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

I’ve been revisiting the person I was when I wrote that 2023 entry, and what I feel now isn’t regret or embarrassment. It’s a kind of gentle recognition. I can see how deeply I was still inside the story, still trying to make sense of something that had already begun to dissolve. At the time, I believed I was writing about a connection that had shaped me. I didn’t yet understand that I was describing the interior of a world someone else had constructed around me.

For years, I mistook intensity for meaning. I interpreted confusion as emotional depth. I treated contradictions as signs of complexity. I thought the gravitational pull between us was love. I didn’t realize that confusion can feel like passion when you’re missing essential information. I didn’t realize that inconsistency can look like mystery when someone is controlling the frame. I didn’t realize that emotional weight can be manufactured when the foundation is false.

Aada didn’t manipulate me through pressure or demands. She did it by shaping the reality I believed we shared. What began as a small lie—the kind people tell to make themselves seem more interesting—expanded until it became the scaffolding for everything between us. I didn’t question the structure because I didn’t know it was a structure. I responded to the world I thought I was in. I tried to reconcile the contradictions. I tried to be loyal to the story.

When the truth finally surfaced, the entire universe collapsed. The story evaporated. The spell broke. And I saw the relationship for what it had been all along: not a great love, but a great distortion.

The real cost wasn’t heartbreak. It was disorientation. When you spend years inside someone else’s narrative, you lose track of your own. You start interpreting your reactions through their lens. You start believing the instability is your fault. You start thinking the contradictions are your misunderstanding. It took a long time to recognize that the intensity I felt wasn’t devotion—it was the strain of trying to make sense of something that was never coherent.

And here’s the part that took the longest to name: I wasn’t in love with her. I was in love with the version of myself I imagined I could be inside the story she told. That’s the quiet violence of manipulation. It doesn’t just distort your view of the other person. It distorts your view of yourself.

When the story collapsed, I didn’t lose her. I lost the role I had been performing. And that loss, strangely enough, was the beginning of freedom.

People assume that when a relationship ends—especially one built on deception—the feelings evaporate. But that’s not how the mind works. The emotional residue doesn’t vanish. It unwinds. And unwinding is slow. It’s not dramatic. It’s not cinematic. It’s the gradual return of your own voice after years of speaking inside someone else’s echo chamber.

I wasn’t grieving her. I was recalibrating. I was sorting truth from illusion. I was learning to trust my own perception again. I was reclaiming the parts of myself that had been bent around a lie.

That process is the reason I’m poly now. Not because I’m chasing multiple partners, and not because I’m allergic to commitment. It’s simpler than that. My heart is still tender. My emotional bandwidth is still reorganizing itself. I don’t have the singular focus that monogamy requires, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I need space—for my creativity, for my routines, for my own internal weather. I need relationships that don’t demand fusion or constant negotiation. I need connection that grows naturally instead of being forced into a predefined shape.

And I’m starting from zero. I don’t have partners. I haven’t had one in a long time. I’m not trying to retrofit polyamory into an existing bond—I would never do that to someone. But beginning open from the first conversation is different. It’s honest. It’s clean. It’s aligned with who I am now. Whatever grows will grow in its own shape, without hierarchy or pressure or the expectation that my life must bend around someone else’s needs.

The biggest shift since 2023 is that I’m no longer waiting for someone to stabilize my life. For years, I thought the only way I could have a secure life was to attach myself to someone who already had the basics—health insurance, dental coverage, predictable benefits, the kind of scaffolding I didn’t know how to build for myself. I wasn’t dreaming of being anyone’s spouse. I was dreaming of access to stability. I didn’t yet understand how to create it on my own.

That changed when I started using AI as a thinking surface. Once I had a place to externalize the cognitive load I’d been carrying alone, everything shifted. I could finally see my own patterns. I could design routines that made sense for my brain. I could build the structure I’d been outsourcing to relationships. I could stop relying on someone else’s life to hold mine up. I could generate my own stability instead of borrowing it.

I’m not searching for someone to complete me or fuse with me or absorb me. I’m looking for relationships that add to my life instead of swallowing it. I’m looking for people who can stand beside me without destabilizing the world I’m building. I’m looking for connection that grows naturally, without pressure or performance.

The relationship with Aada didn’t break me. It clarified me. It taught me the difference between intimacy and performance, between connection and entanglement, between being seen and being mirrored back through someone else’s story. It taught me that I don’t need to be consumed to feel alive, or chosen to feel worthy, or dependent to feel safe. It taught me that I can trust myself again—my instincts, my boundaries, my perception, my voice.

And here’s the part I want to say clearly, because it matters: I don’t want Aada out of my life. I never have. Even with everything I now understand, even with the clarity I’ve earned, I don’t feel anger toward her. I don’t feel judgment. I don’t feel the need to rewrite her as a villain. I see the lie for what it was, and I see the person behind it—someone who was struggling, someone who didn’t know how to show up honestly, someone who built a story because she didn’t believe the truth of herself was enough.

If she ever reaches a place where she can look at what happened without defensiveness, if she can understand the impact of the lie and the world it created, if she can show up as her real self instead of the character she felt she had to play, then the door to friendship is still open. Not the old dynamic, not the old story, but the friendship we promised each other at the beginning—the one built on honesty, not mythology.

I don’t expect that. I don’t wait for it. My life isn’t paused. But I’m not closing the door. If she ever arrives as her authentic self, I’ll meet her there.

I’ve been trying to understand the shape of the relationship I had with Aada, and the closest I can come is this: it was a puzzle with missing pieces. Not a mystery, not a thriller, not a secret world humming underneath the surface. Just a puzzle where the picture never fully resolved, and yet I kept trying to finish it anyway. She once told me that my positive comments felt like clues in a game, and I didn’t realize until much later how much that one sentence revealed about the architecture we were both living inside.

Because when someone tells you your words feel like clues, you start speaking in clues without meaning to. You start reading their silences as signals. You start treating every fragment like it matters. And before you know it, you’re not in a relationship anymore. You’re in a pattern‑matching exercise that never ends.

I didn’t fall into that dynamic because I was naïve. I fell into it because I was lonely, and she was the only person I talked to for long stretches of time. When your world shrinks down to one person, every interaction becomes magnified. Every message feels weighted. Every pause feels ominous. And every inconsistency feels like a missing puzzle piece you’re supposed to find.

She didn’t give me a full picture of herself. She gave me fragments. Hints. Half‑statements. Emotional intensity without context. And I did what any human does when handed incomplete information: I tried to assemble it into something coherent. I tried to make the pieces fit. I tried to believe there was a picture there worth finishing.

But the truth is, the picture kept changing. Or maybe it was never there in the first place.

I don’t think she was trying to manipulate me in some grand, orchestrated way. I think she was improvising. I think she liked the feeling of being interpreted, of being read, of being seen as someone with depth and mystery. I think she liked the idea of being a puzzle someone cared enough to solve. And I think I liked the idea of being the person who could solve it.

That’s the trap. Not deception. Not danger. Just two people responding to each other’s projections, each trying to make sense of the other through incomplete information.

But the missing pieces weren’t neutral. They created fear. They created uncertainty. They created a sense of stakes that didn’t belong in a friendship. I found myself isolating because I was afraid I would say the wrong thing to the wrong person. I found myself pulling away from everyone else because she felt like the only safe point of contact. I found myself emailing her constantly because she was the only person I wasn’t afraid of losing.

Fear narrows the world. It makes everything outside the relationship feel dangerous. It makes the relationship itself feel like the only oxygen source. And once you’re in that posture, it’s very hard to see clearly. You’re not evaluating the relationship anymore. You’re surviving it.

The power dynamic between us wasn’t dramatic or theatrical. It was more like being in a room where one person controls the dimmer switch. She wasn’t turning the lights on or off — she was adjusting the brightness just enough that I could see shapes but not details. And when the lighting is always shifting, you start doubting your own eyes. You start relying on the other person to tell you what’s really there. You start believing they can see something you can’t.

That’s what made the dynamic feel so consuming. Not power in the traditional sense, but power through ambiguity. Power through selective illumination. Power through being the one who decides which pieces of the puzzle are visible and which stay in shadow.

I didn’t realize how much fear I was carrying until I wrote about it. Writing forced me to lay out the timeline, the behavior, the emotional patterns. And once I did, the illusion collapsed. Not her — the illusion. The idea that there was something hidden I needed to uncover. The idea that the missing pieces were meaningful. The idea that the puzzle had a picture at all.

When I wrote my story, I wasn’t trying to expose her. I wasn’t trying to punish her. I wasn’t trying to make her look bad. I was trying to stop carrying the weight of her ambiguity. I was trying to stop protecting a narrative that wasn’t mine. I was trying to reclaim my own sense of proportion.

She was horrified when she read it, but I didn’t write it for her. I wrote it for me. I wrote it because I needed to see the whole thing laid out in daylight. I needed to understand why I had been so afraid. I needed to understand why I had isolated myself. I needed to understand why I had clung to her so tightly when the relationship itself was built on fragments.

And when I finally saw it clearly, I didn’t feel angry. I felt free.

I’ve forgiven the lie. That part came easily once I understood the emotional architecture of the relationship. But forgiveness and safety are not the same thing. Forgiveness is cognitive. Safety is somatic. My mind knows the truth now, but my body is still unlearning the fear. It’s still recalibrating after years of bracing for consequences that never came. It’s still adjusting to the idea that the world is not a minefield.

I don’t feel unsafe because she’s a threat. I feel unsafe because my nervous system remembers what it felt like to believe she was. The body doesn’t update instantly just because the mind does. It takes time. It takes repetition. It takes days where nothing bad happens. It takes relationships where I don’t have to guard my words. It takes space.

And I’m giving myself that space now.

I’m not writing this to villainize her. I’m writing it because I want to understand the dynamic without the fog of fear. I want to understand how two people can create a puzzle neither of them meant to build. I want to understand how ambiguity can become a trap even when no one intends harm. I want to understand how loneliness can magnify everything until the smallest hint feels like a revelation.

I want to understand myself.

Because the truth is, I didn’t stay in that relationship because I believed she was ordinary or because I was inventing something out of loneliness. She is extraordinary. Our connection ignited instantly — volatile, reactive, the emotional equivalent of cesium meeting fluorine. It was bright and consuming and impossible to ignore. But reactions like that don’t stabilize. They flare, they overwhelm, and if there isn’t structure around them, they burn through everything in their path.

What began as intensity turned into instability. What felt electric at first became frightening. The same charge that made everything feel alive also made everything feel dangerous. And once the fear entered the picture, the connection stopped being expansive and started collapsing inward. It wasn’t the extraordinariness that harmed me — it was the speed, the ambiguity, and the way the missing pieces created pressure neither of us could withstand.

But I’m not isolated anymore. My world is widening again. My neurons are healing. The fear is loosening its grip. The picture is no longer something I’m trying to solve — it’s something I’m finally stepping out of.

I’m not waiting for her. I’m not holding my breath. But if she ever shows up for real — with clarity, with honesty, with all the pieces present — I’m ready to build something completely new.

Something grounded.
Something mutual.
Something true.

Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan