You don't know me. You can delete this email.
Dear Cameron,
You don't know me. You can delete this email. It was sent as an incongruous mistake by a stranger; it doesn't matter in the slightest.
Or, maybe you do know me. Maybe, once upon a time, we both lived on West St.
My reason for writing is obscure and unreasonable: in my postpartum writing kick I'm wading through bottomless pools of nostalgia. Combing through old notebooks and letters. Wondering where those strangers are now. I'm writing to apologize.
I've written a story that is half about you, the you from nine years ago. You would hate it. Don't bother reading it; it's 20,000 words of drivel. Don't bother looking for it; it's under a pseudonym, composed solely of pseudonyms. It's PG-13; it necessarily flattens what transpired between us. It's pretentious; it peppers in mentions of Dante and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. The other half of the story is about the other guy who was emotionally distant, or at least the illusion of what the other guy represented to me. You don't want to know. Like I said, you would hate it. Like I said, you can and should delete this email.
I'm not apologizing for writing the story. I'm apologizing for the fact that you will never get to hear the truth you deserved.
When I broke up with you, I failed to say out loud that the moment you had utterly lost my trust was when you slammed your fist into the ground an inch from my face. That I had been naked, and vulnerable and afraid. That shortly after, you had denied your anger, and all meaningful communication had broken down. That was why I left. It took me five days too long to acknowledge it to myself. It took me nine years too long to say it out loud. The other guy's hand on my waist, in the grand scheme of things a thoughtless and incidental gesture, had merely jolted me awake. I anchored onto the original illusion of my love for him as a momentous force to propel me away from you with a purpose that could feel familiar to me, rather than the simple act of self-preservation which required mere bland rationality.
I'm sorry you felt that I had cheated. I really will never know if you had misheard me somehow. I definitively gave up on you, on the idea of us, the day before I physically went to speak to break up with you. I verbalized on this giving up in a vague way, without promising anything else, to another person who I had no commitments to, but had feelings for – feelings that were still unresolved mere days before you first asked me out, feelings that I compartmentalized and did not act on during the course of our affairs. If this is emotional cheating in your book, I am gravely sorry. I am sorry for every person who has had to experience a breakup this way. I know I have been on the receiving end of that, as well.
I'm sorry I used the word love, that it was thoughtless and that it deeply hurt you when I retracted it. I'm sorry that I fell in love with the writer in you, the one who could not physically harm me, the one who could not pressure me into doing uncomfortable things I didn't truly desire to do, and that it was this idea of you who I was speaking to when I had uttered that "I'm so in love with you", and caustically I had flinched and retreated when the real-life version of you didn't match up. You were a damn good writer. I'd forgotten about that manuscript you were sitting on. You spoke in random snippets of poetry that entranced me. You read my letters and you wrote back and you cared. You filled my literary heart with unspeakable joy. I'm sorry that I loved literature more than I loved people. I deeply apologize that you had to come into the crosshairs of this unfortunate phase of my life.
After our breakup, I wrote a long letter to the other guy. It was about you, about us. Filled with dread, I bared my soul. I did it to undo the feelings of what had been said with him, the night before I broke up with you. He read it and, I can only imagine, recoiled in silence. Whereas you, when I had told you about him, when I had gone over to say goodbye, instinctively you asked me to stay.
I'm sorry you misunderstood me. You saw me as a body whose brain just so happened to be attached. I realize now that you even wrote about me in this way. And when that brain rejected you, and the mouth connected to it uttered some pretty damning things that forever severed our emotional bond, still you imagined that in our physical bond there might have been something to salvage. I felt deeply confused when amid my haste to escape from your shouting and fists and boiling rage, you asked to hug me. I had just plainly told you that I didn't love you, that I feared you, that I ultimately felt I still had feelings for someone else, that we were nothing. A hug? A trick, I thought, a perverse deception. How wrong you were about me, for I had always been a brain, with a body shamefully dragged along behind it.
I'm sorry, too, that in many ways I had misunderstood you. You were so much older and pursued me with such a dogged determination that spelled mature confidence, practiced ease. It was only after our breakup, when you revealed in your last letter that I was the first person you had said 'I love you' to in almost ten years, that I realized it had been underwritten by a deep and tragic insecurity I could have never imagined, given our interactions in that short span of time. Your emotional volatility was likely fueled by that insecurity, rather than an arbitrary need to engender pain. You needed someone who could sit through that volatility and demand you to be better. I couldn't be that person.
I'm sorry we crossed paths, over and over on the sidewalk, after the last time we spoke. You glared at me like I had murdered someone and gotten away with it. Perhaps I had – that deeply vulnerable version of yourself you dared to share with me. After several silent encounters you asked me, with clenched teeth, not to walk in front of your house. West was safe, MLK was not. But it was the least I could do. There was a family walking behind me on the sidewalk as you uttered this request; I was frazzled, I couldn't help but remember the other conversations that transpired on that exact spot. I rerouted my walk inside Montgomery station, too, to avoid your performances. But it wasn't enough. There was that final time at the Downtown Berkeley station. I was on the way to a quiet night of figure drawing at Kroeber, my large sketchpad under my arm. You were sitting, knees tucked, empty-handed without violin or bag, at the foot of a pillar next to the stairs. You looked up at me and rolled your eyes as I quickly looked away. You chuckled sardonically to yourself, at the universe.
I hope, at least, that when you tell people about my brief and absurd presence in your life, that it's funny, not sad – "That morose Chinese girl, the scrawny one with the funny-shaped head, always buried in a book – my god she was wordy! And deluded!"
Don't write back, because you've already deleted this email, because it doesn't exist.
After tucking this long note into the bottom of my drafts folder, forever unsent, I will quietly go back to wiping those two very lovable poopy butts and shaking my head at the news with my grumpy husband and eating the millionth bowl of morning porridge, back to my insignificant life. And you to yours.
I wish you all very the best in life.
Take care.
Respectfully, Soleliu