there was a time before I left the town we called home where I would visit you every day, repeatedly approaching you with a proposition to leave with me and never come back. you, being afraid of any change were always so quick to change the subject and it took all of my self-control not to scream at you “do you not love me?” over and over and over until the words were echoes in your head and then maybe you would listen to them. but I never did and that was what I congratulated myself on every morning I stood patiently on your doorstep, and every single **** time I left, I told myself what a wondrous person I was thinking only of you…knowing you wanted that and needed that because you were a self-centered hole and I was a gift basket. after a while I stopped visiting and then eventually I was gone and you were more than a memory but less than my past. the first few months we wrote letters twice a week and I congratulate us on that also because it meant we were taking time out of our lives to think of each other, and it did take time because your letters would be pages and pages long. but it couldn’t last forever and I wasn’t surprised when it became once a week and then once every two weeks and then by the tenth month of us writing letters I hadn’t gotten one from you for two months. so I sent back one letter on one piece of paper, cardstock, with one word spelt out in my best calligraphy with a pen my new boyfriend had bought me…I wrote goodbye and sent that letter to you. I’m hoping you realize that by me spending time writing that goodbye I still care about you, I still want you to think of me as a decent person and not awful ex you couldn’t stand. I don’t want your tongue and breath to go bitter when you say my name because someone who is not a close friend has asked of my whereabouts and you have to answer. I don’t want that but I suppose if that’s how you feel then I cannot change that mind of yours, because I’ve never been able to before. you are stubborn and I do not miss seeing you but I miss the sound of your easy breathing as we lay watching a movie. my new boyfriends breathing is too harsh and we do not watch movies we only *****. I guess it’s nice when he’s sleeping but he never wants to hold me “I’m too hot” is what he always tells me, trying to cover it up with a lilt in his voice like he means it as a compliment when I know he’s very serious. I don’t want you back so don’t think that to be the reason I’ve wrote you back after so long. I just happened along a shoebox full of these things and it made me wonder and it made me cry but I never felt fuller than when I covered that box in gasoline, lit it, and watched in burn fast in the parking lot of my new ex-boyfriends yard.