Unsent Letter #344
Dearest Drew,
So you're going to California to go "live with [your] dad" and "maybe take a few film classes"? And perhaps, even after all we've been through, perhaps you don't have the time to see me or talk to me or email me before you depart. Yeah, I can go with that.
And screw you too.
Although I once told you that you were "a much older soul than you had any right to be," I still have a couple more years and just a little more life experience on you; therefore, I will allow that perhaps you do not realize the extent to which I'm willing to destroy my life for you. I have told gross, unprecedented falsehoods for you. I have endured public...well, the only word for it would be "humiliation," wouldn't it?...for you. I have broken sacred, solemn vows for you. I have risked true, lifelong friendships for you. I have knowingly and shamelessly injured a good, unwitting man for you. I have surrendered all happiness and contentment in worshipping you, knowing that I could never truly keep you nor could I ever truly disengage my heart from yours. But wait, darling--there's more. I would go to jail for you. I would murder for you. And if I have not ventured irrevocably into the world of the melodramatic, I would say that if a madman accosted us in an alley coldly brandishing a handgun, I would indeed die for you.
You, on the other hand, have offered to send me an email if you, and this is a quote, "find the time."
Well, you needn't bother. After you go, I won't waste away for you. You won't return to find me a pale, quivering shadow of my former self. In fact, if you do indeed return to this bland, wretched Region, you will find that I will have lost 25 pounds and have written a novel in your absence.
So leave. Go. Travel around the world like some kind of pseudo-beat poet, oblivious to the havoc you wreak in women's lives. Become smitten with some flighty girl whom you will undoubtedly classify as "a free spirit" and whom you could nail in hundreds of positions for hours on end. Make your little movies, starring that girl whom you will be banging. Achieve the admiration of some local hipsters. Appear in feature articles of magazines read by tens of people. Then, when the hipsters turn to someone else for their salvation and validation and/or when you get your little girlfriend preggers because she's too much of a "free spirit" to remember to take her pill everyday, then you can find some job that involves processing invoices, updating a database, and downloading software patches--a job that becomes increasingly harder to describe to outsiders and leaves you too exhausted at the end of the day to plot your escape. And time will go by, and maybe you'll wonder what happened to me after all. Meanwhile, I'll be signing books in a trendy bookstore/coffee shop nowhere near you.
I mean it too.
All my love,
Iona
--karen