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But then what do I do when he finally realizes it wasn’t real, not for him—that I’ll never be enough to replace her, and the void in him she left behind?
What do I do when I’m left to wander alone in this desert place?
“Fuck it,” I mutter, and grab my phone. I let my fingers fly and hit send before I can second-guess myself.
I’m scared of losing you too, but this is what I need right now.
As soon as I hit send, I regret it.
What happened to icing him out?
It’s just the truth… a small truth, I tell myself. It doesn’t change anything.
Maybe now he’ll finally listen and stop trying to bridge the distance.
I don’t wait around for a response. Or to see if he reads it. Unlike me, he doesn’t care about that sort of thing, and leaves his read receipts on.
Powering my phone off, I toss it on the floor, roll over, bury my face in my pillow.
And I let myself cry for the first time in years.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Dear Izzy,
Izzy,
So I don’t really know how to start this. Cleo, my therapist, thought it might be a good idea for me to write you a goodbye letter. So here goes nothing.
Truth is, I’m terrified that you’re still out there, waiting for someone to save you. I don’t know if I’ll ever not wonder if they got it wrong.
But when I really do sit down and imagine what’s going through YOUR head, out there, wherever you are—if you aren’t dead, that is… I realize, no… you’re not waiting to be saved. You’d be saving yourself. You’d be fighting with everything you have to survive.
And you would agonize over what losing you has done to us. You’d want us to move on. You’d want us to be happy. Because if it was me… that’s what I’d want for you too.
I love you, Iz. So much. I’ll always love you. For infinity. You were my partner in crime. My first taste of love. I don’t know who I’d be if you didn’t bulldoze your way into being my friend as kids. Because of you, I have a brother. Waylon. And to some degree, because of you, I have Jeremy too. Because even though I met him first… who knows if it would have amounted to anything, if not for you inviting me over that day and insisting we’d all be friends from then on out. Just like that.
Perhaps, that’s part of why I’ve had such a hard time with all of this. With these feelings and doubts that I can no longer run away from, not without continuing to hurt myself and the people I love.
Letting go feels like a betrayal. Like I’m letting you down, after all you’ve given me. Which makes me wonder…
I know this letter is supposed to be about saying goodbye, but I think the only way I can do that and fully move on is if I’m honest with you, and myself, for the first time in my life.
Sometimes, especially lately, I wonder if the love I had for you was as intense and deep as it appeared.
For years I’ve been shoving these doubts down. Loving you harder and harder, with each day you were gone, until it became this really unhealthy thing. I hurt people because of it. Because I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that I had doubts about us. Doubts about a lot of things. That I had started to question it all right before you were taken.
It’s been a tough pill to swallow. But I’m also older now… years older than you, if you are in fact dead…and it’s impossible not to look back now and see how young we were. How naive.
It’s also impossible not to acknowledge now how different I was with you. I held back a lot. I don’t know if you suspected, or knew I kept things from you, like my anxiety and my panic attacks and my abandonment issues. But I never gave all of me to you, despite loving you as much as I was capable of back then. I just wanted to be strong for you. I wanted to be someone worthy of you.
There’s so much deconstructing I’ve had to do lately. So much reflecting and healing. So I guess that’s where all this is coming from. And why I finally feel ready to confront some things head on.
For one, I think I might be bisexual.
I’m also pretty sure I’m into your brother.
We kissed. Twice. First, in a drunk, emotional mess when I broke my sobriety a couple months ago, because I’d finally accepted I had to move on. And then again a couple weeks ago, when I was sober, when he told me it wasn’t real… just biology. Just me being hard up.
