You won't read this, but goodbye!

Dear Crush,

You won’t read this, but it isn’t for you. For once, I am doing something with no hope of impressing you, seducing you, or accidentally auditioning for the role of Most Biggest Fool Alive....even if I won four years in a row!

To begin: what is love? My answer has evolved over the years. For too many years, I believed myself to be utterly, ardently, factually in love with you. I won’t revisit the journals or poems—reading them produces a tightness in my chest that, from close range, looks suspiciously like the opening act of a heart attack. But alas, like many things I’ve been absolutely certain about, time has proven me wrong. Again.

I am not angry anymore. I am not even hurt. I am simply disappointed in myself.

Again.

Still.

Consistently.

It was me. It was always me. It is impressively me.

How can one be angry or sad when the culprit keeps turning themself in?

With enough time and documentation, a pattern always emerges. At this point, I suspect most people live inside personalized hamster wheels, sprinting nowhere, and once in a while a bedding pellet flies onto the track. Look! We cry. I don't remember seeing that before! This is a new track! It's different this time!

(It is the same wheel. It has always been the same wheel.)

This pattern. My pattern. Some might call this emotional cheating. I wouldn’t. Cheating, even emotional cheating, requires mutual participation. This is more of a one-person interpretive dance. These are just crushes with no desire for them to go anywhere.

It’s like holding up a marriage proposal sign at a concert—the thrill is that it could capture a celebrity’s attention, but the courage only exists because you know it won’t. If I were ever called out on these crushes—these pitiful, anachronistic, middle-school-level infatuations—I’d probably need to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling until death arrived. Even le mort wouldn't ring my doorbell. He'd be busy that day.

It’s madness, but isn’t a little madness the selling point?

And here’s the important part: I don’t look insane. Externally, I behave exactly as I do with my regular, plain, old friends—people I am definitely, unequivocally not in love with. The chaos is purely internal. Like a duck gliding serenely across a pond while below the surface its feet are paddling like it’s late for a tax audit. IRS in a rowboat just behind me.

So again: what is love? By now, I should know. I know what it isn’t. It isn’t whatever I’m doing. Not really. I don’t give love—I hoard it. I stockpile it. I buy it little sweaters and never hand them out. There is a very warm garment rotting in the back of my closet that could comfort someone, but instead it exists as a monument to my inert fervor.  But isn't that how I've designed this endeavor? Flirt with the edge inside but never cross the line outwardly?

If I’m honest—and I sometimes am, usually while journaling at a speed that prevents self-awareness—over these years of thinking I loved you, I have struggled to even like you at times. I’m not fully convinced we’re friends. Not mutually at least.

Our lives are so incompatible they might as well exist in different ecosystems. An orca and a raven. A bird would eventually drown at sea. A whale could never fit in a nest.. That isn’t tragic. It isn’t toxic. It’s just logistics. They’ll both be happier staying exactly where they belong.

What I loved was not you—it was me. Or rather, the fantasy that somewhere out there you possessed special eyes capable of seeing the real me as I experience myself. I loved the idea of being recognized without the inconvenience of explanation. Isn't that what I've always wanted? Someone who loves me as much as I love me? Oh my God. I'm actually selfish! I'm probably self-centered! 

But I want someone to mirror my own thoughts back to me. And yes, I hear it now—why crave external confirmation if I already know who I am?

I don't know. Why does anyone check their work? I just want to know: Does anyone else see this great, intricate, and interesting person I made with so little?

But it doesn't work. You don't mirror me and you aren't enjoying this. Neither am I. Who is this for? It’s time to retire this emotional crutch before it files a restraining order. I don't need that on my record. 

This is a self-issued cease-and-desist. To myself.

If I ever felt heartbroken—by you, or her, or her—it was entirely self-inflicted. And what’s most jarring is that this “ending” will register nowhere but inside me. You won’t notice. Nothing will change. You’ll receive the same responses. The same gifts. The same letters. As I have always treated you as nothing but another friend. If this was anything at all, it was a private farce. I have always been the most persistent antagonist in my own life, and once again I’ve delivered a strong performance.

How pathetic, this tiny hope that you’ll sense the shift through some psychic tremor—confirming that yes, you do perceive me deeply, just silently, invisibly, and without evidence. It's laughable how little you'll notice me or my feelings or lack thereof.

But really—what is love? Love, I suspect, doesn’t live in feelings. It lives in what one does and says. And I will do and say the same things as ever. So will you. Another failed experiment, poorly designed, repeatedly executed, and somehow still funded. Sounds like something NEH might still support.

And the worst part? I have real love at home—love that shows up in action and in words—while I keep stealing from it to throw offerings at people who were never asking. I am looting my own house to decorate an empty altar to a false God.

Long, meandering letter you won't read just to say farewell to this thing you didn't know we were in. Adieu! Goodbye! This is the end! For real this time! Cross my heart and hope to die!

All that emotional energy—I swear to a kind and gracious God—this time, I will spend on my marriage where love sleeps, eats, makes coffee and toast, pays bills, mows lawns! 

Yes, I withdraw my emotional credit from a fantasy economy and reinvest it in reality—not because reality is more exciting, but because it is more honest. 

What is love? It is authentic.

What is love? Nothing I felt for you.

xoxo,

Caroline