A Letter To The First Boy I Fell In Love With

I found your shirt and sweats in the bottom of my drawer a couple days ago. And just like that, I started to miss the way that things were. Not that it was better, but it was different. Yesterday afternoon I reminisced about the days we would walk around and joke about what it would be like to fall harder in love, move in together, and how we would decorate our place. You told me that I would never have to cook (since I hated it so much) as long as I cleaned the dishes once in a while.

Months have now passed by and we walk around the same city and drive past the same exits. You are surrounded by the places that have built me and yet you walk around like you don’t even know me. Like you haven’t seen me naked, like you’ve never met my family, or as if you didn’t hold me in your arms in Oregon.

I wouldn’t know what to do if I ever ran into you. I don’t know if anger or sadness would fill my body first. I do not miss you and I am not sad anymore that you are gone. I just don’t understand how it was easier to drown yourself in liquor than to come to me for help. I constantly believed you would actually get better like you promised me. I believed that maybe if I acted like you weren’t drinking anymore like you said you were that maybe you would stick to your empty words and promises.

I don’t hate you, not at all. I just used to think that when someone told me that they loved me, that they would at least mean it. I used to tell my friends and myself that I wish you and I “could have been something more” but I know that is not true. At the end of the day, this is all we could ever be: artificial and desperate. Unsatisfied and mid-sentence. We had it. But I never had you. You had me and wouldn’t ever let go. You choked me with your empty words until I couldn’t breathe. I could feel that grip of yours tighten. You let me rot and I could see you giving up on any idea of us. And just like that, you let go. I don’t know why it took me to be released from your grip to finally see who you were. I saw the way that you made your mom, your little sister, and your best friends cry. I saw the way that liquid poison was taking over your body, and everything that made up this boy that I once thought was so beautiful. My skin wasn’t porcelain. Instead, it was bruised so easily from that grip of yours.