I don’t know what to do and I have no one to talk to, but I have this, and my memory of you, and it’s probably my best bet. And I promise, no matter how long it goes on, I will keep it vague enough to the point where when I call you grad school guy, you could not possibly tell which one I mean. Because there’s two. The first one lasted for nine months, the second one for six. They both had basic four-letter names. They had a lot in common including, eventually, me. But there’s some tragic things they don’t have in common, like only one is alive. And no this isn’t an elaborate confession of murder. I don’t know how you died, I just figured out that you did about two months after it happened. I noticed you weren’t showing up on my Instagram “people you may know” feed like you sometimes did so I Googled your name and your obituary was the first result. I was very sorry to see that. We hadn’t spoken once in over four years, because I realized I could no longer tolerate the extreme degree of your alcoholic behavior, and frankly I should thank God in heaven and my own good fortune that nothing bad ever happened to me because of it, because we both know I came close more than once. Or nothing worse, I should say. Either way, I shouldn’t have just ghosted you. But by that point, to be perfectly candid, I was so fucking over your shit, I didn’t feel like it was so out of line. For example, I paid cash money to bail you out of jail for a second DUI, and then instead of ever paying me back after you’d gotten a job, you bought yourself a PS4 as soon as you could and then complained the PS4 Pro came out like a week later. You never ended up paying me back. It was like $250 but still. I also once accrued a $90 parking ticket because of you, but that was more my fault than anything.

          When I get drunk like this, I think about the only time in my life I’ve been on a casino floor. Words cannot express how happy I was, in that moment, that whole day. It makes me want to fucking vomit, now, thinking about how much it all meant to me. I made my feelings so clear, and still you treated me the way you did. The very fact that you get shitty and defensive the second it’s even implied you treated me shiftily leads me to start to see hints of why your wife left you the way she did. I always knew there was more going on there than I knew, but how would  I ever learn what that was? I just had to hope for the best, which was so stupid of me, but we’re all stupid when we’re falling in love. But I’m even more the fool for having felt that way, aren’t I? God it’s all so fucking embarrassing. I will never know why you made me feel the way you did. But that adage about the deeper your feelings went, the deeper the wound goes is just a little bit too fucking true in this case. You ever just hope bad things happen to a person? But also, you know you’re pathetically weak enough that you’d start talking to him again, if he initiated it? But he would never do that, so you’re kind of safe to do the curse or whatever.

          But now, this all means I am meant to face all of this alone, without help from either of you. I have other friends, but they’re women, and either they’re too busy or I know what they’re going to say, and in all four instances I cannot bring myself to feel like such an adolescent in front them. I’m too near 40. And then, sometimes, I’m like well I’m 38, I probably still have it in me to meet someone else and appeal to them enough to form a long-term relationship. But then, because of the two of you, I’m all why would I possibly ever do that to myself? So the guy can turn out to be an absolute scrub or I can fall in love with the guy and he turns out to be an absolute scrub?

          But, having to explain oneself is so exhausting, I cannot think of how I would do it on a dating app.

          I could write about it in a multi-media kind of way. This is the 10-page email I wrote to his therapist when I realized, far too late, what was happening, again. This is the selfie of my daughter passed out against me while I stayed awake through the entirety of the night at the E.R. at the Detroit Children’s Hospital. This is a DM I answered while waiting in the main floor lobby of Detroit Receiving for the strict visiting hours of the psychiatric care unit. This is the Door Dash gift card I was given as a “thinking of you” gift from one of the other member-owners at the co-op bookstore I had to abruptly leave because I moved with our daughter back to my childhood home a hundred miles away. This is the email I sent the bookstore member-owners as a group, which I’m sure came as a shock to them all. And so on. This is my blog, my last true method of communication. If someone is reading this and thinks they found something, I have bad news, my subscribers get about 10 layers below this, and they know ALL about you.

          -Megan/Cassandra