I hate you, so thoroughly. I hate how you would talk to me on the phone until I fell asleep, and I’d grown so used to it in those two weeks that now I just can’t sleep unless I’m on the phone, and if I’m lucky enough to slumber without it, it’s difficult. I hate how you promised me everything, but I guess I really just hate how I believed you. I hate how I even bothered to write about you when I first met you, I hate how I thought you meant it, I hate how your favorite color is blue and your hair is dirty blonde and I hate just how average you are. I hate how you are everything I want to but cannot be, I hate how I had you, I hate how I lost you, I hate you.

I hate how I can always find better than you, more attractive or sweeter people that have more of an interest in me than you ever will. I hate how I would still take you back even after all these times you’ve made me angry, and I hate how I know it and I hate how I won’t even deny anymore. I hate how you just want me for my looks, and even then only in small amounts, you’ll say you need a friend and then make your move on me, and then I hate how we end up saying dirty things to each other and I hate it even more how we get off, and then you leave. I hate it the most when you leave.

I hate it too when you come back. When you say how sorry you are and how I’m such a great friend, I hate it because I know you’re lying, and I hate how I so need to believe you. I hate your hair and your eyes and your shit-eating grin, I hate how you make me want to break my phone, and I hate how I had to delete your number just so I wouldn’t text you anymore. I hate everything about you, and I guess what I’m trying to say is, I love you.

The suburban world waited just beyond, just out the window, just on the other side of the glass, but yet it was so cold inside, and the light only got bleaker and bleaker. White windowpanes and white light spattered among the white sheets of this winter, the sheets of my bed where I’d always dreamed we’d lay. And you should know you were everything to me. 

For seven months you were everything I knew, days had passed by, then months, almost a year it would’ve been, now. But you’re gone now, you say we’re on a break but I think it’s really just us that’s breaking, the result of too many thousands of miles between us. Fuck the Atlantic, fuck it all, fuck this love that could’ve been, but was not, and fuck you when you said you were doing this for me. Fuck me for wanting it, and also for wanting you back. Fuck this Christmas where you won’t be here, fuck the week we’d dreamt of all throughout the hazy summer, and fuck us and all that we were and all that we, now, are not. 

Each morning I walk down my road just as the sun is crowning the horizon and splashing the skies in oranges and pinks and blues, and I think of you. I think about the day I’ll have to tell you I’m really not coming, that I lied, that I chose to go to the city of my dreams, and not to you. I made the decision in a heat of anger during one of our fights, and call it the best thing I’ve ever done, and it was. Doesn’t mean I want to tell you you’re wasting years waiting on me, and I’m not coming, and maybe I never will, and maybe I never wanted to. 

And at night, when I’m under the thick white blankets and sheets shaking from the cold that escapes in through cracks between the window and the pane, I think of you then, too. I don’t dream about you anymore, though I used to every night during that time that seems so long ago when I was yours, and you were mine. I miss dreaming about you. I dream about other people now, though I realize that I’d like to see you just one more time in the dreamspace, even if we’re still not together, even in my unconscious state.

I say I don’t think of you anymore, and when anyone asks about you I tell them we talk very often, though I guess we both know that’s a lie. It’s been weeks, and I just don’t have the heart to come to you and say hello, how are you, how’s the weather across the big blue that we’d grown to hate so much. I’d show you this letter if I could, if you’d understand it, but I know you wouldn’t, there’s too many big words, and that’s okay. I know that’s why we fought most of the time, because you just couldn’t understand, and I couldn’t understand you either. And you tried to keep us together, and I was desperate, and we broke, and have been since that day in late September. I really lost you then, but I know I’d lost you long before that, I’d grown tired, and sick, and given up on you. I couldn’t take it anymore, but somehow I find myself wishing that I could get the chance to take it again. Would it be any different? 

I read the letters you penned me during the months of spring and wonder.