Another Open Letter to The Lawyer

So you finally 'fessed up: she's now your girlfriend. I'm not sure when this happened, though I strongly suspect a bit of overlap between when the two of you agreed to that and the last time (or two or three) you left bite marks on my shoulder; but I asked and I'm glad I did, even though I pretty much knew the answer.

And I think it's the right decision for you. I don't know that I'm convinced she's right for you, but you have a ton of history with her and if nothing else you need to work out if it's going to work out or not. More than that, you need to be willing to let someone in. It's been too long. And while she's not necessarily your forever-and-ever, I don't think she's going to do you damage, and for now that may be enough.

It's the right thing for me too. I need clear lines and our whole (small-'r') relationship has been blurred edges. That was never going to change without the influence of some external force - hell, it was barely 48 hours from our 'break-up' to the next time we slept together - and now that force is here, and a not-so-small piece of me is relieved. Also, the less you're in the picture, the more open I am to a certain lovely Chef who treats me like gold and really seems to care about me. She doesn't bait me, she doesn't make fun of the weird way I talk, she doesn't get annoyed with my bouts of homesickness. She calls me a foreigner because she's dated one of those before and the way I feel about Australia reminds her of that. I like that she understands that about me. She says nice things to me and does nice things for me. She likes me the way I am.

But I'll miss you. Not that we won't be friends now - obviously we will. We are. But it will be different. I'll miss the will-we/won't-we charge in the air. I'll miss the way you'd stand just a bit too close to me. I'll miss both of us tasting mint chocolate-chip when we kiss, even though we had eaten nothing remotely sweet or minty. I'll miss spending hours in bed with you doing crosswords and cuddling your dog whom I love so much it hurts. I'll miss the weird chemical spell we seem to cast on the world. And fuck, I'll miss the biting. That's going to be the hardest to avoid: no one does it like you do, and no one lets you do it like I do. We know that's the point of mutual weakness. Oh temptation.

So don't get close enough to me to smell my hair or my perfume; don't wear that shirt I helped you pick out just before Christmas (and if you do, don't tell me you wore it for me); stay far away from me when I'm at the stove. In exchange, I'll be a good girl because trying like fuck to be the good girl is my ground state. I won't show too much skin when you're around; I'll step away if you step too close; I'll make sure at least one of us stays sober enough to have a conscience.

You've told me that you don't want to hear much about my love life, not yet; that's fine because I don't want to hear much about yours yet either. I want awesomeness for you and you want it for me, and we weren't going to have it with each other so it'll have to be with other people. That's as much as we need to know for now. We'll negotiate the tricky path until it's not tricky anymore; there will come a time when I can hang with you and yours and you can hang with me and mine, and I hope for all of our sakes that that time will come quickly but in the meantime we'll cut each other a lot of slack and wait it out.

But I'll probably cry about it a little. I know you hate it when I cry, so don't worry, I won't let you see it. But it'll probably happen. Because while the bad with you was... bad, the good with you was good like nothing I'd ever felt before, and although I figured out weeks ago that the latter wasn't worth the former I still can't help but wish, just a little bit in a tiny corner of my heart, that we could have made it work. We could have had something brilliant together if we weren't both so broken in such similar ways. But we are, and the time has come to be smarter about ourselves and kinder to each other.

I love you, fucker. Now go on, get out of here.


XOXO