kmk2514

[kmk2514]

gratitude

happy twenty-fourth:

with you, my twenty-fifth year

was also my first

[kmk2514]

It’s been exactly a year since we talked last. In some ways it feels like it was yesterday: I still remember the conversation clearly, each word and tear wounding me like they did that evening. In others it seems as if it belongs in another lifetime.

I think of you often. It’s hard not to be reminded of you everywhere I look. I wish you’d write back, though I know it’s not your style to be vulnerable. I hope you’re finding answers to all your questions. And I hope you’re happy. Things are OK over here.

Kevin

[kmk2514]

we shall wear the bottoms of our trousers rolled

I never used to be able to understand how it could be that two people were right for each other, but it was just the wrong time. I always thought that if two people loved each other enough, they would just do whatever they could to make it work. Then we happened.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, but I still think of you all the time. Too much, probably. I think about how hurt I was when you broke up with me. How pathetic I made myself look trying to get you back. (It may have been pathetic, but I’m still proud of all the things I did and the words I wrote. I meant them, and still do. And that singing telegram was cute.) How much I still miss you.

And then I think about last September, when you called me that Sunday afternoon -- the call that turned into an 8-hour FaceTime marathon. At the time, I couldn't believe what I was saying and doing. Was I really saying no to you, the woman of my dreams? The person I’d loved harder than I ever thought possible to love? The truth is, I had you partly to thank for that strength. You told me I needed to work on myself after we broke up, and I took that to heart. I realized I had to have a little bit of self-respect. It hurt me so badly to do it, but if it’s really “forever, baby”, I deserve someone who is ready to love me the way I love her. Someone who values me enough to weather difficult times. Someone who is big enough to admit to her mistakes. Someone who is ready to be in a 50/50 relationship. I still hope that person is you. But you weren't that person on September 11, 2016. Just as I wasn't the person you needed on April 24, 2016.

One of the helpful things I learned from my therapy sessions was to depersonalize our breakup. You didn't break up with me because you didn't love me anymore -- it was because I couldn't fulfill a need in your life at that time. For over 2 years, I was the person you crawled into bed with, or called late at night, or came to visit you at a moment’s notice. I do know you appreciated me. But something changed, and I wasn’t the person you needed anymore. It hurts to think of it that way, and of course I have a lot of regrets, but it’s true. It’s not about me...it’s about what you needed. And whatever it was, I couldn't give it to you at the time. That was for you to figure out, not for me to figure out for you. Someday I hope to be to someone what you were to me -- I hope to be exactly what someone needs and wants, at any point and time. I deserve to be that person for someone.

I looked at your Instagram and Facebook pages recently. It looks like you’ve deleted some of our Instagram pictures, even the one of the bookshelf. I think you might have blocked me on FB and snap, too, but I can’t really tell. (You know I’m bad at technology.) These things make me sad, because I think they’re pointless and petty, but they’re not surprising -- it’s just like the old Irene I knew and loved. Pretend difficult things don’t exist. Run away from or delete your problems. What’s the point? I hope you don’t hate me, because I could never hate you. Even when I think of you now, there’s this transient happiness (as I think back on something funny you said, or a memory we shared, or something I see that I know you would have found amusing) before the inevitable sense of bereavement. You never even blocked Sacha on FB when we were together, and I know you hated him. So why?

Or is it because you still love me?

But even if you are trying to shut me out, I’ll always have little pieces of you with me. I still have Pingu.

I’ll always have the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, which I read heavily last summer, and whose every line reminds me of you.

I’ll always have the music of the Blue Nile, a band from the 80s I discovered around the same time. Their music (at least their first two albums) is about falling in love in (and with) a big city – I can’t listen to them without thinking about holding your hand as we walk around NYC, or San Diego, or Taipei, in the evening time, under the city lights. And every single lyric to his solo album, Mid Air, from 2012, expresses how I feel when I think of you now better than I ever could myself.

I’ll always have my dreams, where we’re still together, and I still tell you I love you every night.

And we’ll always have that last weekend in Montreal.

Happy birthday. Please be well, 

Kevin

[kmk2514]

a long text, 1/11/16

i still can’t fall back asleep baby. i wish we were still living together, because if one of us couldn’t sleep and neither of us had anything to do the next day, we could stay up together and watch it’s always sunny in philadelphia or the sopranos, or read next to each other in bed. i miss having you by my side to be my happiness when i’m sad, or my calm when i’m stressed, or my motivation when i’m discouraged. i hate being away from you so much, but i know deep down that our relationship can survive it and will be stronger for it. i wish i could drive to NY and just spend a day with you. i’m reading your book and i’m probably not going to sleep before class. maybe i’ll go out for breakfast – i never eat breakfast anymore. i miss being woken up unreasonably early, sometimes bribed with sex (even though it takes me 10 minutes to realize), and walking downtown to get bagels or to henry street to stand in line with weird vermont kids who haven’t showered. even though i know you hate vermont i hope in the future when we’re older and happily married we make trips back to burlington to re-live our early days, and be reminded of what it felt like to fall in love – truly fall in love – for the first time. i want to go back to the flynn to relive our first date. i want to go back to that mcdonalds where we sat and talked for 2 hours after seeing that terrible movie, and you told be about being fat as a kid and i told you about being bullied. i want to walk on the docks where we used to read books together, and where you gave me that yellow shirt from j crew for my birthday. i want to go to the marche at UVM, where just outside the door we kissed for the first time in front of other people. i want to go to the rite-aid downtown, the place i called you “baby” for the first time in public. i want to go to macy’s, where we had the thrill of having sex in a public place for the first time as a couple. most of all i hope somehow we can go back in that apartment, so we can be in the room where i first told you i loved you, and cried, partly out of fear that you wouldn’t say it back but partly from relief at being able to tell you how i truly felt. i can’t wait to start a family with you, and be successful, and live in a place that makes you happy, but i hope that you always have a special place in your heart for burlington – no matter how much you hate it otherwise – because that’s the place where we met, and where our love first grew. always remember what you told me, which i hope you still believe – that the reason you ended up at UVM was to meet me. look at that as a metaphor for how – hopefully – i can make things in your life that frustrate you or make you sad a little better. you hate burlington, but that’s where we met. you sometimes get frustrated at school, or with work, or with the weather, or with your family, or with some stupid post bac who asks inane questions in biochem class – but i am always there for you, either physically there to hold you and tell you it’s alright or just a phone call away. i hope you wake up tomorrow and read this and feel happy, and feel at least half as lucky to have me in your life as i do to have you in mine. because i feel so, so, so lucky. i love you so much, baby.

[kmk2514]

a letter arrived in the mail today i hoped for a moment it'd be from you

[kmk2514]

i saw that you changed your settings on Facebook so that i can’t see your updates. i guess you’re trying to make me feel guilty, or get my attention, or...i don’t know...something. well, it worked.

i had a dream with you in it last night. we were in my bedroom at my dad’s house, making out. my therapist has some interesting ideas about that one.

if we get back together, is this how it’s going to be? will it be more of the same? will it be more of me feeling guilty and apologizing for things that you did? in these six months, i haven't seen or heard you acknowledge any regrets, either about what you did or how you made me feel. when we broke up, you said you needed to work on yourself, to grow up. have you? 

[kmk2514]

How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things? I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects, in some dark and silent place that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound. Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings. Upon what instrument are we two spanned? And what musician holds us in his hand? Oh sweetest song.

[kmk2514]

an unsent poem, written circa early july, 2016

What is this love that loves us?

Without you, nights are restless – your memory

imbues the very fabric of my dreams.

Like a stone cast down a bottomless well

your falling voice reverberates… distant

  Like it were yesterday I can see your face –

one dimple; can feel your small, calloused hand.

“Are you two a couple?” Yes, you had said.

A kiss – some welcome levity. And then…

  Checked snaps, cryptic messages, late-night calls,

the oblique kisses of that last weekend;

in half-measures we find partial comforts

that like the stars fade with the morning sun.

  Another statistic, a casualty

of distance, and demands, and best-laid plans.

There is some humility to be found

in such vulgarity – but wasn’t there more?

  As your name remains etched into my heart,

my chest still bears the red marks of your teeth.

Like Malick’s God, everywhere you’re present

and still I can’t see you; you’re within me.

  Without you each day is my sovereign own,

and I find strength where I once feared weakness.

But then night falls – I relinquish control,

close my eyes, and… it’s you. It’s always you.

[kmk2514]

it’s hard to find words to describe the feelings that washed over me seeing your face and hearing your voice the other night. the first time you called, i couldn't even answer because i was shaking so hard. you still have that effect on me, as if it were the first time i’d laid eyes on you again...

when i look at you, i still think all the things i thought that weekend in stowe.

i wish things were different.

[kmk2514]

There is always this invisible something that I feel so strongly which ties us so tightly together. I love this feeling even if it makes me cry sometimes. It is so strong, this conviction that I belong to you. Maybe you’d like me to stop telling you I love you. I know that strong feelings make you uneasy.

To the Wonder, Terrence Malick

I couldn’t sleep last Sunday. Really, I haven’t slept well for months, but it’s been more the tossing-and-turning variety — this was was the first time I had been up, wide awake, past 3:30 in a long time. Maybe I was just thinking about school starting this week. Of course I wanted to call her. That’s always what we would do when we couldn’t sleep, wake the other up to talk until we were both tired again. Instead I grabbed the pingu stuffed animal and tried to cuddle it to bed. Seeing as part of the problem was how hot it was in my room, it didn’t really do too much good.

One of the things I never used to have the courage to tell her was that for all of her good qualities, she could be an incredibly petty person. From saying “what are you to me?”, when we had first started dating; to the times she’d feign stoicism in the middle of an argument; to deleting some of the posts about me on her blogs — posts that betrayed genuine, felt emotions that she now seems to want to run from rather than confront — to now changing the password to her blog of our notes to each other: all were carefully designed to extract a certain amount of hurt from me, to see how I will react, as a child might pluck the wing off of an insect. It’s an awful way to treat someone you care about.

And yet, here I lie, in the bed we used to share, my thoughts on her once more. God damn it, I’ll probably love her forever. Just as we said we would.

[kmk2514]

You make me want to love myself more.

 ***

 For those of us who find pleasure in reading, certain passages are bound to make so profound an impression upon us that they are evoked years later by even the most tangentially related thought or phrase. There is a particularly moving scene in “First Love” by Ivan Turgenev in which the main character has returned home after a night out with the woman with whom he’s fallen in love. He stands by his bedroom window, watching a thunderstorm in the distance, afraid to even undress and lie in bed, for fear that some abrupt movement might “disturb what filled [his] soul.” Even before I had really met my first love, that book allowed me to imagine the sense of wonder and happiness I would soon feel.

 I remembered this feeling the other day when reading one of your letters to me, expressing gratitude for, among other things, “genuine love”, which you described as a two-way street. You of course were my first love, and although I was your second boyfriend, you always told me that I was the first person you truly loved. Obviously, with this first love, there are some things I thought I understood, or thought I could handle or control, that in retrospect I would have handled differently.

 Seeing a therapist (it feels strange even to write those words!) has helped me begin to reckon with many of the things in my past that make me the person I am today. You had always begged me to tell you more about my childhood, and were always disappointed that I rarely went into the detail that you did when telling me your stories. I always stubbornly thought that by avoiding thinking about difficult times in my past, I was being “strong” – that I was overcoming them by my actions and accomplishments. But the truth is, that line of thinking is doubly fallacious: on one hand, not letting you in might have caused you to feel more distant from me, like you didn’t know me as well as I knew you. The person I am closest to in life deserves to know me like no one else. Secondly, and just as importantly – and this is something I didn’t appreciate until very recently – being open about my past isn’t just for your benefit, it’s for mine as well. I can’t really understand myself unless I explore the things I spent so much time burying deep in my mind. And I think, of course, that you knew this, which is why you always pushed me so hard to talk about myself, and encouraged me on multiple occasions to see a therapist. Everything that happens to us shapes who we are, whether we realize it or not, or even whether we want to admit it or not; not talking about my issues not only didn’t allow you to know me, but it prevented me from taking control of my own demons and living my life with the self-confidence that I was truly able to overcome, and be at peace with, these things.

 The lack of confidence that you perceived in me, and that I perceived in myself, stemmed from my childhood, and persisted because of my unwillingness to explore my own past. As far back as being 6 or 7 years old, I can remember being bullied mercilessly for my stuttering. (Remember our second date, at McDonalds after we saw a movie, when I told you it was because I wore tightie-whities? Well, that was true, too.) I remember sitting on my mom’s bed, afraid even to go to school the next day. These things I’ve told you, in varying degrees of detail, before. What I haven’t told you, primarily because I’d avoided even thinking about it, is how it influenced me later in life.

 My stuttering, and my fear of being ridiculed for it, affected my relationships (or lack thereof) with girls and women. For the longest time, I was afraid to ask someone out, let alone start a relationship, for fear of being judged for the way that I talked (even if it wasn’t nearly as noticeable as I got older). Even through much of college, I would avoid parties and social gatherings, even if I was invited to them, just because I knew I would probably have to start conversations with people I didn’t know. This social isolation was a self-reinforcing cycle, further affecting my confidence in social situations. Of course, this left me lots of time nurture my love for reading, a silver lining for which I am grateful.

 Then I met the girl of my dreams, the one who even thought it was cute that I “stuttered at her” sometimes during our first dates. In some ways – well, a lot of ways – we were perfect for each other. Both of us were indifferent, to varying degrees, to going out and meeting new people, and would rather sit at home with a book. Remember one of those nights in Jamaica, when there was a couples dinner out on the beach, and we decided to just go grab some food from the buffet and bring it back to the room to watch American Horror Story rather than sit with and meet other couples? I thought that was funny, because even I was open to sitting out on the beach. But I loved that we could just be happy with each other. (Though of course, maybe that wasn’t the healthiest thing, long-term.)

 ***

 On several occasions you’ve disclosed to me the pressure you feel to be perfect all the time, to avoid all the wrong things, and to do and say all the right things. You’ve passed the minefield, baby, and quite successfully. You’ve done something that every boy and man has not been able to do. You got me. – 5/21/15

 Despite our “perfect” relationship, some of the vestiges of my lack of self-confidence lingered, and had very real effects on our relationship – effects I was maybe too blind to admit to at the time. Despite the fact that we were very much in love – and not just in love, but loved each other – I still behaved, subconsciously, as though I were afraid to lose you. One thing that I knew drove you nuts was my constant deference to you, whether it was about what to eat for dinner, where to go that night, etc. This reflected my pathological need to avoid “messing up” – failing to please you in some way. I thought that if I just let you decide everything, that I wouldn’t be blamed if you didn’t like the food, or the movie we watched, or whatever the occasion was. But that is not a healthy way to be in a relationship. A relationship is supposed to be 50/50, and that means being comfortable with making 50% of the mistakes. You weren’t going to fall out of love with me because my small-town self chose a crappy restaurant in a city we were in. Deep down, I knew that. But I wouldn’t let myself take that chance. Talking with my therapist, with Preston and a couple of other guy friends, even with my mom, they all said the same thing about that – sometimes people just want to be told what to do. You were a busy person, stressing out all day about your research, or exams, or your mom, or whatever – maybe the last thing you needed was for me to force you to make another decision at the end of a long day, no matter how small.

 Another area this insecurity became a big problem in was our sex life. Our sex life was so, so great – and even toward the end, it could still be great. But my insecurities could mar it. Several months into our relationship, when we would have sex less often, in my mind I would ask myself “Does she not find me as attractive anymore? Am I not as good in bed as she used to tell me I was?” Despite the fact that all of my friends told me that this was normal, I had a hard time accepting it. I knew that we didn’t need constant sex to keep our relationship going – we were far beyond that point. But my insecurities, my subconscious fear of failing to please you, led me to think irrationally. Honestly, who cares if we went a couple of days without having sex, or if I was exhausted one day and only lasted 5 minutes instead of 15? Was it because you loved me any less? Would you find me less manly? Of course not. I always knew this, deep down, but I didn’t understand why I still felt this way until recently. And of course, ironically, there’s probably nothing less manly than a man who isn’t secure in his sex life. I only wish I had the confidence earlier to understand that.

 State your case, I will state mine, and eventually the matter will be resolved. Not without talking about it or fighting about it. Don’t apologize if you’re not in the wrong. You’re just going to grow to resent me, and I don’t want that. I don’t want you to resent me. I don’t want your love to fade… I don’t want us to fade. – 6/14/15

 Another thing that used to annoy the living hell out of you about me was the fact that I would never get angry, and I would always give in too easily in arguments and want to be the first one to say “I’m sorry” and make up. You always used to tell me how much you resented this – that it made you feel small, like you couldn’t live up to me because I was always presenting myself as the “bigger person”. I never really understood what you meant – I figured that by avoiding conflict, it would make things better between us in the long run. Obviously, part of this I can now understand in the context of my insecurities – my need to avoid any bumps in the road of our relationship. But there’s a deeper and more personal level to this one, I’ve recently found.

 I’ve told you a little about my Dad, and our relationship when I was a kid. He was a good father – at least he tried to be – but he had anger problems. He would yell and scream constantly. He would hit me if I acted out or talked back. He even hit my mother once – something he’s profoundly ashamed of. I, too, am ashamed of this, which is why I never told you this fact. Partly I suppose to protect my mother’s privacy. But partly because I didn’t want you ever to think I had that sort of potential in me. That’s sort of a silly fear – you, and anyone who knows me, knows I would die before I lay a finger on someone I love.

 All of this I told my therapist, and he asked me how I thought my tumultuous relationship with my dad had affected me long-term. I told him that I knew for certain that I would never hit my child or a woman – that I wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of my dad. But just like had always told you, I said that I didn’t think there were really any long-term psychological effects – my dad and I get along great now, and I felt as though it’s behind me and that I forgave my father. Then my therapist paused for several moments, and said, “That’s a lot to just forgive and forget. Out of curiosity, do you…ever get angry? About anything?” All I could do was smile. I told him about how you were always incredulous about my unflappability, and always seemed to wonder the same thing.

 In psychology, it’s understood that people get angry for one of three reasons: 1) someone has hurt them 2) something or someone stands in the way of them achieving a goal or 3) they’re afraid of something. If someone were to make the effort to avoid anger, they would have to compensate for one of these three things. Therefore, in vowing not to repeat the mistakes of my father – in preventing myself from getting to the point of feeling anger – I allowed people to hurt me, and I would reason to myself that I was not actually being hurt. This could be big or small. You know me – I’d never get angry if we had a shitty waitress at a restaurant; I wouldn’t share in your anger if you came to me to vent about something in your life that was frustrating you, instead trying solely to comfort you; I wasn’t angry with you, even as you were breaking my heart into a thousand pieces. This, too, manifests as a lack of self-confidence. Understanding this was a big breakthrough for me, and I’m working on it. Remember the movie we saw together, Inside Out, and how we used to joke that you were Anger? Well, the moral of that movie is that being in touch with all of your emotions is healthy, even the negative ones. You have to get angry every once in a while and stick up for yourself, or for someone else.

 Part of being more self-confident, then, would be feeling comfortable calling you out when I feel that I’m right and you’re wrong. Not every disagreement is going to lead to long-term problems. “Taking the high road” only leads to the unwanted perception that I’m superior to you, and leads to resentment.

 The thing is…you told me many of these things before. I heard them. But I was just too stubborn to take them seriously, or to look within myself to see why I was acting that way. I brushed them off as not a big deal – that surely our problems paled in comparison to other relationships. But when someone says something is bothering them, and you care about that person, you have to take it seriously. You have to be willing to work on yourself; you can’t justify the flaws by saying “well it’s not like I beat her” or “at least we’re not cheating on each other”. Sweeping problems under the rug doesn’t make them go away, it just lets them fester until everything boils over.

 You make me want to love myself more. You make me want to be a better person toward other people, have more compassion, sympathy, and empathy. – 6/6/15

 I had been thinking about all the qualities we loved about each other – all the ones we’d enumerate in those letters we used to write. You had all the qualities I wanted, and all the ones I didn’t even know I wanted; likewise me for you. And there was nothing false about our feeling that way. But some reflection has made me think that maybe a couple of the things I was subconsciously drawn to at the time weren’t totally healthy. You mentioned one of the dynamics of our relationship, the almost fatherly role I played at times – something that stems, probably, from your having lost your father. And I think, given my insecurities, I needed to be needed; that I fed off of that vulnerability; that I used that as a pretext to always try to “fix” things, to make life easier on you, even if it wasn’t the most healthy course of action, long term.

 One example of this is that winter and spring before I started medical school, when I was on UVM’s wait list, and you told me you wanted to get your own apartment. The “father figure” in me, the “Mr. Fix-it”, wouldn’t listen to you – I convinced you that staying at 108 N Union would be easiest for both of us. And maybe it was – but that wasn’t my decision to make. I think part of the reason for that, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was my need to keep you close – I feared that letting you get your own place would damage our relationship, that we would drift apart. Ironically, what I did instead only made you feel out of control, and suffocated. My fears were irrational: had I gotten into UVM, and we lived in different apartments, obviously we would have ended up spending most of our time with each other, just as we always did. But I didn’t have the confidence in myself to let things play out like that.

 ***

 And that’s how I knew it was over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end. – Junot Diaz, “This Is How You Lose Her”

 When you first told me you wanted to break up, I think I instinctively tried to hold onto those memories of the first few months of our relationship – the honeymoon phase. Those months, the feelings we felt then, they were real – but they can’t last forever. We knew we were in a relationship whose goal was to build something stronger, more lasting. Instead I want to think of the hard times we got through together because our love was so strong – things like your difficult summer on SSRIs; or when I was so upset after I didn’t get into UVM for medical school; or when we had that scare when we thought I might have gotten herpes from you, and you came to Albany to surprise me, to show me you supported and loved me. In your letters to me, you talked a lot about how our life ahead wouldn’t be as easy as those first two months, but that we would get through the hard times together. That’s part of why I wanted you to re-read them: not to bombard you with emotions, or to force you to feel a certain way, but to show you that you did feel certain ways – about us, about our future, about me – that you might have subconsciously blocked out in the depths of those last couple of months in Vermont. It’s not easy to think about feelings that you might want to pretend aren’t there, or never were there. But they’re there, whether we want them to be or not. Believe me, I know a thing or two about blocking out old emotions.

 I know we’ll get through those years [apart], because I love you, and you love me, and the ultimate goal is to celebrate each other, what we have, and what we will have. … On that…very first Christmas, or another holiday or someone’s birthday, I will reach out for your hand, turn to you, and gaze toward our ecstatic children sitting in front of the fireplace, and say, “We made it.” … You’re the only person whose hand I want to grasp at that moment. – 6/19/15

 ***

 In writing this letter there is an urge to turn each paragraph into an apology – I’m sorry for this, I’m sorry for that. But all of the thinking, therapy, soul searching I’ve been doing – it’s not for you, or at least it’s not solely for you, or us. It’s for me. The purpose is to understand myself, to grapple with all the things I’d ignored for too long, and to make changes to my life, to take chances I wouldn’t take before, and be a better, healthier, and more secure man because of it. I’m getting there.

 With love – still, forever,

Kevin

 And the rest is rust and stardust – Vladimir Nabokov, “Lolita”

[kmk2514]

what is this love that loves us?

[kmk2514]

all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us

[kmk2514]

I just saw her post from a few days ago. I’m still processing what the words in that little booklet mean to me. They mean so many things: in some ways the intervening year is apparent; in most others the words are fresh, as if the breath that breathed life into them were still being whispered into my ear. Good writing -- writing infused with meaning -- has that timelessness about it.

[kmk2514]

She called again late last night. I was out with friends, and my phone was on the other side of the room; one of my friends picked it up, looked at everyone else, then at me, and said, “It’s her.” I’m not ashamed to admit that in that moment the chambers of my heart fluttered, like the wings of one of Nabokov’s butterflies, just as it used to 28 months ago. Nor can I pretend that part of me wasn’t wishing she’d tell me she missed me, and wanted me to drive down to New York that very instant. But another part of me was glad she didn’t. The time apart hasn’t been easy, but I’m making good progress on myself. I’m learning things about who I am, admitting to mistakes I’ve made, in a way I wasn’t ready to before. I still have work to do, and so does she. When the day does come that I hear those words, I want to be ready to be the man she always saw in me. And before too long, that day will come, and I will be ready. Because, you see: Reader, I love her.

[kmk2514]

Hearing her voice on the phone today was...soothing. I’m glad she called, even if it wasn’t an important matter. It was so, so hard not to want to tell her all about my last week, or to ask about hers. How does one talk to his best friend on the phone without asking how she is? Or telling her how much he misses her? I hate being apart. But it will get better.

[kmk2514]

I don’t think most people exactly look forward to the birthdays of their loved ones – aside from the potential for parties of course – probably because buying presents can be challenging and anxiety provoking. Not so for me, at least as it concerns you. I always looked forward to your birthday, or Valentine’s Day, or Christmas, or our anniversary, because I knew that I knew you better than anyone else in the world and that I knew just what to do to make you happy. The best feeling to me is seeing your face light up when you opened up a present from me, be it for a big occasion or just a surprise. Except, of course, for that time that you thought I got you a toy plane…

 I still remember that night in late January 2014, before we became official, when I thought that you might never call me again. You were probably wondering the same thing. But I remember the feeling that came over me when I heard the phone ring at about 11:20 pm, and I looked up from the book I was reading (“Burmese Days” by George Orwell) to see your name on the screen. And I remember the first thing you said, after a dramatic pause: “Why do you like me?” I spent the next 25 minutes – and, really, the next 25 months – telling you, and then showing you, why you were worth it. And I still believe you are worth it. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t spent most of these nights over the past few weeks hoping that that phone would ring, with your name once again on the screen, and I’d hear your voice once again, taking a leap of faith with me, deciding to give us a chance. But I respect that you are trying to do what is best not only for you, but for me as well. And, ultimately, I hope, for us. And I need to stick to my end of the deal, and give you room to figure things out for yourself.

 You told me at the very beginning of our relationship that your biggest fear was that you would break my heart. And now you have.  It hurts even more than I could have ever imagined it would. But it’s a real, human emotion, and one I’ve never experienced before – one to which I know you can relate. (Maybe this is God’s cruel, ironic way of making me more relatable.) But I don’t want you to ever think for one moment that all of the times we went through, good and bad (mostly good!) weren’t worth it, because they were – because I don’t doubt it myself for a minute. And if I had to do it all over again, I would – even if my heart got broken again.

 When we said we loved each other, when we said we would always be there for each other, when we said we were meant to be together, we meant it. Maybe the story of us just isn’t going to be exactly how we planned it those months and years ago. These past few days have been good for me. And I hope that talking to me, hearing me be more open about how I’m feeling, about my past, and about my flaws and failures, has been good for you too. And I hope that as you go through our stuff, and the stuff I got for you, as you pack up your apartment in Burlington, you are reminded of the good times. And once you get home to New York, as hard as it might be, I hope that one afternoon you go through our memory boxes, and reminisce, and read the letters we wrote to each other, especially the collection of letters you gave to me for my birthday – and remember how you felt as you wrote those words. And remember how we both made each other feel ways we’d never felt before – ways we might have even doubted were possible to feel, or that we deserved to feel.

 We both need to work on ourselves a little. I’ve come to accept that. And I truly hope that one day, whether it’s sooner or later, we realize that the person we want to call in the middle of the night; the person we want to tell all of our secrets to, no matter how hard; the person with whom we want to experience all of life’s ups and downs; the person we want kissing us good night, is each other. And I hope that with a little time we can both be ready to not only be the person that the other wants us to be, but to be the person that we ourselves want to be for the other – and that we can give the story of us the ending it deserves.

 And if you do decide to show up at my doorstep unannounced, I hope I walk into my room to find you sitting there waiting for me, your head slightly turned to the side, and hear you ask me, “Why do you like me?” The code to the garage is 1986 – the first two digits your age when our story began, and the latter two your age when hopefully it will conclude, at its happily ever after.

 Through all this, through all the heartbreak and uncertainty, I still want to be the boy to bring you lilies. To love you despite your oddities.

 Happy birthday, my first and forever love. My heart tells me this will not be the last one we share with each other. Please promise me that whatever it may tell you, you will always listen to yours.

 I love you.

 Kevin