The Next Great Form Letter

I am one of those people that believes relationships never end. This is because way before Facebook was invented, I would try to end relationships with finality and then the person I was mad at would end up sitting next to me in English. The world just isn’t large enough to retreat to separate corners, especially now. Gone are the days of thinking, “whatever happened to so and so…” They’re probably mutual friends of yours and you see them once a week in your “Friend Suggestion” list that Facebook so lovingly provides. So even if you want to get away from someone, those days are gone.

There should be a form letter for situations like this:

Dear _____,

I apologize that I was a shitty person to you. I assure you that it wasn’t personal. I am a shitty person to a lot of people and on (X Date and Time), you were just the main target. This is not to excuse you for your shitty behavior, just to say that I own my half.

Can we be trusted not to fuck each other up anymore? Are you still the same shitty person you were? I assure you that I will try not to be the same shitty person I was. However, I can only change so much in one lifetime. The best I can do is hope the good outweighs the bad over the next, um, 50 years that I am alive.

Love,

Leslie

I have to assume that if you are the type person that would actually respond to a letter like this with as much honesty as I put forth, then you’re the type of friend I should forgive. Anyone who replies to this letter that they’ve never done anything wrong and they’re sorry it’s all you has got to be immediately disqualified. Problems between people do not crop up in a vacuum. People rarely have the ability to be as shitty to themselves as they are to everyone else.

I think it should be a scientific theory… we’ll call it “Survival of the Shittiest,” because the people that succeed in life are the ones that can accept the fact that they engineer things to be better for themselves than they do for their friends. We all do the best we can, but when push comes to shove, we’d much rather push someone else in front of the bus than have to play the music we wrote.

Humans are all alike. We just like to pretend that we’re not.