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It has taken me so long—writing and rewriting, revising and rearranging, rereading and rereading and rereading: incessantly so—because, I think, I have things I want to say, but they cannot be said honestly. What needs to be said are not noble words, but I try to wriggle out of my obligation, trying to twist them into such. I just couldn’t buy into them myself, those dulcet, discarded fragments. We have enough of those between us, and frankly, I am fed up with them. I don’t want to be the Romantic hero anymore. There’s a reason Young Werther killed himself. I’ve been trying too hard when less is more. Of course, I finally accept that only after having dedicated a literal novel’s worth of confession to you; however, I can’t put the bow on it and just be done with it. I can revisit, reflect on how I felt then, but I don’t know how I feel now. My moods keep swinging, and too frequently. Am I afraid of you like someone who avoids the sun, too scared of their own shadow? And so, no, I think it is me I am afraid of. I don’t know how I feel about you now, but I assure you, I think of you so much.

I think I see part of the problem. I still cling to the notion of being liked, and I have convinced myself that it’d mean the most coming from you, so I am just as convinced that it’d hurt all the more to turn away from you for good. I got carried away in my rumination and I’m sick of seeing you splash about in yours and I’m sick of subjecting myself to watching you do it. For me now, reading something you wrote feels like what Moses must have thought to himself when he climbed Mount Sinai and was bestowed with those two stone tablets. Most of this is ridiculous and overwrought, but it is God after all, so we must be grateful. I really have no idea what to do, but whenever I sit down to write you, you always come out the other end a deity, clothed with the sun and covered in shit, making you all the more lovely to the compulsive dumpster-dweller. I know, in reality, you are shrouded in neither. I know you so well. I know you too much. You’re a sadistic fuck. I don’t know you at all. I have toiled tirelessly and with unparalleled devotion, having already staved off sleep night after night to dissect your open letter as if it were a bifurcated chest cavity upon an operating table amid an autopsy. I felt I had to work fast or risk losing my favorite patient. I was convinced you would grow bored and forget about, stop caring for, me and our covert, digital, no-contact, long-distance, sadomasochistic union. After all my efforts, I have nothing to show for it.

But you tapped the glass and spooked the goldfish, and it’s been the longest three seconds of my fucking life. I am swimming in frantic circles within the green-glass bubble that I cannot escape. After all this time apart, it feels like I’ve only ever known you in this way—even our time together being subsumed—through the eyes of a fish stuck inside its bowl. But I must admit, I am losing faith in you. I want to continue to glorify you, but I’m afraid it’s just not in me anymore. Nonetheless, my goldfish brain still desires your secular presence, even as I fitfully pore over the revived possibility, the subsequent consequences of—in all likelihood now—actually seeing you again. But I assure you, that is not to say that I don’t crave this reunion, that I have not fantasized about it endlessly, outlined elsewhere—in the waste—how I’d like it to pass.

I think I know why I am so afraid, why I have been so hesitant to reply. I have nothing left to say according to the positions in which we have fortified ourselves: the woman who finds herself the torturer and the man who loves to be tortured. I am wiped out from the trip down memory lane. I yield. Yet, if you saw the thousands of words abandoned in pursuit of your eager reception, you would likely disagree. Look, there’s so much still to say. But there’s a reason I’m here and they’re not. Each attempt always overflowed out of control before it had to be dumped. It’s all just too much to bear. It seems you don’t await another story but a proper response—to unveil myself for you—and I have tried and tried, but I cannot write one that contents me and faithfully captures everything I want to tell you. I don’t know how to write that, I don’t want to write about myself; and I wish you’d write about anything other than yourself—your body and its organs, your desire and its past—because your words are wasted on you; but they needn’t be about me. I’m tired of seeing you like this, from within this fish bowl that refracts our vision and reflects our own images back at us. I cherish you, I do, for you have given me so much, but I have to return to the current, but maybe I’ll see you when you get here.

I pervertedly miss you.