letters, part one

[Sometimes I like to write letters from one character to another when I'm trying to pin down a narrator's voice or flesh out the relationship/emotions between them. This is one of those, for a thing I just started working on.] 

It's been a long time, hasn't it? You might wonder why I would write to you now. I've been gone forever, or maybe you have. I suspect you barely give me a thought, and if I'm honest I don't remember you either. Not really. I think about you more often than I should, but I don't remember who you were. In my head there's a vessel, shaped vaguely like you, and I use it as a place to put feelings I don't know what to do with. Sometimes I talk to you. More often than not I end up yelling at you. You hold a flame long-since extinguished, but its ghost still burns, somehow brighter than the original ever did. 

I think you'd be surprised to find out how much I resented you. There were a hundred, a thousand better targets for such things, but it was only ever you. I spent night after night quietly bathing in my own fury, wishing I'd lied to you, wishing I'd ripped you apart like your worst fears. You made me feel vicious, desperate. I sought you out across every crowded room and cursed the sight of you as much as I cursed your absence. 

You could never have loved me. I think you believed you could, once, but you were wrong. You didn't know me. I seemed nice, and you thought I was pretty. You imagined a nice relationship with a pretty girl, fluffy at the edges and gooey in the centre, a warm marshmallow of a thing. Easy and clean and sweet and soft. You wanted that, and you came to me. I could almost laugh at you. What was I to you? A body, a rhythm, a smile. You didn't look deeper; you didn't think you needed to. 

In many ways you're not special. Every man, every single one that ever glanced my way when he passed through my life, had a sketch in his head of the woman he was looking for. He would look at the sketch and he would look at me, and he would think "sure, she could look like that". He brought to life a strange hybrid of his innermost dreams and me, each one stumbling and unstable, threatening to fall apart at any moment. But to his unfocused eyes, she was dancing. I danced for you, too. I know I did. 

I've been more than a dozen different women to more than a dozen different men. Some of them were made by better artists than others. I've been a child's stick figure drawing, standing next to a house with a triangle for a roof, all hair and smiles with no capacity to cry or to argue or to grow. I've been a work of art with depth and colour and style, so real you could almost touch me. I've been a painting by numbers, my outline taken and filled in step-by-step with what he expected to see. I've been a quirky helpmeet, a self-possessed goddess, a sweetheart just waiting to be made a wife. I've been the One, suddenly, again and again. 

Every time, I let him down. Sometimes he gets close enough to see all the ways I'm not what he wanted, the trauma and the carelessness and the racing mind. More commonly he sits at a distance from the picture he painted, imagining our children's faces from behind carefully neutral expressions, waiting for things to just happen somehow. He watches me continuing with my life, unaware of who I'm supposed to be right now, and waits. He waits for me to stop, to see him, to run to him, to say tell me what you want and let me give it to you. He says nothing. He gives me no clues. He hides, sometimes, afraid of what I might take away from him. From his hiding place he sees another man, a reckless decision, a sadness a little too sharp. Something that makes the picture fall apart. It hurts. And he blames me. I did this to him. 

Every other time, he's confronted me. He's brought me his feelings of betrayal, sadness, anger, and laid them at my feet as though they belonged to me, asking and demanding that I explain myself. He's certain that I had set out to deceive and mislead him, the way that women do. He'd thought I was different. He'd thought I'd promised not to hurt him. No explanation could ever be good enough, and he'll take back his sketch and move on, leaving his baggage with me to unpack. I pick through it carefully, more carefully than it ever deserves, looking for the thing I did wrong. I look for anything I could have done differently, anything I could have changed. And the answer is always the same. I was wrong, fundamentally, down to my personality, down to my core. 

This has happened every time and it always saddens me, regardless of my feelings for the person in question, but it's so common that I'm almost used to it. I set aside my time to search the bundle of feelings and charges left to me, take anything I think I should claim, and leave the rest of it to be evaporated into yesterday. But not this time. Not with you.

You brought me nothing. You brought me neither your hope nor your pain, neither your yearning nor your disappointment. I never saw the woman you drew in my image. I had nothing to examine and understand. I still don't know what I did, or what you thought I did. You just slipped away quietly, put up a gate I couldn't get through until you worked out how to get even further away from me. I wish you'd said something, anything. I wish you'd called me a whore. Anything I might have been able to grasp at and respond to. But you wouldn't even give me that. You left me with nothing but a sense of utter worthlessness, one that swallowed me whole. I never quite recovered what you took from me. I hope I hurt you too. I hope I broke something inside you. I hope I left a scratch on your soul that will never heal.

So I write to you now to bring you everything I found inside me that I believe to be yours, the way every man before you did to me. You can kick it away without looking at it if you choose; I don't believe you owe me anything. But I want it gone. I want you gone. Out of my body, out of the darkest recesses of my mind. And the only way to get it out is to return it to you. I don't want to talk it over with you. I will not claim your pity or your condescension or your feigned confusion. The only thing I will take from you is any painful scrap of myself that you still hold, something I can return to the place where you wrenched it out so it can begin to heal. I don't expect it, but it would be the one last kindness you could do for me.