Dear Aada,
I realized today that the love I have for you does not stem from everything you’ve done. That is what feeds our friendship and keeps it strong. The place where I get trapped is that feeling that you’re a part of me in a way that no one else ever could be, because I can write about you all day long, but communicating with you is off limits. It is okay because I enjoy spending time with your ghost, trying to figure out all the parts of me that are irritating so I don’t do it to someone else. That’s always the real post-mortem of a relationship, trying to figure out how you went wrong. To focus on the other person is a useless exercise.
Because even if down the line I impress you with something and you come back, it cannot be in the same way.
Mostly because the story we were telling ourselves was so drastically different. You focused on all the negative, the “479 entries that left nails in your palms.” What you would not, could not do was see that there were 10,000 telling the world I loved you in a way I’ll never love again. It’s a rich tapestry of an emotional roller coaster, not “All Pick on Aada Day.”
I have learned that you can dish it, but you cannot take it. You told me that you cared, even left an “I love you” on my Facebook page once, and it made me feel validated in two ways. The first was, “I love you because I’m a fan of your work” and the second was, “I love you because you really see me.” In the beginning, that was delightful in your eyes because I was speaking truth to power. The second you saw our relationship through the lens of your guilt over your own stuff, my blog became the one place you couldn’t control me.
I was doing emotional labor that was yours to own, because I was trying to give you an outlet to talk and you never did. Not only that, when I write about you, it’s as impersonal as it gets. Strangers read me. They do not know either of us and see my writing objectively. You are not the authority on whether you are a 3D character across the world. You are a fan that used their influence to change the narrative, and not always for good.
You did not see that my blog was a mirror. That I wrote about our narrative in a repetitive way, but that’s because our dance of intimacy was predictable… not “I cannot change the subject.” There was nothing I could change, because you never gave me the power to do so. You blocked me on everything having to do with social media. Fine. I deserved it. But even before that you locked our relationship down so tightly that even the people around you didn’t know about it… or at least, that is the impression that you gave me. You influenced my relationships and I influenced yours, but only I told you about how you influenced my life.
I emoted; you shut down. You’d come back and emote, then we’d get too close and flame out because you said you were open and as it turns out, not so much. But most of that is because you said you needed to step away the moment it got real and I needed you. You turned it into me acting like a child because I was… a terrified one at that. And instead of facing reality and helping me through it, you decided to dump me instead.
You needed to do what was best for you. I needed to do what was best for me. But life is long and strange. You’ve said that you’d no longer read or write before, and it was like six months. Body memory tells me that I’m thinking about you a lot because we always blow up at the same time every year…. the moment I realized I was choosing my friend over my wife for all the right reasons, not knowing that it would turn into an everyday battle, verbally trying to lift each other up or bring each other down depending on how close we were feeling that day. I never knew which version of you was going to show up, because I didn’t want to create the mess I found myself in any longer.
I started focusing on my tone and running my entries through AI so that I could see whether I’d actually been too harsh or whether it was just a misunderstanding. What is happening is that we are both rejecting each other because we think the other doesn’t love us. It takes us time to realize that we wouldn’t fight if we didn’t care about each other this much.
What I have learned is that in that time, you’re really taking in what I have to say, mulling it over. I am slowly learning how to write in a way that introduces topics over my relationships, but I will never give either up because I need to express my own emotions, how I’m doing on my own terms, because an AI can capture all of my ideas, but can only imitate my tone. It’s a way to see what I can own and when I’m reaching/projecting/whatever. I constantly game out possibilities for how people are feeling because I am unclear on the message that they are trying to send.
You took my clarifying questions/narrative as a threat to your authority, so the only way to reach you was to write here, dispassionately and for a neutral audience that needed both sides of the story in order to feel it the way I do….. not to get into the business of judging either one of us. Your side of the story was constantly missing and when it was sketched, shat upon with emphasis.
You accused me of lying without realizing that I was going through and trying to cope with it. That wore on me to an enormous extent, where I realized that I could no longer think out loud or it would cause you to react.
I realized that I could be a great writer, or I could have people in my life. I chose being a great writer. I was a blogger before I met you, and you cannot take away the one thing that helped me survive all the instability and guesswork.
I know that you believe that I was being manipulative, and that’s okay. Your narrative about me is yours to create, just as is my right to have a narrative about you. I thought of you as being included in my life, and you appreciated when I glowed.
Over time that became “notes of affection” which rendered to you as “clues in a game.”
My beautiful girl, I made you human. I expressed the entire range of our emotions regarding each other, not just the brilliant and the beautiful. It’s because 40 years from now, everyone (even you) will have a beautiful picture of this time in your life. Yes, there was turmoil. But when you stop seeing affection as a game and just the truth, perhaps you’ll meet me halfway.
You have always thought my truth was suspect and told me it wasn’t. I do not lie. I do not think I have ever lied to you, but I’d be willing to admit it if you found one. My problem was never that you lied once, it was the height, depth, and breadth of the fabrication and the way you just expected me to shut down and get over it…. but your perception is that I was being a drama queen without actually looking at the effects of what you were doing.
You gave me life, but isolated me so I couldn’t really live it. I wanted to have you as a buddy I could count on, but I have realized that it is probably a pipe dream. When you said goodbye to me, you made sure to get in your parting shots, and ask me if it was worth it.
It was. I am sure that I would be horrified at the consequences I laid out for you because I imagined them and ended up at the psych ward at Sinai. Still worth it, because no one lights up my life like you do and I am not concerned we will ever be mercurial again. Neither of us will tolerate it.
But what we are capable of doing is nothing short of phenomenal, whether it’s writing or conversation. We’ve just never gotten there because we were interrupted. Maybe I’ll never get that time in my life back, but I am not wrong for hoping. I have lost hope before, and you’ve always surprised me. You’ve loved me more deeply without telling me than anyone I know, and I know it like the earth is round.
But what you see is what you get. You can choose to look for all the places in which you are unhappy, or all the places in which our relationship sings. That’s the part I cannot do for you. I cannot read my work with your eyes, and I cannot count on you to read me at all. But even the hope that things will smooth over is a lift in my step. I can be a peer, but I cannot be someone who can be controlled. I can be stable without getting into the pattern of toxicity. I can even stop blogging and start working on all my books so that Aada has input before I publish.
Editor’s Note: I offered her editorial control and she turned it down, saying she had no concerns about what I knew and what I didn’t and she didn’t care what people thought of her. I pushed that past the limit and I know the ways in which the problems are me, but that is not my story to tell. I can only guess the things that I’ve done wrong, because generally what I focus on is not what she’s clocking.
Because she told me all that for so long, I wrote like she meant it while she was dying inside.
I wanted to tell people why I was willing to stick with this relationship for life despite the fact that we’d constantly have to work so hard to keep it together, and that is a huge part of it. She allowed me room to be myself, to paint her picture with depth. The only problem is that the reality was that I left pricks on her skin, nails on her palms because she was reading it through her own rejection sensitivity dysphoria and not the literal truth.
You said it would have been nice to go back to the beginning.
Hi, I’m Leslie.
I used to be one of your favorite authors. You used to be the one fan I could tolerate.
Neither of us are those people right now.
But we could be.
xo
Stories That Are All True 