Thing is, you stuck out so clearly in September that I find it hard to think I could have met you earlier and not remembered. You had this glow about you, this very “Arwen in ‘Lord of the Rings’” aura (and yes, I made a LOTR reference…I don’t have to see your furrowed brow, so I can slip one last one in). Wasn’t so much how you looked (tattered jeans, black sweater over white tank top), but how you carried yourself. Moreover, how you carried yourself to me. Shoulder towards my body, space invaded, eyes attentive. All towards me. Made me feel interesting, funny, like I was the only one there. You did this thing with your hair, and it just...

Played it as cool as I could, but thing is, I get these crushes pretty fast. You seemed to know it. You’ve always known it. Known my type. So easy to get the attention you want, all you gotta do is give guys like me the attention we need. Little investment for a large return. You’d do well as a venture capitalist. I’d take a few tips from you in that arena. About the only advice I’d take from you know. In business, you need a cold heart, and that’s what you’ve got.

OK, that’s a bit crass, a bit cold, but I said I wouldn’t mark this up with eraser marks. Promised myself that. Gonna let what comes out, come out. Haven’t had the chance before. Bottled up inside like a shaken Coke bottle. Might get a bit messy. Prose a little tattered. I’d apologize, but I won’t. Done enough of that for things I never should have felt sorry about.

I used to play this game, you see. The whole time I knew you, I’d play this game. It went a bit like this: you’d do something completely nuts, insane, off your rocker, and then I’d go and justify it somehow in a way that prevented me from booting you out of my atmosphere. Heck, I’d even go and tell close friends about what you’d done. The bizarre emails. The odd phone calls. The mixed signals. Tell everyone in the world just to get a puzzled/befuddled/exasperated look and a “What are you thinking?” But then I’d retreat again, figuring that I was only telling them the negative, that I was painting an incomplete picture, that there were all these amazing things about you as well that I couldn’t express, I just knew.

And knew that outweighed the weirdness, the inconsistency, the…well, all the times you hurt me. Hurt me bad.

Yea, you hurt me. I think you knew it, too. You played it cool, but I think on some level, that was the point. I’m hardly alone in my role, just as you’re one and many in yours. We assume these intertwined and interdependent roles concurrently. There can be no one without the other. Symbiotic dance of emotions. The pursued, the pursuer. One seeks to be chased, one seeks to chased. Thing is, the former wishes the chase to be infinite, the other pretends that the chase has an end.

I was never much in the way of flesh and blood to you, I think. I’d love to say I know, but, as you undoubtedly know, I’m not the smahtest cah to pahk in Hahvid Yahd. Just this guy who was perfect for what you needed. You needed to be adored, and I’m really freakin’ good at adoring. Form and function. You need X, you run out and get Y. In this case, I was your Y. I just don’t quite know why.

Maybe you know me better than I know myself. Maybe I’ve got some sign above my head. Maybe there’s some magazine subscription that pinpoints guys like me. (Hell, there’s a magazine for everything else, why not eh?) Something in you lasered in on that part of me that summer/autumn night and recognized that I could be, for lack of a more romanticized word, useful to you.

Utility is, sadly, the key the game here. Not romance. Not friendship. None of that old-fashioned stuff. See, here I was, stuck in this wacky notion that we were forming some sort of relationship, when in fact what we were forming was a unidirectional support service for one.

If you wanted something---a beer, a late dinner, a 30-minute phone call, it was always to fulfill a need you had at that particular moment. That need could not be fulfilled, however, in a vacuum. Just as I needed external validation for my problems with you, you needed external assurance that you were still pretty/sexy/intelligent/name your positive trait so forth and so on down the line. Course, I was more than happy to tell you what you wanted to hear. Happy because I meant it. Because I felt it. Easy to tell the truth. Easiest thing in the world.

And as long as those were just words streaming from my lips, everything was great. But no hand holding. No overlong hugs. No chance of eyes meeting mere inches from each other. No, no. Adoration from a distance. The distance across a dinner table can seem like miles given the circumstance. God knows I know that for a fact.

You’d take all my compliments and smile, and that smile killed me. God, it killed me. Melted through every damn defense I had built up from our last encounter. Again, I think you knew it, too. Got you out of a lot of jams. Made me look pretty bad at work the next day when they heard we’d hung out again. I didn’t care. I knew what they didn’t.

Course, that’s a lie, and that lie ends with this letter. You may not have even thought about me for the last few months. I wasn’t so keen on consistently lifting your spirits, when your spirits were so obviously uninterested in mine. I’d like to pinpoint the exact date in which our relationship ended, but really, it never really began. Not even in a “we never dated” way, cuz God knows I have no illusions about that. See, thing is, call me crazy, but when I think about relationships, I think about two people investing some amount into each other. It’s not always equal, and that’s why relationships of all kinds fail. Ours was a different kid of failure. I sat at the table and anted up; you stayed at the bar and asked me if you looked fat in that skirt.

I didn’t want to fill a pressing need; I wanted to be your friend. Maybe more, sure, but we never got out of the starting gate, so why bother on that? More than at your beck and call. More than waiting and hoping for an email or an IM or a phone call, cuz any of those meant you really, really needed me and I could leap in and save the day and you’d love me.

And yea, there we are, back at the beginning. Someone hit an emotional reset button when I wasn’t looking.

Always felt like it was a test. A series of steps. And you’d see what I could be, and that’s what you’d want. Never turned out the way, tho. You took and took and took and, well, the tank ran dry. So you found a new tank, I suppose. The emails, the calls, all more infrequent. Then, just in reply to something I’d send to you, with a little bit of the remaining self-respect oozing out with each “Send”. Then, nothing from your end. Finally, I’d just stare at your screen name and sigh a bit.

So here I am, months later, and I still have to exorcise you through this letter. Not sure if it will work, but it will have to work better than my lame attempts near the sputtering end of our symbiosis. The time apart makes it easier, day by day, for certain. But there are nights when I can see your green eyes behind my eyelids when I go to sleep, and I’m right back where I started.

I want to be free of you. Free of all of this. I could have been great for you. And you might have been great for me. Probably not, I think. A nice thought. Might be wrong. All academic in the end, anyways. You’re gone.

But still right here. Your smile was the warmest coat I’d ever worn. As the autumn air fills the New England skies, though, I’m left a bit chilly these days. It’d be nice to be warm. I think I deserve to be warm.

Enough cold days.

Enough.