TreeHouseView

First love is never all its cracked up to be, and the glorious ending to my first college romance was nothing more than a sputter of disbelief on my end, and what I imagined to be a raging fuckfest on my ex-boyfriends’ end. But really that had most likely been going on the entirety of our measly year long relationship. Which, in my nineteen year old overly-romanticized mind, was like being married for all of eternity. We were bound to each other for all time, never to love another.

Except he was “loving” all the others. Every single one of the others. Blonde, brunette, redhead…you name it, he’d loved it. And so when he ended things wiith me via phone, stating some inane reason that I now can’t remember and that never really mattered, and not giving me any chance to talk, I was devastated. I don’t respond well in the heat of any moment–I need time to process incoming information in order to decipher my emotions and responses, and so I knew that it wssn’t “over”.

At least not for me.

Enter THE LETTER. This was the 90s, but the early part of the decade before the internet sunk its claws into all that we know, and so there were only really two ways to communicate to people who weren’t directly in front of your face–via telephone or writing a good old fashioned letter. And I loved me a letter.

So I wrote. I poured my little wounded nineteen year old year old heart onto the college-ruled paper that wrinkled ever so slightly in spots after it dried from my tears and smudged from my hand as I scirbbled and scribed. I wrote for pages and pages, back and front, rivaling Rachel’s letter to Ross. And my sad, wounded heart turned bitter and angry, something I wasn’t familiar with.

At some point midway-ish through the letter, I remember telling my ex that I really wanted to tell him to fuck off but I was a nice person, so I wasn’t going to do that. And at nineteen, I still fancied myself nice enough that I really didn’t want be that girl.

Until I did.

At some point in the cathartic waterfall that was that letter, I realized I really did want to tell him to fuck off. HOW DARE HE. And so in what I remember as the grand sign-off of my life, I told him at the end of the letter, something along the lines of “you know what, I’ve changed my mind. FUCK YOU”.

Mic. Drop.

And that was the end of the letter. I went from pathetic, whiny, howcouldyouleaveme to fuck you in roughly a paragraph and it was my first full feeling of empowerment in my young adult life. I took back my power without even realizing it or recognizing it at the time and it felt like nothing I’d ever encountered.

I wish I’d been a fly on the wall when he read that letter. I wanted to revel in what I expected his reaction to be when he read those shocking words. I wanted to be there in person to see the absolute hammer blow I believed those two words would deliver. The hurt! The betrayal! The tit for tat! Take that!

I know deep down that if he even read the letter at all, he might have only gotten a chuckle out of the butterfly kiss of my my coup de grace, but it was what I needed to get over the hurdle of the breakup and move on from the heartbreak of my first adult relationship. So probably best that I couldn’t morph into the fly I wanted to be on the wall of his law school apartment where he was hooking up with every single female within reach–I would have been unable to carry on as the insect I already was and it would have further reduced me to. My wings would have been ashen.

But I hope he got the message.