I am sorry for the hurt. I do not want to patronize you, and keep telling you I wanted you to be happy—that ending things was to make things better for you—you knew there was something I kept hidden when we ended. You did love me by the end of it, I had held onto you long enough to make you love a girl like me. I needed you. I loved you because you let me hang onto you so I could change course. Somehow fate allowed our universes to touch—and when they did I wouldn’t let it go. You loved me, even though we fought over petty things. We had so much passion, despite that everything either of us said, became opposition to what both of us truly felt. 

When we broke up, you asked, “but how did I change your life?, What does that even mean?” It means that love is not perfect, love can come and go when it is ready, like it is a third party that has its own freewill. It can leave you feeling like the sea being pulled back by the moon. It can feel like an instant that knocks you over in its presence, and in its passing, you feel like it was never there. Love can be like that funny face your lover drew on the shower window, and even though they're gone, you still see it when it gets all steamy, and it doesn’t really make your heart sink, it just is there, and you can’t remember why you have this smirk on your face as you shave your legs. Before you, love made me a victim.

Our love was like driving in a rainstorm; feeling every drop hitting you harder than anything else you were staring out at from the inside. The muggy car and the rain would create the most powerful and heavy of silences: I would touch your knees, your hands, and in that moment I would believe that we were truly beautiful and that our love felt like a fast, wet car and that you felt it too. Although, sometimes our love felt like the realization you have when your windshield wipers are still squeaking along the dry glass, many moments after the storm had passed. 

Our body language was always awkward in photos and in real life; always “it is so random you two are dating”, or my favorite was, “how did she get with him?”—I was not part of your crowd, and neither was he. He was your friend. He was not one of the original friends you identified yourself so strongly with, but a true friend of yours. When he came around, I felt like I could breathe. I felt my shoulders relax, I felt warm standing near him, I felt like I could say things out loud around him, that I usually kept inside my head when I was around you and your friends…He for some reason, always heard everything, and he saw everything. He felt what I would say, and knew the place it came from inside me, even before I spoke. At parties I always had to run back in and say goodbye to him. I never wanted to be with him when my body embraced his presence, I still wanted to be your girl, because I still needed you. He was our friend; though I will never dishonor the fact that he was your friend first. 

That summer I felt feelings for him that could not be unfelt, feelings I expected, feared, and embraced. Expected, because I knew that when I found him, I would leave you, I just didn’t know who he was. When all of our friends showed up to clean up what the river had left behind of my home, my mother mentioned I was different around him, but different in the sense that I was finally myself again: “Who is he?”… “he is our friend”, her face for the first time since the flood, relaxed, and she said pointing her finger at me, “you should marry that guy”. Fear, because I knew it wrong that I could not picture my life with you and never really had, and fear because I knew I would leave with such haste at some point. I knew I was cruel, and I knew I was with you out of desperation (originally), but then again, I think you were too. I felt fear explaining how I felt to him, because it meant jeopardizing everything; he and I would lose your respect, lose our friend’s respect, and have to accept that people would eventually move on, and forgive, but it would not be anytime soon. 

You and I met at the old house after I broke it off. It was pouring while you rummaged through my dad’s records in our flooded garage, looking for answers and The White Album— But you settled on Kenny Rogers as a parting gift, and “I am not the girl I picture a guy like you with”, as parting words—Both equally shameful and not what you had come for, you really did deserve more.

As time has passed, it is almost shy of a year since I touched you; I remember how I fit under your chin when we hugged goodbye, we agreed that maybe we will talk when you returned from visiting Sam. You returned, and that never did happen, because there was such fragility created as I walked on egg shells with him. Whenever I hear the songs you used to sing to me, I am sad and happy. Now, I can only faintly recall how you use your face when you talk, or remember what it was about your hands that reminded me of your mother. I think about how when we see each other, I will have to say something more than, “how have you been?” Reticence has never been my strongest trait—in fact, it is often my weakest. Not being able to explain to you how incomplete it all felt when I wasn’t the one who told you I had fallen in love with your friend, is something that will come across (when it finally does) as dramatic, and “ex-girlfriendy”- the classic “too little too late plea”. I hate the cliché; “as if anyone on this planet doesn’t know a couple who dosey doe’d their way into true love, that’s how I met your father”. I never devalued you, or moved on by replacing you with your friend. Maybe I will even seem pathetic as I over-talk my way into embarrassingly trying to win back your respect. I think that no matter what, it will hurt, and feel uncomfortable, but no matter what I owe you an apology at some point. It is just a matter of how I chose to do it…Though, I think running into you at a show or with your new girl, would be most unsettling. Sometimes I feel like a phone call out of the blue or maybe seeing you on the street when both of us don’t have any place to be, would work. 

It is just that now, I am so happy, and so free from what it was that made me need someone, and I am so thankful I met you. Not because you were the segway to me meeting the love of my life, but because you showed me that love can change from a fast wet car, to unremitting thankfulness. If I hadn't have met you, I would have destroyed my youth. I would have never known what it was to feel truly alive, and truly young. I am so thankful for all the moments we shared that got us through things nobody but ourselves will understand. I guess part of me yearns for that reciprocity, but above all, your forgiveness… Maybe this silence, and this new love and new life each of us has, is enough. I think this instance is when love becomes a sense of closure only hind-sight can give us; affirming that sometimes when two people who were once lovers, can smile because they realize meeting each other and then moving on, were equally the best things that could have happened to one another.