A letter I will never send
I hope you keep making mistakes. Keep leaving people to vomit on subway platforms. Good-naturedly misrepresent yourself to women until your narcissistic fear of rejection becomes the narcissistic certainty of insult granting license to retaliate. I hope you get to pretend, well past a reasonable age, that restricting your aggression to the passive kind is somehow virtuous, that it successfully masks the harm you cause as boyish floundering. It wasn't innocuous. You pretended to listen and then blamed me for falling for it. Given that we were intimate, given the arduous process of learning to trust, that defensive blame was a betrayal. More directly: I wasn't fucking money-obsessed, I was hurt that you decided right from the start that who I was didn't fucking matter, that it wouldn't be a big deal to invent a terminally selfless, emotionally self-sufficient Florence Nightingale figure to take my place so you would never have to look at me. I hope you never change, because if you did, I would have to live with the fact that I helped you.
revised:
I hope you continue to leave distressed people on subway platforms to vomit alone. Halfway through every relationship, I hope your fear of rejection transmutes into the perception of insults that warrant retaliation. I hope you get to pretend, well past a reasonable age, that passive aggression is a virtuous alternative. I'd prefer that you never learn to take accountability for the way you misrepresent yourself. Keep pretending to listen so you can blame women for demanding too much of you as soon as they begin to feel safe enough to ask.
Given that we were intimate, given the arduousness of learning to trust, the way you blamed me for my own sadness was a betrayal. More directly: I wasn't a money-obsessed basic bitch or a childlike, attention-seeking ward. People seldom are. I was hurt to find out you had invented a terminally selfless Florence Nightingale fantasy to spare you the effort of ever having to see me. (When this happens again, I hope you successfully convince yourself that she is the manipulator, not you, and that you hold no responsibility for faking interest in a future.) I wish you ease in comfortably reducing everything you say to "the abstract" when convenient. I hope you never change because I would hate to know that I've helped you. And if you bother responding to this with more insults, know that my aim in writing it isn't to insult you, but to finally express myself, and that the only reason I didn't say any of this sooner is that I was afraid to be willfully misunderstood again; I was not about to give you carte blanche to total my self esteem at a vulnerable moment. I realize now that my tendency to stay silent out of fear was pretty telling, and that this was never the kind of relationship I wanted, just the only kind I thought I could have. That's something I still need to work through. Good luck with your healing.