It has been a long time since I've reached out to you directly. This is a good thing, I think, to give myself time to separate the you I write to from the physical “you” walking around in the world. The you of this letter only exists in my head, and has my love still, but your you is no longer tied to the physical form you once had. You were one (at least, moreso) once, but now you are split.

Neither is with me any longer. One is a sweet memory, the other a hellish apparition, and I try not to confuse the two. I’ve stopped paying attention to that body, which hurt me so much after you left. It’s just you and me now.

So honey, now that we are alone here, let me confess some things between the two of us: I miss how you felt, my mind touching yours and my body touching yours. I miss being the smarter one, the faster one, the one who could stay calm and collected in the face of all your emotion. You were such a fucking mess, and you let me see it, and I wanted to take care of you because I loved you, and I loved you because I wanted to take care of you. It felt so good to be the one with my shit together, to be the one with the answers, to be the adult managing you like a child.

It sucks to swap between who is the immature one and who is not. I just can’t get excited about an equal-ish partnership, where both people are competent and grown-up and everything is fucking boring. Someone needs to be messed up, I mean seriously messed up, like break things kind of messed up, like hit me in an abuse kind of way, like someone gets raped a little bit. Like, this is terrible, and no one should put up with it, but we do, because we both get something out of it, and neither of us would have it another way.

We didn’t have that but it was closer.

And instead I have this...programmed robot like I wrote about in my story, who loves me like he’s a child, like I’m a real person who deserves that kind of affection despite all my faults. And he touches me, and I cringe, and I’m like, get a clue about this and about me and about us. If he knew me he wouldn’t want to touch me, except in anger, except in the service of his own agenda. I need him, logically, but he disgusts me. Not in his weakness but because he is NOT WEAK ENOUGH. I’m sick of his goddamned independence writing in shit all over my walls that he’s incapable of loving me the way I need to be loved. I can’t program him to be a kind of sucky person, like you were. At least, I haven’t, but I’m trying.

But I still dream about you a lot. Sometimes we’re in love again because you became just a little bit more of the person I wanted you to be. Sometimes I have a lucid dream and I make the “conscious” decision: even though I know this is bad, I’ll bring him back, just for a minute. This time you'll be just a little bit more analytical, a little bit more confident. You’ll still love me, but you’ll also hate me too, and you’ll be able to hold both those emotions in your heart without feeling so uncomfortable about it. And it will feel right to you the way it always did to me.