Your play brother is a liar.
I know I said he wouldn’t lie to you, but don’t listen to me. I’m a soft gut people love to rip open, as if there’s something about that underbelly skin they have radar for—the way it doesn’t armor up against them, perhaps, the way they can sink deliciously deep, the gasping dark of the blood that runs out, the metal of it thick and victorious in their noses. I don’t know; you’d have to ask him. He lied to me for months, a deceit that grew exponential and swollen. This is not a letter about that. This is a letter about me—all these letters are about me—but this is a particular me, standing with loops of my own viscera staggering and sliding over my shocked hands, watching him cry as he leaves my apartment, his right arm slick with my blood, up to his elbow.
It hurts so much, Eugene. The grief attacks me indiscriminately. It scrambles through my bamboo blinds in the mornings—the ones he put up—and presses me into my pillows, weighing me down with morning light and the confusion of waking up into a world where, for one heartbreaking moment, I’ve forgotten what happened. Remembering is the death of mercy. Sometimes it comes at night, when I realize how gone he is, when his ghost kneels blindfolded at the edge of my bed. I send ragged voicenotes into my phone and my friends try to hold me as best they can from the distance that splits us apart. I try not to cry too loudly, in case the neighbors hear, but this is Brooklyn. They probably don’t care. I wonder what my apartment’s sound track is like from the outside: gospel music, hoarse sobbing, The Great British Baking Show, the soft roar of the air conditioner, silence, an injured god keening have mercy, have mercy while the stovetop hisses soft blue fire under a copper pan. I take my anxiety meds to stave off the panic attacks, and to my relief, they work. I change my life because it is different without him in it. He was my family, he is dead, he is literally down the street with her and their baby, he is a ghost painting green leaves on a blush wall in my bedroom. I dissolve our ties. I give my landlord notice that I am leaving this apartment; I don’t tell him it’s haunted. The ghost only targets me, after all; future tenants will be safe. I throw out the material evidence of how I loved him: his toothbrush and toothpaste (he doesn’t like my Sensodyne), the Reese’s cups in my fridge (when he’s sad, he eats junk food), the LED lamp by my daybed (my ceiling light was too dim for his work). I rip up notes and ticket stubs and sketches on random notebook paper. I don’t burn them or drown them or do anything particularly meaningful with them. I just throw it all in the trash and put it out on the street. I am just cleaning.
There are a slew of emotions that come tangled up in grief, that invade when a person you love dies that halfway death—the kind where they’re still walking around with an audacity of a body, while simultaneously existing as a ghost that shows up in corners of your house and makes you cry. One of them is sadness, another is loss, another is relief. I was glad to be free of him, this love that would not take me but would not let me go. Another was hope: the edges of another life that could be clear and honest and, perhaps most of all, brave. The night he was at my place confessing his lies, after I screamed and wept and fought the urge to throw glass, he asked me what he could do to make amends for the harm he’d inflicted on me. I asked him for three things: the first was to get help and the second was to send me the art he owed me. That made me think of you and me outside the hotel, teasing him about what he owes us, the way you smelled when I hugged you goodbye, the sudden sharpness with which I always want you, since that first dinner in the booth, these fine blades of desire piercing me in a thousand places.
Then I smiled at him, his hands in mine, and I asked for the third thing. “Eugene,” I joked. He nodded, teary-eyed, as if it would save him. “I will,” he said. He knew that’s not what I was asking; you are no one’s to give except yours. I just wanted your play brother to give his blessings if you ever had reason to need them, whether you asked or not. I know how ridiculously presumptuous this sounds, but I always worried that you’d assassinate a chance of anything between us out of loyalty to him. You have to understand, he and I had talked about it quite a bit, what you and I would be like together; he’d just mentioned that you might be ending things with the dreamskin woman. Ignore me, I’m spinning worlds again, a silver story out of faint threads. This is still a dream where you want me back. I’m writing this letter because I want you to know the truth about why I left him and what he did to me, and I’d rather tell you now than relive it later. You don’t have to do anything. None of us do.
When I asked him for that, I was afraid. Standing there with my intestines slipping down my legs and a joke in my mouth, I was afraid that he would not only break my heart but also take the sliver of this dream into the back and blow its brains out. I hoped, instead, that he might tell you what he once told me—how he thought you and I might fit well together, how he saw potential for care there, how he thinks I’d challenge you. I have no idea what he’s capable of anymore. Neither do you, trust me—lovers see a different set of knuckles than the ones you dap. Or don’t trust me. I’m no prophet, just a believer with a regenerating underbelly.
I wondered if you knew the whole time, if you were in on it, smiling to my face at the last dinner while I sat next to him, still holding a love I didn’t know had turned on me. What else could you do but be loyal and hold his secrets? Does it mean a bullet to this dream? Maybe this dream needs to be put down anyway. We don’t talk about how stories can be used as drugs enough, highs to disappear into. That doesn’t mean it’s not real.
I tell him I forgive him. I write him a letter and all it does is look him straight in the face, even though I know how much he hates it when I do that. It feels strange to read my last letter to you. I can see so much hesitation in it, such a fear of hurting him with this desire. For the first few days, my grief cuts through desire’s throat, leaving it exsanguinated. It becomes hard for me to imagine wanting someone who still loves him after what he did to me—which is ironic, because I still love him, even after what he did to me. I guess what I’m saying is that I can’t imagine you holding him accountable for the harm he caused. I believe you look up to him, and I wonder how many of his failings you see. Maybe more than I did. I’ve heard how you talk about your boys; the devotion is thick and heavy there. I remember sitting in the car listening to the stories about helping each other unlearn toxic behavior, but I wonder what your protocol is for when your boys harm others. I wonder if you’ve harmed women, or entities like me, and how you handle accountability. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound judgmental. I genuinely don’t know y’all like that, and it’s not my business. I would protect my family too, I just . . . I thought he would protect me.
I think I’m writing this letter because I want someone from his world to be a witness to what happened, to what it did to me.
You don’t know me either. All I do is shape a hologram of you out of words, project you into these letters. You’ve barely met me; you’ve loved him for almost half your life. But don’t mind me, you are an entire person beyond what even he sees of you, beyond a few conversations I overheard. I’m just a gutted god—a small Prometheus under siege from shape-shifting eagles. I swear, I did not expect your play brother to turn into one of them.
I’m forgiving him because I don’t have time to hold a grudge, because I see how fear and cowardice have a chokehold on him, because there is no penance he could perform that would bring him more suffering than what he’s doing to himself. I say this with all the tenderness I ever held him with. I forgive him because I believe in his rehabilitation, should he ever choose it, although I don’t think he will. I don’t think he will, and it feels so absolute, so ruined and final. But I found the space to write you this letter in forgiving him. I still want him to be loved, I wonder if it helps to have people who see him the way I used to, as someone better than he is. I wonder if he can live up to it instead of wearing it as a mask. I wonder what you will do, but you don’t have to do anything, and you certainly don’t have to tell me any of it.
I did everything I could.
Through my grief, I inhale this as fact, like it can hold my lungs together. I loved him past common sense. I loved him like a god does, as if I could not die, with worlds living and expiring in my mouth. I don’t have time for mourning, but my God, how mourning makes time for me. In an older story, I would have thought I could’ve done something better, something different. I would have painted myself as unlovable, as if that would explain why these devastations migrate so brutally into my chest. He’s at least the third man I’ve loved who’s tried to teach me how much I was worth with one hand, while hurting me with the other. I learn fast, though. I wonder if they think I won’t apply these lessons to them, if they’re surprised when I do.
Your play brother was a good teacher. He helped me see myself—he would tell me how soft I am, how tender and open, he would say it with wonder in his voice, looking at me like I was a sun he would willingly let blind him. But then he went ahead and eviscerated me anyway, and it was so easy. It was so easy, Eugene, for precisely those reasons, my ready pulp. You cannot begin to imagine how many times I’ve been broken open, spilled on someone’s floor, left with their greedy handprints seared all over my exposed and panicking heart. But look, this time, I’m not bothering to knit things back together. I don’t want to change. There will be no hastily manufactured armor, no walls thrown up around my heart. This letter is a piece of that. I am exhausted. I am a split fruit, leaking sweetness. I am a fucking god. I still want you, delicate gold on your chest, thick ink on your knuckles, I still want to drip down your hands. I still want you in my mouth, velvet and salt. Perhaps that, too, is part of the grief. It’s not a bad way to look for life when surrounded by half-deaths and ghosts.
This sorrow spills large like dark rainbow oil: that we live in a world where being loved is more terrifying than not, where your play brother could do this to me—to me—because it hurt him too much to be seen. I wish the world had been gentler with all of us.
I wrote this because I thought you might understand something of how this is such a dying for me. I just wanted to be his friend, Eugene, but he broke things so completely that there’s no way I can put them back together. Anyone who can make worlds that well can destroy them just as easily. I miss him like I lost one of my senses. It will pass, with time, but I wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know the truth, even if just for the sake of a dream. I wanted to give you more than he gave me. You are beautiful enough for that.
Thank you for listening.