Ever Letter

I can attune to people pretty well. It’s a skill, like any other that you can practice.

I like to think I picked it up somewhere along the way intentionally, that I developed it with study and focus just because it’s something I wanted to get better at. The reality of it is a little murkier.

Like you, I grew up into an environment without much proper love. This talent of attunement was baked into me, as I’m sure yours was, to pick up on cues thrown about with seemingly no pattern—signs of anger or rejection or disappointment. I learned to regulate the emotions of the people I was supposed to be nurtured by and put theirs before my own. I don’t know if that’s where you also get your abundantly generous altruism from, but it looks damn similar to mine.

If I’m honest, not much has changed for me in that department. I still keep fierce guard over the things I think and feel. I still would move heaven and earth for the people I love, even when they don’t deserve it. It’s an odd blend. One of my friends described me as ‘full of layers she was sad she’d never get to see’. I think about that sometimes.

You and I have joked that we share a brain—a sentiment I believe to a large extent. I see myself in you, and vice versa, and I know what you meant when you said that hugging me felt like coming home.

Home is historically what we each have made of it. We’re independent creatures, after all. Your mind is like mine, big and scary and full of a gorgeous frantic momentum that never slows, not even to let me finish a story. I see that in you, and I know you see it in me. To be frank, that’s the intimidating part—to think about spending a whole lifetime looking for someone to recognise me—and that I might have accidentally stumbled upon that person. Looking into your big brown eyes is like seeing the bits of myself I aspire to live up to reflected back at me. It feels like coming home to your hugs, wrapped up in a hot body with possibly worse circulation than my own. It feels like listening to you share something of yourself, with a tentative confidence that tells me you’ll be okay if I don’t understand, but you want nothing more than for me to hear you completely in the way that you’re speaking—not just the words but exactly what they mean to you and what they convey. And most of the time, I do.

I could be projecting this all, of course. It wouldn’t be the first time I got wrapped up in a flight of fancy and hoped for the things I’m describing in these passages to be tangible reality. I’ve been falsely infatuated before—usually by people that have been wounded as you and I have, but not yet found a way to walk back from that. They often like to captivate and entrance, and then want nothing to do with the attention that follows. You have my attention, lovely. You have been unapologetically yourself and I find that to be a vote of confidence that what I am feeling is less infatuation, and more just a deep, unfaltering appreciation for the person I am continuing to discover, one ten-hour-conversation at a time.

I have been of two minds about what to do with these feelings. I have described you in glowing remarks to all the important people in my life, and a few of them said they’ve never seen me like this. What a terrifying prospect. Make no mistake, I am a tentative person when it comes to feeling this way. There is nothing like the thought that I have met my match, recognised my counterpoint in another, and am punching way above my league to scare the pants off me. Sometimes literally. It’s a good distraction.

But, after some reflection, I have come to agree with what you said—it would be a crying shame to filter myself or to hold back in any way and think I missed an opportunity. I told you I’d not lived a life I could regret, and that I’d done all the things that ever came my way to tempt me. I would be a fool to not tell you how I feel, and that the magnitude of the sensation is sweeping me away. It would tarnish an otherwise regret-less life. I could not stand to break a streak like that, after all.

So it turns out I am as crazy as you, perhaps more. For every doubt you’ve had about scaring me off, or saying something that would turn me away, I have had equal measures. And just as you would scoff at the notion that anything I might say would scare you (you brave and lovely soul, you), I feel exactly the same. And I know that I need, in every sense of the word, to give into the impulse to trust you and run towards you, not away.

I’m crazy about you, my little lesbian, in the way that only Hallmark movies and grotesquely passionate love songs are. You inspire me to think that everything I’ve dreamt of is not only possible, but sitting in front of me, reading this. If you’ve the urge to let out tears right now, I’ve done my job AND you’re a pussy. I don’t think I care to let anything breathe. I want to rush headlong into everything with you because I have faith in us both to sustain the little world we might build together. You make me want to lavish these passages with metaphors and big words, because the small words don’t do you justice.

I lesbian you, partly because you and I are two halves of the same person, and it has taken me twenty-six years to lesbian myself. I cannot shake the feeling that the timing was meant to be, because it put both of us right here, right now—as cliche as that might be. And I cannot wait to spend the rest of our lives proving each other right, or for as long as you’ll have me.

—Yours faithfully and forever,
Monster A