Jac

dear ryonnel,

today is the day after your 29th birthday. i hope that you had the birthday to end all birthdays. i hope that you were surrounded by all of the people who love you and you love in return. i pray that you received everything on your wish list and more than what you anticipated. i hope your day was filled with love, passion, peace, and abundance. may this year be the best year of your best years, may you find all that you've ever wanted, all you can hope for, and every good and exquisite thing. while i wish these things for you, my letter is bittersweet.

i am writing this letter to relinquish the negativity, pain, anguish, and disappointment that i have allowed you to usurp over the past seven years. you have no knowledge of this power you've held over me, but i have afforded it to you just the same. i remember many events of our relationship like they were yesterday. sending you letters during the summers i pined for you at home, you telling me you loved me outside the athletic complex. i remember you said it first. your boldness fortified my strength and i said it back. i had never felt so free, so giddy, so emotionally whole. i loved those feelings and i loved you. i remember you bringing frozen chicken, roasts, and steaks from your parents' freezer to my home to cook for you while you had football practice twice a day. you came home to a hot meal. i was never as open as i was with you, never as devoted, never as in love. i thought you loved me in return...i thought. i felt your love in the way you touched me, the way you confided in me, the way you smiled at me. i thought we would be together forever. i understand that many women have this expectation of their first love. i don't look back on our relationship with fondness--with the ability to laugh at my own naivete.

for a long time i have been bitter. i gave you the best parts of me. i bared my person to you and expected the same from you. you didn't simply cheat on me. you lied to me. you were not the man that i thought you were. more importantly, you were not the man you said you were. it is clear to me like it was yesterday. i spent all of thanksgiving moping around my parents' home wondering why you hadn't called. since the summer of my freshman year, we connected with each other on holidays. if we weren't together, we would talk to each other on the phone. when i got back to st. louis, i blew your home phone and pager up. it was a good thing that cell phones weren't as popular, i would have blown that up too. you came over that sunday evening. it was brisk. i remember that most of the trees on my street were orange. i asked you why you didn't call, you told me you were busy. when i questioned you further, you told me that it was my own fault that i expected you to call. we weren't in a relationship. you told me that you "loved" me, but you were never "in love" with me. your words were slowly wrapping around my neck, depriving me of air, of life. my head was swimming. never in all of the time we were together did i ever think that you didn't love me the way your actions told me you did. you told me that you weren't responsible for my assumptions that we were in a relationship. you were never my boyfriend and i was never your girlfriend. funny, you never said these things when you took the key to my apartment. you didn't reject me when i offered my body to you. you didn't tell me that we weren't "more than friends" when we sat in health services waiting for the nurse to bring me a "morning after" pill. it is funny now how our non-relationship was never mentioned in those times.

finally, you told me. it was bridget. from that point on, she was known as "good old bridge" or just "bridge" amongst my group of friends. you had been in a relationship with her the entire time we had been together. of course it's easy to hide a girlfriend that lived in florida. "so see you never could have been my girlfriend. i never would have told you that. i have a girlfriend." those words swam in my head for months after you uttered them. they are still with me now. it's funny. pab told me you had a girlfriend. she told me that she saw her the summer before our freshman year. the night before i left to go home for summer vacation before our sophomore year, i asked you if you had a girlfriend. we had been on the phone for hours, the sun was starting to come up. the dark night was giving way to the bright reds and oranges of daybreak. you told me no.

you told me no.

i proceeded from that moment with abandon. i wanted love, welcomed her, beckoned her into our lives. with your deceitful actions and lies, you perverted the love, trust, commitment,and hope i placed in you. i have continued to suffer as a result. after that, i didn't think i was worthy of loving. i didn't believe that a man would ever willingly choose me. so, i rejected intimacy and embraced sexual relationships. it was easier to give my body than to give of my heart. no more.

this will be the last year that i remember your birthday. i reject your hold over my life. i welcome intimacy, seek it, relish in my ability to share it with another man. i am not ruined, i am not damaged goods. i am a good woman--a damn good woman. i have grown in ways that i am proud of. i am not the same timid naive girl who you used for a home away from home. you are responsible for your actions. you lied. you lied a lot. and what's more, you implicated me in your lies. i did not imagine your reaction to me. i did not imagine your love. when it became too much for you handle a deeply intense and wholly committed relationship, you balked. you couldn't handle it; and, instead of communicating that reality, you chose to place the onus on me. i should have rejected it then, as i reject it now.

i feel so free. i deserve happiness. my relationship with you was not an anomaly. you are the anomaly. most men are good, truthful, honest. most don't tell lies to get what they want. most don't selfishly use women for whatever they can. i am quite possibly staring my dream man in the face and i cannot sell myself short or refuse his best because of your obtusity and base character. i hope you've grown, that you are a different person for your sake and for your wife's sake. i hope that you have developed a strength and depth of character that you didn't have when I knew you. i sincerely wish you all the best. today, i release those negative memories that led me to question my worth and worthiness. i release you to your fate as i pursue my own.

be richly blessed,
nonwhite&woman