10/05/26

Hello dearest, 

I have been trying to figure out how to tell you this without making you sound cruel, which is probably my biggest mistake. You are not cruel, at least not in the ways that would make this easy. 

You are very good at loving. Exceptional, even. I have always admired this about you. You know how to make someone feel chosen. I’ve seen you surrender the better piece, the easier hour, the warmer side of the world. You make devotion look effortless. I love that you remind me that I am loved. You give yourself completely to a person and never call it sacrifice. Maybe that’s why I thought you were kind.

It took me a long time to notice the other side of you. The way you speak of people whose names mean nothing to you. The way a stranger’s suffering becomes an inconvenience the moment it crosses your path. The way you can lie without the slightest tremor if the truth happens to stand between you and what you want. You never seem ashamed of yourself. Sometimes I envy you for that. Sometimes I despise you. I have watched you do terrible things with the same hands that once tucked a blanket beneath my chin. 

Distinctly, I remember the night we heard about Oliver’s mother. Someone said it out loud at the table…cancer…two weeks…gone…and everyone went quiet. On instinct, I looked for your reaction. I watched as you took it in the way you take in the weather. Light rain. A little inconvenient. Nothing worth opening an umbrella for. I hate you for this. There. I have declared it. There are cruelties I cannot make beautiful simply because they came from you. And the terrible thing is, you never seem to care that you have done anything terrible. Perhaps this is what frightens me the most: not the knife, but the absence of blood on your hands. 

I think this is what makes you so difficult to forgive. If you were empty, I could leave you alone. If you were only cruel, I could hate you cleanly. 

But alas, I have had the misfortune of experiencing your affection. You are tender in all the ways tenderness can be learned. I have watched you give and give until the person beside you forgot there was ever anything they wanted. And then I have watched you turn away from someone hurting because their pain was not yours to carry. Tell me, what makes one sorrow sacred and another disposable? Who taught you where the border goes? Who told you that love must have a name before it is worthy of mercy? I want to tear that lesson out of you. I want to leave you standing in the world without your little kingdom, without your chosen few, without the comfort of knowing exactly whose suffering is allowed to matter. I want you to feel it all. And then I hate myself for wanting that. Because what kind of mercy is it to wish suffering upon someone in the name of teaching them how to suffer? So I stand here, still loving you, which feels sometimes like a moral failure. Still admiring you, which feels even worse. Still thinking you are cruel. 

You tell me it isn’t cruelty if you never meant to hurt them. You tell me remorse is only useful if it changes what you do. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps this is simply how a good person can exist without feeling good. I just don’t understand how you can watch someone break and feel nothing, when I can barely watch a bird hit a window without carrying it with me for the rest of the day. 

Sometimes I think your heart is not a heart at all, but a house with perfect rooms, each one furnished for a particular person. There is no room for the uninvited. Perhaps that is wisdom. Perhaps I am the fool, forever setting another plate at a table that was never mine. Still, I cannot understand how a thing can be precious only after it has been loved. Does the sea require a witness before it is deep? Does the dying star need someone waiting to make its disappearance a tragedy? Does a stranger’s blood become redder once we learn their name? You would say no. I know you would. And I still want you to feel that answer. 

I have tried to convince myself that compassion must have limits, that no heart can contain every sorrow it encounters. But I do not think you have limits. I think you have borders. And I think you know exactly who is allowed inside. There are people you would die for. There are people you would hurt without losing sleep. And there is almost nothing in between. 

That is the part I cannot forgive. Because I know you are capable, I’ve seen it firsthand. You wake at three in the morning and walk twenty minutes in the cold to be with me when I forgot to be alone. I have seen you surrender the better half of everything for me. So when you tell me you cannot understand why someone else’s pain should matter to you, I want to shake you. I want to tell you that a life does not become sacred when you decide to love it. That the dead bird beneath the hedge does not need your name to have been alive. That the woman crying on the train does not need to be yours to deserve sympathy. That somewhere, someone is losing everything and there is no reason you should care, except that they are human. 

God, it is misery to plead humanity from you. I’m not asking you to love everyone. I don’t even know if I believe that is possible. I only want you to look beyond the borders of your little kingdom and recognize that there are lives you did not choose that are still lives. I want you to be haunted by something that has nothing to do with you. 

There are nights when I imagine breaking every window in that house of a heart of yours to let everything but the cold come through. The dead, the nameless, the unchosen. All the little lives you have never had a reason to love. I imagine them standing in your rooms. I imagine you are finally unable to close the door. And then I imagine you taking off your coat and putting it around the shoulders of the first person who shivers. 

I hate that I know you would. 

I hate that I know you wouldn’t ask their name. 

I hate that this is enough to make me want to stay. 

Yours, somehow (always).