#letters I'll never send

[lettersfromscarlett]

[toalloftheboysivelovedbefore]

My J.D.B.,

I love you.

It was the start and the end of everything, so it only feels right to start her by reminding you of that fact, in case you ever foolishly forget. I miss you. With as much of my heart that a human is capable of missing another human. I miss you. I carry you with me, everywhere, with all that I am.

To live this life without you is to have a little less color in it. You always loved color, so I suppose it is only fitting that you took some with you. You always laughed at my love of neutral earth tones, but that was why our pieces fit together. You brought color into my life and I grounded you in yours. There are remnants of the colors you took, like watercolors bled onto the edges of a page. Not there purposefully, but spilling over from a work of art.

I know that you didn't want to leave. I didn't want you to. I wanted time with you -- so much more time. The weight of unlived plans is a heavy burden to shoulder. We only got two years together in this life. I hope that we find each other earlier in our lives next time. I hope we spend every minute of it together, and that we never take the time for granted. I hope we spend our days reading together, spending time in nature, and going on adventures. I hope that I can draw you because you sit before me and not from memory or a photograph. I hope we spend our nights with soft kissing, you wrapped around me, my octopus; me wrapped around you, your pretzel.

The last night that I had with you was beautiful and we did just that. You peppered me with soft kisses and I did the same. You held me closer than I think you ever had. When I woke up, you were gone, and my life has been irrevocably changed in so many ways.

To love you was to find a piece of myself I didn't know that I was missing. "Ah. There you are. I've been looking for you." You returned that piece to me when we met and took it again when you left. I wish on every 11:11 that we had a different ending. You always promised me that I could die first. I wanted to hold you to that promise.

The boys miss you too. Arlo lays at the door most nights, looking out into the darkness. He never used to do that before you. He won't let me shower without being in the bathroom with me. I think that he feels my pain and he carries your absence as much as I do.

I look for you everywhere, in everything that I do. I see you in the trees, in the bookshops, in every pair of blue eyes that I find. All the things that drove me crazy, all of the bad puns and dad jokes, all of the movies and television shows that I never wanted to watch, I would give anything to have them back.

I miss dancing in the living room with you. I miss reading to you and you reading to me. I miss showing you my writings. I miss you telling me that you are proud of me. I miss showing you music and dramatically singing Tina Turner to you. I miss the face you would make when I was being ridiculous and silly -- the slight shake of the head, the crinkle of the crow's feet, the smile that isn't sure if it wants to make an appearance or if it wants to turn into a laugh. I miss picking you out gifts at Target and leaving them on your side of the bed to find. I miss writing in cards to you just so you knew I was thinking about you. I miss showering with you, our little dance squeezing by each other and arguing about the temperature of the water. I miss out routine when we were going to bed. I miss crawling into your arms and falling asleep to you rubbing circles on my back. I never felt safer or more at ease than I did in those moments. I miss you reaching over and pulling me close to you in the darkness when the nightmares woke me crying or yelling out, again. I miss our coffee in the mornings and your determination to perfect a vanilla latte for me. I miss the smell of you. I miss washing our clothes together. I miss cooking for you and sending you to work with lunches. I miss getting our pizza and salad and watching a movie together. I miss you bringing me chocolate from Sprouts and watching with delight as I picked out my favorites. I miss your parents. I miss the smell of their house. I miss combing through the books in your dad's office. I miss your mom and making iced tea and I miss her garden and the bees. I miss wrapping my arms around you and clutching the back of your head and playing with your hair. I miss kissing you like we were made to do so. I miss the way our bodies fit together, like we were cut from the same mold, desperate to find each other. I miss our date nights and getting dressed up with you. I miss the joy in your face when I ate something I loved and did a little happy dance. I miss running errands with you. I miss you being my rock in Costco. I miss you pushing the cart while I stressed over the grocery list. I miss walking laps around Target, window shopping and talking. I miss calling each other on our drives home -- it's too damn quiet now. I miss calling you to complain about my family and how crazy they're driving me. I miss dreaming about creating a family of our own, about how much you wanted a daughter simply so she could wrap you around her finger and you could spoil her rotten. I miss dreaming about giving you a boy to carry your name on. With all that I am, I miss you, my love.

I would give everything for a different ending for us. I would give anything to touch you one more time. I wish we had more time to grow together and learn from one another. I love you in ways I am not sure I knew I could love someone. "We loved with a love that was more than love."

You will always carry me with you, just as I know I carry you. I've never known anyone more beautiful than you. Yours are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen.

I don't know how to end this. I don't want to end this. I want to spend the rest of my life writing you this letter and telling you how much I adore you and all the things I miss about you and about all the plans we made. Time was never on our side. If I could, I would go to war against time itself to take back all that it stole from us.

I will find you again. I will search for you in the eyes of every stranger until I feel that familiar tug on my soul strings. "Ah. There you are."

With all that I am, all that I was, and all that I could ever hope to be, I love you. Eternally. Endlessly. Infinitely. Irrevocably. Until my last breath, you carry me in your heart.

Until I find you again, Your Sunshine

[rowandarling]

it’s a quiet sort of tragedy

to feel the time slip away

the ghost of your hand is letting go

and your warmth is a distant memory

you’ve gone so far

yet i am right where you left me

[caturnmoon]

“Checkmate”

How silly of you to play me like a game of chess.

Don’t you know that kings are nothing

Without their pawns?

✨poetry by yours truly, please don’t plagiarize. :)✨

[tenth-of-july]

is it over now?

How am I supposed to come up with new words out of over 600,000 entries in the Oxford dictionary just so I could avoid reusing all of what you left me? How do you explain the same type of pain that has lashed through your body over and over under a million times already? Would I be able to showcase the limit of my abilities through this piece? Can I recycle the words I used such as how devastating it was when your silhouette is still ingrained in the back of my mind to the point where I could spot you first in a room full of people under an already unusual day? Or how I remain breathless and unmoving in the coffin that you helped me build? All of these jumbled up letters that form into words meant to describe and relate to what I feel or have felt, will lie meaningless by the end of my point as its taste will subside but uncomfortably linger like the improperly flamed gin I mixed with grape juice to memorialize the morning I first saw you after a year of wanting to erase the traces of us from the capabilities of my episodic memory that right now, am unfortunate to have—from your face, to your voice, and down to the specific way your head would turn when you get to hear me call your name. What else is there to write other than the repetition of my woes and my alliterated miseries written between the lines of my poetry? 

How do I tell someone the fortuities hidden beneath this one encounter, perfectly timed at the 375th day (precisely a year and ten days; the tenth day, being the date of our parting) since that damned birthday party with the same drink I concocted and the similar restaurant where we had our first date? How do I tell someone that even after I chose to ignore your Christmas greeting last year, even after my third “last entry” about you in my journal, I still feel you cutting through me—and not in a way that someone would expect. Usually, it could mean that I yearn for you again, that I would like to talk it through and maybe change your mind if I were to gamble with my luck—But no one could ever be more wrong if they were to assume that to me. The closest word I can provide is torturous. My heartstrings, already tangled and unkempt outside the shells of every body system that any human being should encompass, beaten and tugged away yet again. When I walked through the door in that fast-food restaurant to escape from the pre-afternoon heat outside, I knew it was all over when the glint of your glasses led me to a spiral all those months ago. I looked away just when you noticed me walking in, your brows lifting in surprise and I think we had that same thought of, “Why now? On the last day of the semester? Just a year after?” I wanted to let you know that I knew we were in the same room that day, but then what? What would I do if I were to ever acknowledge you and the months that have passed without even a word from each other? That I forced myself to ignore your greetings in holidays because I was afraid of bursting? I sat behind your table, your back completely within my gaze, and I felt like I consumed a whole bottle of vodka at the sight of you trying to find my face through the front of your camera. I wanted to throw up and purge every drop of blood that was inside of me because you have already taken everything and what else was there left for me to keep but my organs and its vessels? This sudden pull occurred in the most agonizing way possible, happening in the blink of an eye—or more accurately (and quite literally)—in the blink of your eye. And now, I am forced to accommodate the fact that you remain constant on the soil where I stand as well. 

[signed-someone]

To the couple who walked past me earlier,

six months ago I might have cried.

today I could only smile.

it was something about the way one of you slipped your hand around the other's waist on the inside of their coat, and the way the other leant into it.

the care in the touch, the love in the glances.

the meaning behind every smile, every word, every breath.

six months ago I might have cried.

today I could only smile.

[scamomile]

It's getting harder and harder to remember why I'm still here. I do things just to make sure I'm still corporeal. I fear that one day I will wake up to find that I can no longer interact with the world around me; that I would wake as a phantom. I know this is a terrible thing to say, but the truth is, I'm not sure if I should go on existing. The night calls and I find myself too weak to resist its summons. If this is the last time I write to you, I swear I tried. I have never been very strong, you know this, but please, please know I tried.

[addictedtopizza14]

Love doesn't always demand reciprocity

I've read in books, watched in films, and heard in songs how a person is capable of liking someone without expecting anything in return. How a person is content to spend hours worrying and caring about someone without the other person's knowledge. And how their happiness became their happiness too.

Then it intrigued me. I questioned, "How can someone do this to theirself?" and "Is it really possible to like someone that genuinely."

Yet, here I am now.

Writing letters that you will never read and scribbling endless paragraphs that your fingertips will never run across.

Perhaps, this is the only way I know how to love— behind a pen, behind a series of words, and behind a piece of paper.

[aelysianfields]

it's weird to be the villain in a story when you thought you were the victim, but who says they have to be mutually exclusive?

[the13dreamers]

Dear West Street,

Where the garden beds are filled with sand. Where the flowers won’t grow, but the mint will. Where I bought my first car for $1,300 and lost the key three weeks later. Down the street and to the right is the pizza shop, where we sat on the Stairway to Heaven (which is really just a flight of stairs in front of the building). Do you remember? The sun buries its face in the breasts of the clouds. Nick played the song I loved best, but I can’t remember the name. You picked me up after I talked you down from the railing. Funny how my legs gave out while yours never trembled. I still think about the careless way your headlights never looked back. Did you forget about West Street? My first night in my apartment, you brought wine and the scrawny guy from the show. He sang Jolene by Ray LaMontage. He had a voice that even the wine couldn’t make sound good.

But that night, with Christmas lights tracing the baseboards, with only a rug to sit on and your parakeet laugh ricocheting off the walls, with my bruised knee & bad taste in jokes (and men), I made excuses for it. Maybe he never found the breath he lost climbing up the steps. Maybe this wine just sucks.

West Street is where I lost the keys to my house at least 7 times. I’d climb back inside using the window to my living room on the second floor. By then, I had a cat and a septum ring, and a fuck buddy who lived down the road. He taught me how to longboard and kiss real slow. I got bruises from both, so he showed me how to walk it off. We watched a Studio Ghibli movie he had on DVD, but I fell asleep right after the opening scene. I threw away that damn disk as soon as I stopped fucking him. You asked me to go for a walk across the Sundial Bridge, where you cried for all the trees that turned to ashes last year. You were funny in that way. One minute you’d be laughing about some girl you’d flipped off, or some guy you told to kiss your ass. And the next second you’d be crying for the rainforests that can’t weep for themselves to water their roots.

I love(d) you because when life gave you lemons, you’d sell them a buck each and use the money to buy a string of beads. I love you in a way that happens once or never at all.

[coeurdetout]

for mo, 21.12.2022

[toalloftheboysivelovedbefore]

TW: rape and SA

Dear J.D.B.,

I don’t know where to start, exactly.

I am planning on telling my mom and Tom tonight. Not that it was you, but that it happened. I think that if I told them it was you, Tom would hurt you. Badly. I don’t want that. I realize I’m still protecting you. I am so tired of wearing a mask all of the time and pretending like I’m fine when I’m not.

I am scared shitless to tell them.

There are so many ways that this could go and I am not in control of any of them.

Garrett keeps talking me through how to do this and how to set my boundaries and telling me that I can do it. I tell him that I am worried that they will feel like I am just ‘attention seeking’ or making this up or overreacting. It takes so much mental capacity to tell myself that anyways.

But then I think about the time that I told R.A.R. about when I woke to you already inside of me, and he called it rape. When I told Tammy, the color drained from her face and she said the same thing.

By definition, it is. But emotionally, it is more complicated than that. You were my partner. We were in a sexual relationship. I have driven down so many, too many, Reddit rabbit holes of other women who have experienced this and what it felt like to them and how they were able to contend with the fact that this is sexual assault. It is rape. And you did it to me not just once.

On another note, I think I have Pavlov’d myself into looking forward to my Thursday sessions. I get to go eat ice cream in the park afterwards…who wouldn’t look forward to that?

I filled a journal page the other day with this sentence over and over again, so I feel it only appropriate to put it here too.

I am going to be okay.

I am going to be okay.

I am going to be okay.

Sad and scared,

H.L.F.

[rowandarling]

there’s this loose piece of thread in me

tucked in the marrows of my bones

it’s hooked itself onto you

taking a bit of me

as you drift

further

and

further

away from me

these days i find myself

unraveling, fraying, dissolving

running out of words, out of time, so

for my sake, i’ll sever the string binding us

[solacemygame]

2023. The year that i I have lost you, the only person i know i was ever truly in love with.. The only girl i know i would have loved loving.. my best friend.. my once in a lifetime person. :’( i still miss our conversations . Our late night talks. Our connection. How happy we used to be before i messed things up. To be fair, we both failed to do some things we should have, and did some things we shouldn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt the need to let go. I would have married you in a heartbeat, if things were not complicated. You know this. I never wanted to lose you. Never wanted us to end this way. Never wanted us to end.. but mistakes have been made. If only there was a reset button.. If only i could go back in time and make things right. :’( but things are what they are. And maybe it is the way they are supposed to be. If only it wasn’t so painful…

Still feels like a nightmare. I wish i could wake up and things are back to how it was between us.. :’( but i know it is too late. I have lost you.. and a part of me will always feel this void you have left. I will always feel this pain. I will live with this pain. in a way, you are more fortunate than i am. Because at least, you were able to marry and live with the one you love.. or at least used to love. And you were happy then. You both were. I’ll never have that chance.. i lost it when i lost you. But you were never mine to begin with.. yet after you, we both know my heart cannot be as in love with anyone else as much as it was with you.. you were everything i dreamed of. I don’t know if i can ever be as happy as i was than when we were together. I was happiest with you. You were my home. My perfect fit. But you were never really mine. i was never really your home. That privilege already belonged to someone else..

So I had to do what i had to do. Even when it hurts so much. :’( and i have to live with my decisions. For better or worse. And i know it would take a lot of work to make things work with what i had to settle with. But isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? You work things out. Yet it has been a struggle for me. When everything could have been easier with you. Because you are the one i love. But maybe it is for the best. And I hope things will make sense in the end. It has to mean something at least. Right? All this pain? :( i am sorry for all the pain i caused you. I hope you know how much it cost me too. I will always grieve the loss of you.. you will always be my love at first sight, and all of me will always be in love with all of who you are.. you will always be the most beautiful woman to me. My muse. My heart.

i hope 2024 will be kinder to both of us. I will cherish all our memories. They are precious to me.. your laugh still echoes in my ears.. your face still lingers on my mind.. your love still clutches at my heart.. all the happy moments we had, i will ever hold them dear..

happy new year to you. I know you’ve somehow found your peace.. i pray that i find my peace too.

I pray that things will work out well for you.. I wish you all the happiness.. may this year bring you so much joy and fulfillment, laughter and love.. because you deserve it. You deserve all the best.. and even though i know i shouldn’t be saying this anymore, let me say it once again. i love you. I really did love you.. I still do.. I will always do.. from the first time i saw you, to the last time we talked.. Even while i was letting go.. even if i never say it again. Even if i never see you again.. even if you never read this. Even if you hate me. I will always love you. I will aways care.. My heart will always be homesick for you..

May this new year give you all that you deserve.. be safe always…

[tenth-of-july]

my integumentary system is familiar of even the thought of you that bounce around the voices of people I barely know; they tickle through the cracks of my goosebumps as the words continue to sort themselves into sentences until it eventually forms a coherent conception of who we were, what happened in between, and what we could have been. they continue to feel familiar deep through the layers of my skin, below my subcutaneous, inside my marrows, and around my tendons.

[signed-someone]

To her again,

I fell in love for the first time when I was 17.

and you were incredible, something I couldn't begin to explain and didn't want to.

everything about you existed as this immovable constant in my mind.

no distance would stop me from loving you, no argument would make me love you less, and nothing could stop the words from pouring out when I declared just how much...

my heart broke for the first time when I was 18.

and you left remnants of love etched into my skin.

you existed in photos and texts and everything I was desperate to forget about.

no distance stopped me from thinking of you, no time has passed that's made me think less of you, and there are nights even now I wonder whether I'm still in love...

or just miss the feeling.