Author and Columnist
I was foolish to say I do not want to desire Kate. It is beautiful to want her.
You infuriate me. Have some backbone, man! Continuing to want Kate after all that she has put you through -- after all that you have put yourself through while crediting her -- is the stupidest thing you could do. Yet you persist in doing it. There is no plenty here. Even without my gift of foresight, anyone could see that this won't end (or continue) well.
Learn to end relationships that are over.
Over the past several days, I have been working harder than usual to amass a greater history in the form of old letters for this site.
Loving the past coats the present in gasoline. While you are looking at the toxic rainbows around you, the future becomes too slick, dizzy, and flammable for you to reach toward.
I am aware of the irony of my saying this, but your nostalgia is one of your most damaging qualities. You could have had innumerable better futures, but you kept reaching backward to Kate.
I began to see how perfect Kate and I were together, nearly of one soul.
You weren't perfect. I have responded to the entries you reconstituted from a broken drive. You posted them, so you saw how flawed your relationship was. You knew. Stop romanticizing the whole of it.
She dumped you before this, even if she reneged because you offered yourself to her. Occasional breakups do not punctuate perfect relationships.
It was, for years, a mostly good and strong relationship. That is well over by this point.
She was so beautiful in the dream, as she is in real life[...]
You are aware that there are real women worth knowing (or a real you worth knowing) while you make out with people in your dreams, right?
It is right, unquestioningly, for me to desire Kate.
I question it. I am confident most of your friends do as well.
This truth is reciprocal, it is right for Kate to desire me. She does desire me, she kisses me and smoothes back my hair and holds me gently.
So? As I keep trying to remind you, while she is cozy with you, she sleeps with her friends. You don't think those things can coexist -- that if she is cuddling with you, she couldn't possibly be with others -- but she does think that.
In these letters, she swore the rightness which I swear now.
Past tense, buddy. Lovers, particularly twenty-year-old ones, are given to fancy declarations whose only substance is cotton candy thin.
We are not at the end of this story, not by a long shot. This is all a chapter and I am ready to get back to the main plotline.
Could we be done with this plotline? Kate is not the story, and winning her back is not the conclusion. You are the story. You forget that.
I tried so hard to leave Kate alone, because I thought that was what was best for her. I see now that she has needed me all along as I have needed her.
Don't you tell her what is best for her. That's none of her business. She has her own struggles, and she must find for herself what is best for her.
Could you imagine what you would think of any of your friend's ex-boyfriends who acted as you do?
You never left Kate alone, even though that would have been the healthiest and kindest thing you could have done for the both of you.
She may like you, may indeed have loved you, but she doesn't need you.
And you don't need her. You would have been far better off without her once she dumped you.