This is Not a Love Letter

To the boy I never loved, 

You walked over, reached in my car, and shook my hand. Then it was over. The last time I saw you.

*

It’s been eight years since that handshake. I was driving home from teaching high school students geometry, which was going just about how you would imagine. I was stopped behind a line of cars, mildly dissociating from my fatigue and frustration. And there you were, walking down the sidewalk. You were with a girl. I remember the shock I felt, finally running into you. 

Without thinking, I rolled down my window and said your full name, out loud. You looked over, your face a mirror of my surprise. After a few seconds, you shook my hand through the car window. You may have also said my name, maybe we exchanged a greeting, but I only remember the handshake – an odd gesture after everything and the long years of silence. I was pulling forward and you stayed where you were. I imagine you leaned close to the girl you were with and said something like, I went to high school with her. Maybe that encapsulated your memory of me. 

We never did know what to call each other, never defined what we were to each other, who we were together. Over the years, I’ve occasionally looked for evidence that anything ever existed between us. Did I imagine everything? Almost no pictures ever taken, texts long lost to the ether, the few gifts received tossed away years ago. 

My search for our shared past mostly failed, as have my investigations into your present. By today’s standards, you are a ghost. I did manage to scrape together a tenuous picture of your life now: you still live in our hometown, and I think you work on cars. That makes me happy. I can still picture the freakishly accurate free-hand drawings of car engines, inked on scraps of notebook paper, you used to slip in my backpack. I’m glad you’re doing what you always loved. 

I see our relationship in flashes, moments out of order and loosely stitched together in my mind. 

Sitting on the grass in the school courtyard, worried what other people would be thinking. We were not exactly on the same social footing, and I knew it. Maybe you did too, but you didn’t seem to care what people thought. I was still figuring out how much I did. 

Riding bikes in your neighborhood, convincing me to jump in the pool with you. Pedaling back to your house slowly, letting the slight breeze dry us off, soggy and happy. 

Driving out to the beach, a secluded spot I’d never heard of. Like a secret between us. I watched you hop from pylon to pylon, the wreckage of an old pier your jungle gym. Scared you would fall, in awe of your fearlessness. 

Meeting in the school parking lot for an early morning run, the Florida rain and our feet pounding the asphalt. We ran in the dark, no one else around. My heart rate high from the exercise, and you, so close. 

My mom, confused when I came home drenched: “Why did you still go for a run, it’s pouring?” I laughed it off, rushing upstairs to shower and avoid further questions. I could skirt the truth, but I didn’t lie to my parents. I’ve always been a bad liar.

Except with myself. I lied, pretending that this wasn’t a big deal. We never had a label or officially dated. Hell, we never even kissed. I wanted to, though I never admitted it. I wasn’t supposed to want that. I was supposed to be waiting, focusing on God. 

We never really talked about God, so I assumed you weren’t into it. I needed someone “equally yoked,” so we couldn’t take anything further. You and me, we were just hanging out. At most, you were my teenage rebellion. How serious could it be? 

Serious enough, it turns out, that at thirty years old I am still thinking about a boy I knew when I was seventeen. Serious enough that I have had more than one dream about you in the past few years. Serious enough that I felt my only option back then was to explode the relationship, before we were ever truly in one. Serious enough that I still regret what we never had.  

This is not a love letter. I didn’t love you, because I didn’t know how. You were someone I cared about during a formative time in my life, but it wasn’t love. And that was never your fault. You were a uniquely remarkable person – kind, brilliant, curious, open, and unapologetic about who you were in a way teenagers almost never can be. What happened between us in the end had nothing to do with who you were or weren’t. It was always about me.

So that’s who this letter should be addressed to. To the version of me who existed when we were whatever we were, and to the person I wish I could have been. The person that I’m pretty sure you could see in me, even though it would take me years to believe she could exist. 

It’s time I write that letter. 

*

To the girl who couldn’t love, 

I’m mad at you, E. At your coldness, your pride, your concern for everyone else’s opinions. I’m embarrassed of how caught up you were in proving yourself to others, making sure everyone knew how smart and impressive you were. I hate the rigid world you created for yourself and imposed on others. I hate the walls you built around yourself, between the different parts of yourself.  

I’m ashamed of how callously you ended things with him. You thought only of how you could be right, how you could avoid doing and being wrong. You used your Christian beliefs to shield yourself from having to confront the truth with him or with yourself. 

I don’t think you would be proud of who I am today. 

You ended a relationship with someone for “not being in the same place with our faith,” a faith I have not professed in over five years. I’m now someone you would have prayed for. I’m someone you would have judged. 

I recently re-read journal entries from that time while visiting my parents. I had just had another dream about him, and I went looking. For data, evidence, answers. For what the hell you had been thinking.

I found the journals on a shelf in my childhood bedroom, forgotten between old high school English books and trinkets from family vacations. No two looked alike: some were thick, covering whole years of my adolescence, while others recorded no more than a few months. Some had plain covers, others were elaborate floral or geometric designs. Even the handwriting looked different between the journals: evidence of a girl trying to find her style. Find herself. 

They were hard to read. 

You used to write every journal entry as a prayer, or, I guess, kind of like a letter. Letters to a God who never seemed within reach. A God you feared was always displeased and disappointed by your level of faithlessness and lack of zeal. A God you endlessly tried to figure out how to win over.

I notice a pattern in these entries over the years. You would write most consistently during the times you were stressed, confused, needing an outlet. I pieced together a hazy timeline of your adolescent happiness: your months of silence must have meant you were living your life, less consumed by the guilt and fear and panic that accompanied the doubts that always crept back in. Unsurprisingly, one of the longest stretches of silence was when you were with him. 

When I read beneath the writing steeped with “Christian-ese,” I see a different story. And my heart breaks. Not for the relationship lost, but for you. For the way you had been taught to mistrust your desires, call them sinful, and reject them. For the belief you carried that your stress was a symptom of your sin, rather than that of an anxiety disorder. For the reality that the only coping tool you had was religion, when you really needed a therapist.  

I cannot have what I want: a do-over, another chance to be seventeen and fall in love with a boy, to feel the heartbreak that comes from loving and losing, not the heartbreak of losing before loving at all. I wish you had been brave enough to say yes to what made you happy and terrified you at the same time. I wish you had trusted enough in your own resilience to be honest about your feelings, even if that meant risking the catastrophe of a broken heart. Perhaps, pain would have been easier to reconcile than regret. 

I want to be someone who can love even when it involves risk. And loving you, this part of me I want to forget, feels fucking risky. Because I don’t want to admit the ways we are the same: I still want to be right, I still care what others think, I’m still afraid all the time. 

The beliefs are easier to discard than the self-hatred. 

But hating you would also be hating me, and one of the reasons I left the church in the first place was not wanting to be told I had to hate parts of myself. I didn’t want to believe redemption had to be bought with violence. 

I can now see you were doing the best you could, operating within a framework designed to keep you small, scared, and obedient. I want to love you, and me, enough to grow into someone we’re both proud of.

So maybe, after all, this is a love letter. 
-Elizabeth Woods

Elizabeth Woods is a psychotherapist and writer living in Nashville, TN. Elizabeth’s writing explores themes of religion, meaning, chronic pain, healing, and community. Elizabeth shares a home with her husband and their many houseplants. When she’s not working or writing, you can find Elizabeth cooking for friends, reading on her porch, or getting out of the city and onto some hiking trails.