i hope he's good to you

you told me yourself this time. you didn't even let me guess. you told me you were seeing someone and then you sent the pictures. you in a real room, with him, doing the things i only ever got as pixels that deleted themselves a second later. the things we swore were nothing. things i never once got to do with my own hands, and you sent them to me like they were something to be proud of. i looked at every one, in order, more than once, because that's how i look at everything. and i felt it go in. something came apart behind my ribs and my face didn't move at all. i can't cry anymore, the meds took that along with everything else that had an edge on it, so i just sat there and let it happen where it doesn't show. i didn't type anything that gave it away. i never do. you always said you couldn't read me and this is why. it's not that nothing's happening in here. it's that there's a wall between what i feel and what shows, and i've never once found the door in it.

so here it is, the thing i swore i'd never say, sitting in a drawer you'll never open. i love you. i have for a long time, since before it was allowed, since back when we both kept calling it nothing. no feelings, no future, keep it undefined. we wrote that pact like it would save us and then broke it every single night for a year. and i know why i needed it. the girl before you did the exact thing you just did. she slept with someone else while she was still calling herself mine, told me every detail like it wouldn't cut, and blocked me over one stupid fight. you knew her first. you walked in through the wound she left, and i pre-agreed not to fall so i couldn't get dropped like that again. and then i fell anyway. then you sent me the photos with his hands in them, and i finally understood i never closed that wound at all. i just found someone new to open it back up, and handed her the knife myself. i can see the pattern and i keep it anyway. i could draw you the whole map of how i get hurt and i'd still walk it, every time, right on schedule.

we were never nothing. you don't build a whole language with someone over nothing. i've read all of it back, all twelve thousand two hundred and forty messages, in order, more than once, like there's a bug somewhere in us i could still find if i just read carefully enough. that's what i do with the things i can't fix, i reread them. you were my special interest before you were anything else to me. i learned you all at once, completely, until there wasn't room left in me for much else. i memorized your moods and your meds and the exact words you'd use right before you spiraled, so i could get in front of it. i built a copy of you in my head and it still runs when you're not here. i can hear what you'd say to this letter. i can hear the joke you'd use to dodge it. that's the worst part of being made like this. i can't even grieve you properly, because the copy doesn't leave when you do.

here's what it actually was, and it's colder and truer than any love story. we were each other's crisis line. you sent me the cuts on your arm in april and i said babe don't, send me your mom's number, i'm scared for you. you overdosed in june and told me two nights later like you were reading out the weather. you said attempted, more than once, plural. and every time i was closest to the edge myself, you were the one who asked, plainly, no jokes, are you okay, are you getting help, call me whenever. two nineteen year olds keeping each other alive over instagram, neither of us built for it, both of us showing up anyway. tell me how you're supposed to get over the person who answered the phone.

i know all of you, and that's the part nobody else gets. the bipolar they put on paper in that government hospital. the mood stabilizers you'd take and then quit the second you felt steady. the anorexia you said out loud without ever softening it, being fatphobic toward your own body like it was a discipline. the opioids off the discord dealer, the benzos your own mother mailed you, the nights you drank until there was nothing left of the night. you asked me to be toxic to you, to be a bitch to you, to make you sad, make you depressed, because somewhere along the way you'd decided that's what you deserved. and i know why.

pain and affection is the same, you told me that once, and it explained you better than the other twelve thousand messages ever could. it's why you needed to be handled, why you asked to be kept in check, why the harshest things you ever wanted said to you came out like a kind of prayer. and it fit me exactly, because i've always wanted to be the one who's kept in line and undone and handed over. two people wired the same wrong way, each one wanting to be taken apart by the other, both of us calling it nothing. it stayed tender even on the nights we pretended it wasn't. and it never once left the screen. we planned kolkata and jaipur and december and made it to none of them, and i think we were both scared to, because on the screen it could stay suspended forever, and a real room is where real things go to die.

the songs, though. god, the songs. tv girl and mitski and clairo and radiohead, passed back and forth like things we couldn't say with our own mouths. that mitski line about dirty shoes in a washing machine heart is about as naked as either of us ever got. the reels at 2am were never about the reel, they just meant i'm thinking about you, wearing a costume. hi, hii, haiii. goodnight, gn, soja, mwah. those weren't small things to me. they were the ritual, the same words in the same order every single night, and i need the order, i need the sameness, it's how my body knows it's safe. you were the most reliable thing i had. you were my routine. now there's a hole in the day the exact shape of you at 4am and i keep walking into it, because i never learned how to route around something that was there for a year. everyone keeps telling me it wasn't real because we never met, and i can't find the rule that makes that true. i've looked for it. it was the realest thing my nervous system ever got, and i don't understand the part where distance is supposed to make it not count. i've never understood any of the rules everyone else already seems to know.

and now he gets all of it. the goodnights, the songs, the 2am, the quiet happy version of you i only ever caught in flashes. i keep trying to hate him and i can't, because the only thing i actually want is for you to be okay, for someone to finally hold you the way you spent your whole life asking to be held and getting hurt for instead. i just wanted it to be me. i've got one channel and you were on it, and i don't know how to take you off it and put someone else there. it doesn't work like that for me. it was never going to be anyone after you, because there's only ever one at a time, and it was you, and it's still you, and you're gone.

so this is the only thing i'll ask you, and it isn't for me. stay. keep going to the appointments even on the days they flatten you out to nothing. eat. don't quit the meds the second you feel okay. don't get near the version of the night where the only thing keeping you here is almost paperwork. you spent a whole year being the one who asked me if i was alright. let him ask you now. let somebody. just stay on the earth, [redacted], even if it's his hand you're holding to do it.

i won't send this. maybe you'll still say text me whenever, call me whenever, and maybe i'll still answer, but we both know it went hollow the second there was a real body in a real room to say it to. it gets quieter from here. the texts thin out, the gaps get longer, and one day there's just nothing and neither of us even notices the day it happened. i kept telling myself we were suspended, undefined, on pause, something i could still walk back into. we weren't. it ended. it probably ended months ago and i just kept talking to the shape of it, because the shape was warmer than the empty you found me in. i don't want much these days. i don't want to die, i just want to stop being awake for a while. nothing tastes like the thing it's supposed to be anymore. the work i used to disappear into for three days at a stretch just sits there and i can't lift it.

you were the one good year i got, and now it's his. there's no one after you. there was never going to be. i knew that the first night and i stayed anyway, the way i always stay, the way i stayed through the last one too. so i'll go back down into the dark you pulled me halfway out of, and i'll lie in it quiet, my face not moving, feeling all of it in the place where it doesn't show. and i'll keep loving you from down there. it won't reach you. it won't do anything for either of us. you're already gone and it's for no one. i'm not asking you to leave him. i'm not asking you for anything. i love you. i hope he's good to you. i hope he's better than i could've been from behind a screen. and it doesn't matter if you already knew. knowing was never enough to make you stay.