a letter to my (old) lover

Dear D,

You're back in the country, and you're seeping into my life. Slowly, slowly, your name comes up in conversation, and your face appears in digital colour. You sent me a request to be friends over six months ago. I wonder if you did it while you were drunk. H said she left you alone in a bar; maybe that was what it took. Maybe you thought, well, it's time we unfroze the Cold War. Maybe you didn't think at all. I fear the latter more.

Sometimes I fantasise about rejecting you, of seeing you at T's wedding and just leaving you cold. I don't think that will happen. This is what will happen, I think.

- Hello
- Hello, how have you been 
- Great, and you? I hear you've done ____
- Oh, yes, I'm fantastic - really loving the _____
- And your family are well?
- Oh yes, very well

Ad nauseum.

I miss - something. The feeling he gave me. The feeling that I was with exactly the right person. But he wasn't, was he? Not then, not there.

Maybe love,
SL

the ghost ship that didn't carry us

Earlier today, I read a few lines that struck something within me, from the Dear Sugar advice column at The Rumpus.

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

As I approach 26, I am more and more aware of my own capabilities and weaknesses. I fundamentally tend towards laziness, am a little too critical and often become bogged in minutiae - seeing the forest only for individual trees. But I'm also generous, and loving, and good at being good to a person - really, genuinely, all-my-heart good. 

I spent six, almost seven months across 2015-2016 with a boy who loved me but wasn't enough. Who roused tender feelings, and sparked to life yearnings that I had not experienced before. But - it was not enough. I did not respect him as I need to respect my partner in life. I did not feel that bone-deep knowledge that I did not need anybody else, that he was IT. I cheated on him, once, and did not feel significant remorse. 

I read the things that Dimitri and I used to write to each other, to say to each other that I recorded faithfully - and I wonder about my ghost ship; the spectre of what could of been, and mourned it once more. I am twenty five and eight months. I am trying to be better, every day. I want to know that someday, I will feel like I did at twenty-one again.