three weeks since my birthday and today I check an old email address I stopped using back in February. I check it in the off chance that someone has written me there instead of at the new one. in eight months no one really has. but today when I check it, the inbox holds a message from my exboyfriend. (my only exboyfriend.) who has my new email address. he's written to wish me a happy birthday, an innocuous wish and a detached delivery. I think: that's nice of him. I respond to the message in a friendly way, let's have lunch sometime soon, we are in the same neighborhood and all and it would be nice to say hello. too bad you missed my dance show last weekend, it was good, I write. and sign off cordially.

.

and then I look at the message again and consider that this is not a fresh message entirely, but a reply to a message from one year ago. shortly after we really broke up, after six years solid + one backsliding. after I said: I can't give you anything anymore. after I found out that he'd been lying to me for weeks about dating someone new, all the while working my guilt about calling an end to it, still making moves on me and crying when I didn't respond. and then I find out that he's taken someone I've never heard of on roadtrips and to bed, and all I want is for him to stop it. I just want what I know again. I will promise anything. I want all the struggle back again. he's a kind of drug that I've spent seven years wanting more from, wanting to really feel all the way for once, trying and failing all the time to quit and make it stop. and right then I cravenly want it to start all over again.

and I want him to stop seeing this girl whose name I've never heard until the night he says he fucked her in LA on a trip he hadn't mentioned he was taking. I want him to come back with me to where it's awful but we know the rules, and I will promise anything.

he has no respect for me anymore and he shouldn't. I have none for him but I am desperate.

and one night I ask him to come to my apartment to really talk, I'll curb my phone hysterics and I just want to talk. I want to give him back his car keys that I've had for a year. I want to feel something familiar again. I ask him to swear that he won't sleep at her house again until I talk to him at mine. he says yes.

I send him an email in the morning before he comes to dinner that night. that night that marked the end of all of it. and today I see he's sent it back to me.

::: :

j: i wasn't sure where to put your keys. i still have them with me. tell me where, and i'll put them there. i slept last night solely with thoughts of you. i think this, a turning hum of thought: tonight i will see you. e.

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a year later and he sends this back to me.

and I hate him so sadly all over again. :

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there is a row of three scars on my thigh from where I cut myself in a fury that night from something especially ruining he said there in my living room.

I see them now with a passing sinking heartsickness of all the desperate sadness I felt then.

I see them now and hate the way he led me to wreck myself.

:

in all the months since january that c has seen my legs bared, he has not asked where those marks came from. sometimes he knows my answers without asking, and I don't think he feels a need to hear this explanation aloud.

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the return of this note means little to me now but this: sometimes things are just mistakes. privations are privations and you cut your losses and move on.

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