By M.

I have five unsent letters to my first love in my desk drawer. In this discourse of passion and heartbreak, I present to you five chronologically ordered excerpts from the love letters that have been walked in and out of the mailroom countless times. This is my catharsis. This is my sending them to her without complete indulgence. This is patience, waiting for the day when we read them aloud at our kitchen table and love each other once again. 

Excerpt 1: A Reflection on Loving an Artist 

Do you remember when we sat in the street in Rome and you drew a jazz quartet? In my moments of peace, we’re sitting on the cobblestones. We dance and I spill my cheap beer and there’s graphite on your fingertips. Sometimes, when I listen hard enough, I can almost hear it! The trumpet you were sketching, or was it a saxophone? I can almost feel your lips on mine as you whisper “I love you” into my mouth while we walk away from the band, leaving your drawing in the bassist’s open case, but I can’t. We were beautiful in that moment, after we weren’t strangers anymore and before we became strangers again. 

Excerpt 2: A Comment on Loneliness 

How do I untangle you from every part of me? I have dreams that we’re old together, dreams that we’re children together, dreams that we’re together, right now, in this moment. I think we both know that if I could’ve chosen, I would’ve followed you across the country. It feels like some sick joke on God’s behalf, like I’ve found the key to the inner workings of the universe and dropped it down the storm drain to be swept away with the movie stubs and train tickets and doodled letters and photo booth picture strips and pressed flowers. We’re so young, and we’ve already held and lost what everyone spends their entire life looking for. What is there left to find now that we know what it means to love and to be loved? 

Excerpt 3: Pettiness is a Healthy Coping Mechanism 

I think I’d rather spend the rest of my life yearning for the home I’ve found in you, and hoping desperately that I find it in every other lifetime than never having experienced it in this one. I hope, selfishly, that you yearn for me, that you hurt too. For our comfortable silences, for family dinners with yours and mine, for holding me from behind while I stir our dinner in the cast-iron, for the single card game we knew how to play, for whispered names and grips on sheets and hands wrapped in hair, for holding one another through the night, for hosting dinner parties together, for shared lipsticks and cigarettes and toothbrushes, for feeding me focaccia and raspberry mochas, for eternal text threads, for car rides with hands on thighs and beautiful views and shared seven-dollar matcha lattes and our songs on the radio and a destination for just us. I hope you too are cursed to spend the rest of your life yearning. 

Excerpt 4: An Inquiry 

We spent the holidays together. I am so angry with you. How dare you tempt me with how deeply I can love you, with how I fold perfectly into you and melt into your soft skin, soft smell, soft touch. Not fair. Now that we’re done pretending for this cold, confusing month, we won’t speak for a while. So, as I wait for you to return to me in this lifetime, I think I’ll look for versions of us existing together in alternate ones. In how many lifetimes do you think we find one another? I hope all. Secretly, desperately, I hope in this one. Seeing us in all things is comforting, but it also makes me hate everything beautiful. I want to beg you to come home, but I won’t. It might be time that I accept that while I’m in this body and you’re in that one, we might be stuck with only yearning, only observing other pairs and hoping they might just be different versions of us. Where you’re a hummingbird and I’m a trumpet flower. Where you’re the moonlight and I’m the tide. Where you’re a girl and I am too. 

Excerpt 5: Happy Birthday! 

Happy birthday. Nineteen, my favorite Aquarius! This world is more beautiful with you in it. I hope the 9th is a day of celebration of you, your accomplishments, the ways you’ve made this world better. You are so loved! You’ve given my life purpose! What I can’t tell you is that I hope I get to love you on every birthday you ever have. I’d make you a birthday cake every February for the rest of my life if you’d let me. 

Excerpt 6: A Final Address to My First Love (and Another Letter to Add to my Desk Drawer): 

You have taught me what it means to be unconditionally loved and to love unconditionally. It’s torn me apart completely, but it is also the most important lesson I will ever learn. I will not send these letters, although I do have this daydream where you and I sit around a kitchen table together when our hair is gray and our tattoos are blurry, and we read them aloud in celebration of deciding that this life is ours to share. For now, I’ll compile the key points for safekeeping and read them to everyone but you.