january 6th 2024

i don’t want to navigate this world alone. no one gets it but you. perfect flies on the wall of a world which was so inhospitable to anyone of our nature: we constructed our understanding of life’s most mundane hardships by feigning seriousness. it was a game, nothing was real, we sailed over classes and parties and sex, but our impressions of ordinary people were so spot-on, and we’d take refuge with each other when the day was over to recall our every move, finding gleeful triviality in anything that should have mattered. my mother calls me intense—that doesn’t even do it justice, the gnawing urge to catastrophize each interaction and each physical experience outside of my body, but you found the dial on the back of my neck and you simmered me down so i could see again—and to you i did the same. i cannot rightly exist without you. i don’t know how to make sense of my life, because you’re not here wisecracking, or telling me i’m acting like a shit, or eating like a child, or wearing clothes that looked nice. you were half of my mind. i imagine conversations with you as i go about my time in your absence—what you’d think of the girls i match with on hinge, or my bangs growing out to show my forehead—you loved my forehead and hated my bangs, or how i’m using a new deodorant. esme said when i wasn’t there you would predict me in the same manner, before we went wrong, back when you frowned over my empty seat on the couch. this is how love is meant to be, i think. nothing, nothing kills more than our loveless truth. i could not love you, i did not love you, but then you loved me, so i loved you, and then you would not let me love you. you creature of spite, you eater of words, we had only one night where we met, and you refused to kiss me, because i did not kiss you, only your crown. i was the best thing you’ll ever have. she’ll never see you. she thinks that you’re good, that’s how i know. we are errors in the system, we are numbers awry in the code. she’ll never eat you—but she’ll make you warm. and wouldn’t that be such a dream, to be loved in the right way? 

in two years you’ll face the wall after uneventful missionary and you’ll wish you could do it all again. two years, that’s when she said she’d marry you, and when you said we’d do it for real, on that night when you came back for me. you asked me why i wasn’t in love with you anymore. you said: what if we’re meant to be together? isn’t that scary? what if that’s the narrative? what if we’re booth and bones—luke and lorelai—mulder and scully?—and it’s something i think about. i don’t think i’m in love with you, i’m just saying i could be. and i said, i don’t think you are either. it’s not the world, but it could’ve been one. and you said, there’s still time, the series isn’t over. what if we’re made for each other? oh, sydney, you knew. and you said, i can’t imagine my life without you. and you said, i still think about what it would’ve been like if i kissed you that night. so i think part of me will always be in love with you.

i understand that you have always been transient. you will be and then you will not be. you will sit at my table and then you’ll excuse yourself, and you’ll go to your room and sulk until i come and get you, but you won’t answer my knocks on the door, and i’ll just keep going forever until you’ve gone to sleep and my knuckles bleed. part of you will always be in love with me but it’s all of me, it’s all of me that loves you, even when you’ve scorned me, even when you’ve stabbed me a dozen times, even when you hate me, even when you wish i would die, even when you’ve reduced me to a husk, an ambiguous shape without a heart. i’ll love you when you move up to washington and take up glassblowing and think of me once a month, if ever. i’ll love you when you forget my nose and my eyes and my hair. i believe, as i have always believed, that you will find me again, if your half-awake wedding vows were true. i believe this because i don’t know how else to keep myself alive. you are my unwilling angel. i collect your feathers and i wear them in my silver locket. i miss you.