Dear You,
I’ve been thinking through some things (always a dangerous preface to any letter) and found myself thinking about you, and our interactions, and last Friday evening. I have come to the realization that I must be sending you no fewer than a thousand and one mixed signals. So sorry about that. I hope to give you some clarification in this letter. As my verbal communication skills are subpar at best (and Neanderthalic at worst), the written word feels so much more comfortable for me. That said, the letter you hold in your hands retains my honest thoughts and I hope that you do not mind my rather unorthodox (and let’s face it: outdated) methods.
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So it’s official.
I’m superbly fucked up. Irreversibly and undeniably fucked up. But perhaps I should back up a bit. There is a story to tell. Something is different about me now. Something has changed. Somebody else looks back at me in the mirror, and she is both a stranger and a sister. It is refreshing as hell.
I am sitting cross legged on the bathroom floor, feeling the cold tile against my backside. Key West unfurls, in all its Technicolor tropic splendor, somewhere beyond this lavish hotel suite but I do not notice. I am panicking.
I am taking a speech communications class at my college this summer, and today we were expected to share a personal story detailing some transformative moment of our lives.
If we were assigned any other topic, I would have been perfectly okay with this project. Talking about myself makes me want to jump off of a bridge. If we had been told to step before the class and share to the group as a whole, I would have been so much more comfortable. Sharing shit one on one also makes me want to jump off of a bridge. So naturally, the project called for us to share deeply personal issues with a single class mate as the rest of the class observed. Fun times! I just reentered the Land of Single Ladies and Relationship Rejects after some time in a rather shady relationship. I took the necessary time to heal, and reorient, and jumped straight into the fun part: looking around like a puppy in a world full of bacon. As is usually the case with me, my eyes would follow anything tall, dark haired, and breathing, and I have to say. There were some very decent looking guys running around my neck of the woods. (God bless whoever created the muscle shirt. Good gracious, these boys in the gym...) However, I quickly came to find that none of these new connections had any of that gooey, magical substance to them, the feeling that pulled me into the last guy. The conversations felt lackluster, and after about ten minutes of talking to Mr. Ripped Arms, I was actually bored. I saw this questionnaire floating around the Young Writer's Society blogosphere, and thought I'd give it a go. Quirky questions, quirkier answers. You get the gist.
Dear Victoria,
I know you’ve got a business to run. I know, marketing wise, this is the best way for you to roll in the duckets, for example the eight billion you made back in 2016. People naturally flock to the ideal, what they think is perfect, what they themselves want to be. However, I’d like to say screw you and your skinny ass, six foot tall models because if you poke around the real world for five minutes, you will find that the vast majority of women don’t actually look like that. Seeing your Angels strut the stage in those skimpy ensembles makes those of us who are more averagely proportioned feel like slugs in our pajamas. Let me show you something.
Take an egg in your hand. Its beautifully matte shell, which glistens slightly in sunlight, is not flawless but it feels perfectly smooth in your fingertips, like a palm-sized lopsided bubble. Now take the egg and throw it (with gusto) against a wall. You should now have a nice messy splat, perhaps with a few broken shards on the floor. This is very close to what my heart looked like post break up. As a result of this mess, my newly jaded Freudian ego has decided to take a vow of complete celibacy this summer. It seemed like the perfect solution to all my problems. Abstaining from dating would allow me to focus on reorienting, on reconnecting to who I was pre-ex boyfriend. It would give me an opportunity to learn more about myself, to release those inhibitions and finally do all the things I wanted to, like write music (like, with actual notes! And a staff!), or join a theatre troupe. And most importantly, being on my own would allow me the time necessary to heal. It has been a month. Boy was this a stupid idea. I’ve been two people for the last week.
One version of me (we’ll call her Ms. Logic) has been preparing to break up with my friend/ex-boyfriend with all of the intensity and attention to detail of a general preparing for war. The other (the slightly less intelligent, Ms. Sentimentality) has been brooding, and listening to 80’s love ballads on repeat. I knew it had to happen (please consult my other published works). He was more toxic to me than a radioactive sewer. But when the time finally came to say what needed to be said… I clammed. Twice. Damnit. |
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