letters i never sent

I ran up the narrow staircase, each step creaking as I passed. I opened the door on the left to find what was once my bedroom. What was once my sanctuary, the place I’d have sleepovers with my best friend, the place I’d kiss the Nick Jonas poster hanging above my bed, the place where I’d tell my 8th grade boyfriend I didn’t love him. Although it once was my sanctuary, the place I brought boys I once loved, the place where those boys broke my heart, a place where I would go to escape the teen angst that grew ever so deeply, it no longer felt like mine. Not really, not anymore. Sure, it had all the stuff from my past – notes from middle school tucked inside of the dirty pink converse sneakers I wore to the middle school dance. Those sat next to boxes of oversized t-shirts, yearbooks of pictures of me and a boy who I once was convinced that I would marry. Oh and of course notes from that same boy in piles underneath a wooden boat he made – an ode to “our song,” that he was like the dead sea, and I would never sink… He always wrote them in pencil, so the “i will love you forever and ever…” had faded just like our love had many years ago.

Then there were boxes from my college years. Those college summers were spent pretending to be an adult and “knowing absolutely everything” because I would merely repeat what my professor in race, crime and justice class said. Those boxes were littered with stories from my life during past winter breaks. Where I would spend nights huddled in my bed next to the other boy I thought I would love forever. Snow bitten noses barely peeking out from under the same pastel pink comforter that sat on the bed now.

Sure, everything in there was mine, the pencil box with hearts and names sharpied in thick letters on the outside and the stuffed lizard my dad got me as a compromise after I begged him tirelessly for a pet iguana. This room was not foreign to me, each item had an origin story, a climax, and (sometimes sadly) an ending that I knew by heart and could recite in detail... But, these stories were no longer me, they were mine, sure, but they were not who I was now. As I looked at these items from my past, from a time I no longer really knew, everything felt different. I would never wear those baggy jeans now, I thought. I no longer could feel how awful it felt when the senior boy who “tutored me in math” and taught me how to kiss told me he couldn’t date me when I was only 15. I remember the movements, the actions I made, I can play them back in my head like watching a movie. I got home from school, turned on Taylor Swift and I cried on the bathroom floor for hours wearing his torn up white t-shirt… but I no longer could remember the actual feeling of it, the pain I felt from each tear, that I wrote about in my pink diary years ago. At the time, I know I thought it was the biggest, most terrible heartbreak I would ever feel… not only was I very much wrong, but that feeling was too brief for me, years later to even try to remember its touch. It's funny how something you thought was so big, so intense would feel so meaningless, so foreign, years later.

As I tore open box after box to reminisce on my younger self, on the past years that once felt so long and never ending, I came across an old letter I had written. It was sealed, stamped, and closed inside of a light pink envelope, ready to make its journey across the country to the boy whose name I wrote in large letters on the front. Looking at the outside of the envelope, I couldn’t remember why I didn’t send it, or why I even wrote it, but it wasn’t like me (at least the me I am today) to not tell someone how I felt even if they didn’t want to hear it. It must have been a mistake, I thought…

So as I sat on the floor of my bedroom, with memories flowing around the floor, I tore open the neatly closed letter. It started out as “Dear *u**n…, I am writing this because I need to tell you how I feel…”

Of course, a love letter to a boy who never loved me… why was I so goddamn predictable? I kept reading and there it was. On the third and final page of my overly long, overly dramatic letter I wrote, in shaky handwriting, I wrote “It has been…and will always be you.” I underlined the word “you” as if he couldn’t pick up on how much I loved HIM, not someone else, from the entire letter itself… but alas.

All of a sudden it was like I was 15 again, I could picture it so vividly. There we were sitting on top of a ferris wheel, him on one side, me on the other. It was awkward, like the pause before your first kiss, looking away then catching their eye before finally (and quickly) going in for the kill. All before running away and giggling with your friends about how you felt his braces. I mean I was just so nervous, he was older than me and “cool” and I was just a freshman who just last year still had “playdates” with my friends who would come over and play barbies with me. But through my nerves, he knew how to make me laugh. He stared out at the sky, then back at me and smiled, and every single part of me knew I already loved him, then and there. It was the kind of crush that I couldn’t contain, couldn’t control, that was growing ever so quickly with every moment spent near him.

I remembered his soccer games too, me sitting on the sidelines pretending to care about the game but really being there just to watch him. He always wore a headband to push his floppy brown hair back, it made his blue eyes look even shinier than normal. While his eyes were on the game, my eyes were fixated on his. I did catch him looking in my direction just for a second ever so often. Then there were those nights we would go camping hidden away behind the trees, cuddling in a tent next to one another. Or sleepovers at his house, his room in the basement, bed up against the wall, and his arm around my stomach. I felt so safe. So in love. And I’ll never forget when he took me to his prom, my ivory dress didn’t arrive on time so I wore a small blue one that didn’t match his suit. I shimmied it on, zipped it up and stared into the mirror. It tightly hugged me, a size too small. Far too short, the spot on my knee I missed from shaving was all anyone would see. And worst off, it was way too blue, as if I stopped by Willy Wonka’s and got turned into a blueberry right before I got there. The whole night was ruined, I thought. But then, I turned around and he was there, he lightly kissed my cheek and told me I looked beautiful, then he asked him mom to take a picture of us with his arm around my waist. The blue of the dress brought out the blue in his eyes… as he grabbed my hand to walk me to the car, suddenly, everything, including that stupid blue dress, felt just right.

One year in high school, we were assigned Moby Dick in English class. I power read this book, skimmed some, skipped some, spark-noted some, claimed to love but didn’t entirely understand some. I finished it, or at least sort of did, I definitely stated to the world, i.e., my English class that I did… seemingly floating along with my classmates in the same boat. At the time, all my friends were obsessed with the “white whale” metaphor – only having taken bites as I, without full digestion. But, whether or not we comprehended the great depths of Herman Melville, it was our new go-to phrase, used mostly in contexts it did not fit. Specifically, about our failed pursuits of love. The boy I wrote the letter for, after many failed attempts at romance, and continuing pursuits, received a new title in my friend group, as my white whale. To me, and the internet at the time, a white whale was “something you obsess over to the point that it nearly or completely destroys you. An obsession that becomes your ultimate goal in life; one that your life now completely encircles and defines you.” All my friends called him my white whale, and for the love of literature and the love of, well, love, I did too.

Years later, I re-read Moby Dick, and re-watched Friends in its entirety and came to realize that white whale was not the correct name of my unrequited pen-pal. Rather, he was my lobster... I declared. According to Friends, lobsters fall in love and mate for life, so if he was my lobster it meant we were meant to be together – despite this being nothing more than a line in a script, I liked this metaphor a whole lot more than the former when referring to this boy. When I came to this realization years after high-school, we had nothing more than a few drunk texts, likes on each other's photos, a “miss you” left unopened. But to me, he was still my lobster, he signified “the one that got away… but if you happened to find one another many years later, you would both see each other from across a crowded room, lock eyes, and run into each other’s arms as if no time had passed and just know that it was meant to be.” Cheesy? Sure, but for some reason I was convinced that this is what he was to me, that our timing was off, that one day it would happen…Naive? Maybe. Moronic…? Definitely.

When I wrote the letter, I truly believed he was my lobster, that regardless of the amount of people who held our hearts in between, it didn’t matter. He was the person that after so many years, I could not let go of. After so many years I still considered him to be the one, and that even as I met new people and fell in love, he was still there, sticking to the tips of my fingers… he was like molasses, while everyone else was mere honey.

Maybe it was because our relationship never blossomed into something real, it was always what ifs, and maybes, and what could have been. He never saw me at my lowest of lows, he never held me as I cried, we never screamed at one another, we never helped out when the other was sick, we were fleeting moments while our real lives were moving along without the other. He never even told me he loved me, let alone felt it… well he said it, once, sort of, when his breath smelled of whiskey, and he couldn’t walk in a straight line, but his drunken stupor saying “i have always loved you” really doesn’t count. Yet, to me he was everything, and would be everything. Thus, I wrote the letter. To finally tell him the truth, to finally tell him that I loved him (underlined boldly of course). I felt as though sending the letter would free me somehow, it would be the final page of his never-ending chapter, that would make it either finally work out and make him mine or make him realize how I felt (as if he didn’t already know) and tell me to let him go.

So why didn’t I send it?

Well, I subconsciously knew then, what I actually know now. Although I didn’t want to admit it then, underneath all the stories of our past, all the overly romanticized and dramatized plotlines of our future I created, I knew that he was not actually my person. Although I wrote it down, underlined it, rewrote it to make sure it was perfect, then rewrote it again, I knew that this was not the person that I was “supposed” to be with, he was not my stupid lobster. I think I enjoyed believing it, it was romantic, like all my favorite books and movies, full of love and lost but re-found connections, it felt right. In my mind he could do no wrong. We would see each other for a week out of the year and I would fall back under this spell that I may have created, but he perpetuated while we were together. Yet the second we were apart he treated me like leftover chinese food that you save, claiming you will eat it, but you know you won't, and then you wait a little too long to throw it out before it starts stinking up the whole kitchen. He would act like I was everything when we were together, before leaving and forgetting my name while he lay underneath the next carbon copy blonde girl of his true/actual lobster (a rainy day I’ll never be.) We were not some huge romance that they write about in books, no, we were just another memory that sits in boxes in my room at home, that although was once mine, is nothing more than something I can’t quite touch or feel, something that I can reiterate but that I no longer know.

I didn't send that letter because part of me knew that I had to let him go, that I finally had to close the door to what once was or what could have been. The girl who wrote that letter knew that she deserved more, and that future me, the me today, deserved someone who loved me the way that I have always loved others, the way that I have always fantasized about. What I didn’t know though was that just a year after writing that letter, after I put my pen down, and sealed that envelope, I met that person, my person. You may not believe in soul mates or that everyone has a so-called “person” but I sure do, because I met him, and he's now the person I get to wake up next to on cold Sunday mornings. He's the person I always dreamt about, the person I wanted so many other people to be but they always fell short. He’s the person I love with every inch of myself, the kind of love that I genuinely never knew was even possible, that I would claim existed but could never reach up and touch it, until now. We love to talk about how our meeting was perfect timing, that everything was right, and it was. If I had met him a year earlier, my heart may have still belonged to “letter boy,” and maybe it wouldn’t have worked. I do believe things happen for a reason, and timing (not always) is yet a piece of the puzzle in showing you that. Me and “letter boy” used to always say “it's the timing” – we blamed bad timing on us not figuring it out (over and over again), but the timing was telling us both something, among the many other red flags, that we were just not meant to be. That he was not mine and I would never be his.

So I guess, although heartbreak doesn’t get any easier in the moment, and it hurts deeper and stronger than anything I have ever felt, it doesn’t last forever. The feelings will eventually become mere memories tucked away in boxes in your childhood bedroom gathering dust and fading faster and faster like old pencil to paper.

I folded up that letter, placed it back in the box among other past memories, and smiled, because although I made many mistakes back then, I am no longer the girl who wrote that letter. And the boy that I wrote the letter for, that boy is just a person I wasted three pages of paper and a cute floral stamp on, whose middle name I no longer remember, and the love I once had for him I can no longer feel. He, like many things in my past are just that, the past, floating, memories, and letters that I wrote but never sent.