after “Love Letter” by Diane Seuss

Dear X,

        I’ve learned you so well, like a dog-eared book read once too often. Repeated lines keep coming back to haunt me. But what can love be if it is a past tense event? I think the expression might be love’s lost or something of that nature. To my way of thinking, the affection you were after was a well-hidden secret—furtive and feral, frothing at the mouth, baring its fangs right up to the gum line. I am on guard now that I can recognize unlove—if that is the expression—always on the lookout for an illusive helpmeet of the forgiving sort. When I was younger, even before you came galloping into my life, I thought romance was the key—fishnet stockings and slinky lingerie on my part, the guy doused in Brut cologne, watching wrestling on TV pressed together on the basement hide-a-bed—sweating like a cold Bud with buttered popcorn on the side, my blonde hair brushed to a tousle, falling like a curtain over one eye, my manicured nails gently stroking the dude’s forearm, arranging my body just so, one foot tucked under my bum the way I’d seen in the movies, my voice modulated to a hoarse Billie Eilish throb—breathy and breathless at the same time. By the time you found me, I realized I wasn’t trying to fool anybody, at least I wasn’t succeeding. You weren’t Heathcliff or the warmed-over nerd from Donnie Darko either. You were dangerous and sexy in the bookish way that I imagined my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Finley, was. My girlfriend and I used to pass notes under his door until he almost died of a peptic ulcer and didn’t return for the rest of the year. How we envied his wife until that happened. I haven’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover since sixth grade. I don’t remember how I got a hold of that book but I do remember thinking that the gamekeeper wasn’t much of a lover if he couldn’t handle a woman’s orgasm without whinging like a toddler. I bet you haven’t read that book either. I wanted a real man and thought you were it! Read my lips, love doesn’t conquer anything, except maybe the desire to love again. My mother thought my father was a real man. And promised to love him to eternity until she met her true love in her fifties, only to have him die twenty-five years later when she met her third true love and he kicked the bucket well into his nineties. My dad wrote a sentimental poem about newborn me being a queen—that was before my mom and I came home from the hospital and my dad realized babies were a lot of work and probably not worth the effort. The only thing you proved good at was stifling. You remind me of my dad. Over and over again you’ve slammed on the brakes, just short of smashing into a guardrail. You believe in an unfaithful god, Old Testament most likely, love writ large in vanishing ink—reactivated with heat, tears and a dash of lemon juice. You love like a penitent on a quest for sainthood, small sins pile up until you confess and all is forgiven. You suffocated any love I had to give. I loved you like a pauper begging for coins. I regret to say that I was still expecting the romance novel kind of love—kiss me until my lips burn, squeeze and release, rip me and I’ll leave claw marks on your back. Love me until it hurts. But now I’m done, no longer wedged between regret and forgiveness. The lesson might have been worth the cost. This is your love letter, 

Dear John.