i saw your ghost

Dear Y:  I hope this letter finds you well.  It's been two years since we've parted.  It was great while it lasted, but then again, it wasn't great enough to last.  All the things that people do to each other - make each other happy, infuriate one another, build up the other person's dream, break each other's heart - I guess we did it all.  I do think about you sometimes.  I am not sure though whether I think about the idea of you, what I've built you up to be in my head, or actually about you the person I was with.  Regardless, whenever I do think of you, whichever version that is, I inevitably wish I were not some messed up person who cannot make things work.  I wish I were that person whom you wanted to stick around for, that person worthy of your trying.  I look at myself in the mirror and wonder if I would ever grow up to be that type of man.  Like someone who makes someone else want to put everything on the line and say, "I am in.  I am all in."  But I know I am not yet that man.  I have too much crap.  I am not nice enough.  I am petty and selfish.  I don't love hard enough.  I hold things too close to the chest.  I am often times inauthentic.  I worry too much about what other people want from me and what they want me to be.  I think you wanted an authentic person to be your life partner.  You thought I tried too hard to say the right thing and do the right thing, but I end up saying and doing all the wrong things because those things I say and do are not real.  There was one fight that we had where you said, "Why do you do that?  Can't you just not be so appeasing?  It's like, the more you try to be likable, the less likable you are."  That comment cut me to the core.  I hated you when you said it.  Not that it wasn't the truth.  But I hated that you thought that of me.  You were supposed to love me and see the best in me.  Being critical of me was my job, not yours.  Maybe that's why it didn't work - because we both saw that me that I didn't like.  Now granted, you had issues too.  I am just saying.  But this is actually not the reason I am writing today.  I am not writing to rehash what went wrong.  I am writing simply because I heard a song today.  My library was playing on shuffle, and it came on.  It was Jose Gonzalez's cover of Hand On Your Heart.  Do you remember what that song meant to us?  Or have I attached too much meaning to it over the years?  It just made me very wistful, like seeing a thousand sunsets, or watching a time lapse of our would-be growing children, or smelling the perfume my mother used to wear when she was young.  So I am writing you this letter to let you know - someone from your past thought of you today.  I don't want anything from you.  I don't need to know about your new life, whom you are loving now, what you last dreamed about last night.  But I think sometimes it's nice to know that even when people aren't together anymore, their ghosts sometimes come floating in and out of each others' lives, just as a reminder.  Today I saw your ghost.  That's all.  Take care, M