I once found a letter you wrote, but never gave to me. It was on your shelf beside the comic I bought you after our fourth or fifth date in midsummer. We were just getting to know each other.
On that shelf I spotted the letters and poems I wrote for you too in their orange metal clasp envelopes, and I was touched that you kept them all. Those days, the first times that we shared a bed, they fell into each other like a memory blur even as they were happening: our long unending walks sweating, silent, taking the bus, showering together, fucking, kissing, arguing over snacks at the bodega, fucking again, going to the beach, you made me cry, you rocked me back to stillness against your chest, sleeping, waking, and again the next day. In those days we hardly worked or ate or spoke to anyone else at all. We were impenetrable. We were delusionally happy. It must have been a letter from that time because in it, you wrote about how the shape of my lips pouted into these delectable mysteries you wanted to lap off my face, and you also wrote that you didn’t think you had ever met anyone like me. You said you thought I was a perfect creature. I thought you were a perfect creature too.
I’m sorry, but I did finish that letter. I read it to its end. But to be fair, if it was never meant for my eyes, I don’t see why you’d keep it in such a conspicuous place, and besides, I was bored waiting for you to wake up (you were violently hungover) so that I could finally break up with you, which I had been meaning to do for weeks.
While I’m here, I suppose I’m sorry about the way the breakup went too. I didn’t expect to stay over that night, but I couldn’t figure a good exit point between Gabriel’s swinger house party and your near-death experience. You kept apologizing for throwing up, but secretly, I was happy to take care of you one more time, and when you were between expulsions, on the living room floor, I took advantage of you. I knew you were too far gone to remember or fight me so I held your hand and lay beside you, and I smelled your neck and I imagined that the entire two weeks before had never happened and that you had never spoken to me like you hated me, and that you hadn’t left me hanging in that thick silence, texting me once every two days just to keep me from dying like a fucking Tamagotchi, and I imagined that you would always need and want me like you did that night you were sick.
Maybe it’s all dusted up now in some critical nostalgia, because I remember you heaving into the toilet at the end of the night, unable, finally, even to produce any lucid bile, and I just could not get over how beautiful you were like that. Out of your mind, horrified to lose me, the lovely (such lovely) freckles across your shoulders, the surprisingly delicate tattoo on your back.
You, on your knees. All this muscle. Dying of poison. Crying for love. And I’m not going to lie, maybe I started to lose my nerve. I’m sorry for sleeping with you in your bed that night. I always loved your bed because we have to stay close in it.
Things I hate: the most beautiful love letter ever written for me, which you never even gave me. That’s just like you: you’re a coward like that. The way you used to sweat in your sleep so that I had to peel myself off of you. How you made me earn your affection. How you hated me for begging for it. My own voyeurism. Vomit. Sex. Days of midsummer. How quickly it began, and how quickly it also ended. All the poems I ever wrote you – the fact that you have the only existing copies.