For Now

Dear Aada,

I never expected to hear from you again. Thank God you’re so feisty that you have to refute things on my web site. But you are wrong that hearing from you was because I was trying to provoke you. I have so many feelings that I need to get out, and I’m sorry that you think I need to exact punishment without seeing all the positive I write… or you cannot trust it, because you think that the negative is correct and the positive must be false.

You write that our journey has been amazing and debilitating as is all of life. Such is the nature of my web site. When things are bad between us in real life, they’re bad between us on my web site. When things are good between us, it shows here.

We have spent too much time fighting for me to explain how beautiful you are to my readers in great detail.

You said, “we all get it. I’m a terrible person.”

No one, not even the writer that mirrored you, said you were a terrible person. Everyone has come through with empathy for us both because that’s the way I write- that love is complicated and so are people. I, like you, am tired of things being complicated. We need time to rest and relax in the enriched earth after thermonuclear war. The ground on which we walk must not be radioactive, but we get to decide how long it stays that way.

I’m struck that we both want peace for the other, both look out for the other. I know you feel pain on my behalf. But you have not reached out to do anything about it, such a large part of my need to pull away.

As I told you last night, I love you and I want you in my life… but not like this. Not aloof on the Internet where so much can go so wrong, so fast. I would rather have memories of the first time you hugged me instead.

I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you. You are right in that we both manipulated each other. But I am very honest about the fact that it was not purposeful, and interested in what your doctor saw that I didn’t. I assure you it was all first family crap, and not “I really need to screw with Aada’s head today.”

You asked me if I’d ever turned the kind of judgments I have for you on myself, and it was my turn to laugh out loud. I punish myself in these pages and I know it. Every time we’ve fallen out I’ve cried like a toddler on steroids.

I rake myself over the coals so that you don’t feel alone in being written about. It’s not your story, it is mine. Every protagonist has to have an antagonist, and I think I have shown that you are mine and I am yours, should you ever have the need to write it all down.

We have both been the heroes and the villains in the other’s story. Because your letter is so long and involved, I go back to it often. It’s your “last letter.” For now.

For now as I turn toward my Zoom CBH group and in person on Tuesdays and Dusan and Michael. Maybe one day you will call Dusan and explain how I am sane. I know he wonders daily……… but that is a call a close friend would make, and we have made no promises that our drift now will lead back together.

“For now” leaves me with hope, and I know you would not leave me with hope if you did not mean it. I will ignore what you said about me not wanting to dedicate my first book to you, because of course I will. Duh. You didn’t go through the grind for nothing, woman.

I enjoy you. I wish we could walk in the sunshine with our arms around each other and just let emotions happen. That tears could fall and it would be okay for me to have emotion and it would be okay for me to see yours, rather than hearing about them as you type.

The thought of never hearing from you ever again is one that feels crazy to me, but probably less crazy as we go longer without contact. What I know for sure is that because I was not expecting your email, I said that I did not want it. I did not mean that I didn’t want it and oh, God. I’m a moron. What I meant was that none of my silly blog is designed to elicit a response.

That of course someone is going to alert you when you need to pay attention because you’re my yellow string. My emotional support for the last 12 years and I’m trying to collate what that looks like now that it’s “gone.”

I keep saying that I will change topics, but this is what is running through my mind right now and I cannot lift out of it. Thoughts of you no longer feel intrusive and I can breathe freely.

The damage to both of us has been incalculable, but we are both doing the best we can to write the story we need right now.

Counselor and Dana know what’s true and what’s not. No one in Baltimore does, and my health is dependent on what my counselors believe. I’m over a barrel with these “psychotic features,” and my new friends are showing me a way out.

The way out put nails on your palms, because we did not talk to each other first. You have not known what was going on in my life for the last few months because you did not want contact and I gave it to you. I still had to tell my story here.

Contrary to popular belief, I’ve seen some shit.

Maybe one day I’l get to tell you about it.

The next Big Gulp’s on me.

Again, I love you and I want you in my life. But not like this. Our relationship needs the one thing we’ve never given it….

Air.

It is my hope that I’ll be walking down the street one day and there you’ll be, finally, after all these years. That my writing has made an impact on you, and you see that my feelings for you are genuine. I really have been invested, and so have you… but I tend to see it the most when you are telling me goodbye….

For now.

Yours til bacon strips,

Leslie