I’m not sure what to do.
Distance doesn’t stop me from bleeding and clawing, but we just keep slicing at each other when we try to be close and work through shit just the two of us.
I never got the answers to questions I have been asking from the beginning. For two years you’ve been telling me “I don’t know” and “I need time to think” and “now is a bad time” but then … we slide away from each other … and I’m still left with gaping holes in my understanding of things … and we come back, but my questions resurface, and you get frustrated and angry that I’m bringing up old issues. You are trying to move on, I’m trying to patch up loose ends, neither of us can move forward together that way.
I was not trying to punish you or reprimand you. But for my own sanity, I needed to understand the why and how and meaning of your side of the most significant emotional relationship of my entire life.
…
During that last phone conversation we had… you told me: “Look, we’re not together anymore!”
That really and truly hurt. That was quite painful.
I mean, wasn’t that the whole point? The only reason we aren’t “together anymore” is because I’d thought we WERE “together”, and you told me that I’d no justifiable reason to think we were “together”, and when I accepted that and then asked you if you WOULD NOW want to be “together” with me, you rejected me and were offended that I’d even asked, and felt I’d lessened our best friendship by reducing it to sexual monogamy.
It’s all breaking my brain. Literally.
It’d been two years of this kind of “i need time to think” limbo, and now months of total silence.
Look, people like us don’t GET things like “a good time.” Life is going to keep happening, and terrible things will always be snapping at our heels. Always. There will always be the awful and the hurting and the pain. The best we can do is not wait for the bad times to pass, because they never will. Instead, try to drown it out with good things. Make millions of warm moments and smiling eyes to flood your mind, so the awful scars will be but specks in a sea of fabulousness.
…..
I don’t want to be this person. Begging for answers, throwing myself at you again and again. It’s pathetic. It’s needy. It’s cloying. I don’t like myself like that, so I’m going to stop.
I have become one of those issues you don’t want to deal with. I have become something that makes you feel guilty. I have become another stress in your already stressful life. That is the last thing I ever wanted to be to ANYONE, least of all you. I wanted to be a happy place with open arms.
You were the FIRST and ONLY person I ever EVER thought was “the one”; a person I could easily and with utter joy partner myself with for the rest of my life, through anything the world could throw at us. Everything we did was awesome and comfortable and fun. Going food shopping. Folding laundry. Sitting quietly for days in a row. Just going to bed in pajamas to watch something. Every stupid small moment. We worked so perfectly together. Together, we made life something worth staying alive for. I thought I’d found what I never thought possible.
I guess it really wasn’t possible.
Having you in my life now without complete trust and openness is simply… too painful for me. Maybe I’m just being crazy hyper sensitive, but it’s a constant reminder of the intimate closeness I thought we had, the idea that I wasn’t alone in the world which was ripped from my reality.
And that emotional pain, it becomes physical in my frail broken self. Brainswelling and stabby pains and whatnot.
For the sake of my health, my brain, my heart, my everything…
If I am something to have to “deal” with, if i can’t expect real honesty and transparency between us, if you can’t give me some concrete ground, then…. I need to be nothing at all.
I’ve already been worn through to the bone.
<Abusive ex-boyfriend> was a bastard, but he only ever touched my skin.
You were amazing, and you touched the very core of me. The place where I trust and love.
I can feel the echo of your fingertips on my heart.
Will I ever feel anything as amazing as I thought we were? Will I ever be as happy as I was during our time together in Ocean Grove? As fraught with loneliness and health problems and intruding family as it was, living there when you’d visit at least three days a week, every week, and talk to me almost every dawn… I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. I don’t think I’d ever felt so not alone. I never thought I’d feel so perfectly entwined with someone’s life. I’d never been so willing to sacrifice everything I was for someone. So. Thank you for the illusion. I felt safe when you were in my life. I felt… together. Just thinking about you made everything better. Everyone who knew me was amazed at how much I’d “light up” when you’d call. Everyone could tell, without me ever saying it, that you were the total center of my joy.
I think… I think we both idealized each other. I think we both ended up disappointed. The problem is…. everyone else is still just as terrible, just as shallow, just as alien in comparison. Everyone else still pales next to you.
I hope you can find someone who will be anywhere near as completely devoted to you as I was, but who isn’t blinded by your talent to see you as nothing but novelty. Someone who can see you through the stone facade. Someone to stand by your side through everything like I wanted so desperately to. I really hope you find that and can open yourself to it. You deserve someone by your side. Someone who can see you, and let the lost little girl in her play with the lost little boy in you. A partner through thick and thin. Someone to do a million tiny things to make your day better. Someone who will appreciate the million small things that you do in spite of your hurricane life. Someone to give you a safe place. I hope you find that again, better than me, and embrace it this time.
I hope things get better for both of us.
I need to stop fucking missing you.
But I fucking miss you.
Every fucking day.
I really and truly do love you, y’know.
Romantically? I’m not so sure anymore. But the love is still there.
I am waiting for change to smother it quiet. That girl of me will always love that boy of you in a way that I will never EVER find again. I’m waiting for time to change both of us, to pull us in different directions so that most of me will be made of new chapters; new pieces which that girl in love with you didn’t have. Oh, but it will take some doing to make our pieces not fit so seamlessly.
Perhaps, by the time you read this email, time will have done it’s job.
But really, I think I’ll always feel an empty space where you used to live in my universe.
Rachael
PS. Romance From Beyond is probably a perfect metaphor, huh? She won’t let it die, will dig up the corpse and smile at it, won’t let it just rest already, but never even did get one real date out of the guy.
He never responded to this email. He never answered my questions. But two months later, I emailed him again. I tried time and time again to be the supportive non-romantic friend I thought he needed, even when it hurt to do so.