Do you ever think of it? All of our missed connections and the one we finally lit upon? The tiny apartment on the Lower East Side, the pizza place downstairs, the white-paneled bar around the corner where we’d do shots of flavored vodka? That time we sat on the roof under the stars dunking Oreos in peanut butter and passing a quart of milk back and forth? Fire escapes, hot nights, throwing off the top sheet, box fan in the window, me draped over you?

I was such a mess. You held on for so long. I still think so highly of you. I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but I know that I don’t deserve it. I wish I could explain it to you now, if only to explain how much better I can explain it now. I am only now beginning to understand the extent to which things in me were broken. I thought I had fixed all of it before I met you. You felt like proof that I had survived it all, that I was not hopeless, that the future could still be bright. But it turns out that I had simply done my best to repair the worst of the damage and then spackled over the rest of it, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best.

I hope you know that I always hoped for the best.

It was dark when you ended it. You wore striped pants. You let yourself into my apartment and knelt by my bed and told me that you couldn’t do it anymore. We’d had talks like that before but they never stuck, so I didn’t expect this one to last, either. When you still felt the same way the next morning, I panicked. I felt sick. I would not for years understand the extent of what I had done to you, but I knew immediately what a mistake I had made (how many thousands of tiny mistakes I had made). It sent me into a spiral. For months I tried to convince you to give me another chance until finally you told me you’d found someone else. You never told me her name but you posted hundreds of photos of her. She had beautiful, thick, dark hair and wore a lot of black. She squeezed in next to your friends, big smiles, on so many adventures we never took together. I did not know how to grapple with that reality. I literally could not comprehend it. My heart fell in on itself and I wandered around for months trying to survive anyway.

I am still not sure how I managed this.

Stifling summer descended on me, stuck in a city I had never wanted to live in, moving through the long hours without the person I’d come there for. I did my best to make it my own. I darted between the boroughs, drinking in so many bars with so many boys (one of them would break me, so much worse, so much later). I came home late each night expecting to find you waiting for me at the top of the stairs, but you were never there. I’ve never been able to explain how much all of this hurt me, how deep the grief permeated, how it took root and became a part of me I still feel sometimes. I resented you so much, but deep down it made sense to me. You have only ever deserved happiness. This was clear to me even then.

You have a family now. You’re successful, but under the radar. You live on the other side of the country, a world away from New York and from my world. I bet your house is beautiful. I bet the bookshelves sag under the weight of your paperbacks, notes scrawled in the margins, corners bent to mark the parts that echo in your heart. I bet the walls are filled with your photos. I bet the rooms are full of scraps of pastimes, the remnants of your discarded passions, echoes of the projects you dive into and then quickly walk away from. That always bothered you — your tendency to thrill over something new, only to abandon it quickly for something shinier. Bitter years ago I might have said that I was just another project that didn’t hold your interest, but I understand now how unfair that is — really, how unfair all of it was. Recently my best friend and I listed the people who have broken me (this sounds dramatic but was actually very matter-of-fact: the names like shrapnel, all of them plucked from my armor). She mentioned you and I shook my head. He was a casualty of my brokenness, I said, not a cause of it.

You’ve really grown, she said.

And I know I have, but not so much that I’ve stopped wondering if you think about it. Any of it. The Lower East Side. Julep on Avenue B. So many late nights spent alone while you worked. Notebooks in poetry class. Text messages on winter break. Slipping past each other in Pasadena and in Ann Arbor. One fall afternoon I asked to borrow a book and you told your roommate that this was it, this was the moment that would start everything, but when you came over to deliver it I didn’t invite you in. (I had no idea you wanted to come in.) Kissing you quickly as I climbed out of the car. Cocktail rings, disposable cameras, Wisconsin in March. Moving your chair to my side of the table. Heavy snow in the city. Arms outstretched in Brooklyn. Poems on postcards. Airport tears. The surety that it was real, that it would last, that it was right.

It’s OK if you don’t. It was so long ago. We were so heartbreakingly young, and maybe it wasn’t as significant for you. I am grown and I am better. I am happy and I am working toward being happier. But I still trip on the sadness sometimes. It stings to remember how carelessly I held all that love and how easily I tossed it aside, how much harder I made things that could have been so simple. I never meant to hurt you and I still hurt you. I didn’t mean to destroy my own heart, but there it was in tatters anyway.

Honestly, I think all of it will always break me a bit.

You do not know the weight of the things you carry until you are able to put them down.

With thanks to G, K, L (“ain’t no reason to bring old shit up but I get it”), and most of all (and always), B.

once, when I was younger