To Rose,

To Rose, 

Who gives a person they have never seen before a birthday card? I’ve tried to imagine the scenario a hundred times over, tried to put myself in your shoes. So I’m sitting there at the table, and the barista is talking with a customer he seems to know as more than just an order on a ticket. The customer, a mysterious fair-haired person, the kind who looks like the poems he writes, is giving his order, and then it happens. He says it’s his birthday, which means he gets a free drink. I, being you, smile at the thought that someone has something to celebrate today. I think it’s wonderful, and I leave it at that. I look back down at the book I’m reading or studying or writing, and I don’t give another thought to the customer at the counter who was born 20 years ago today.

But that’s not what you did. 

You, being you, must have thought that it was your job to celebrate this day in the life of a stranger. So you set out on a mission. You got out a notecard that you probably should have filled out with vocabulary or historical facts, and you wrote down a verse. I’m sure you remember - it was Psalm 139:14. You reminded this kind-eyed stranger that, yeah, he’s fearfully and wonderfully made, then you wrote a succinct “happy birthday” message on the back of the card and gave it to him. It’s easy to imagine he was surprised. He was always one to receive love as something unexpected. So you handed him the card. There you are, standing there, sitting there, whatever you are doing there, and you are handing him the card. And he is smiling, and he is surprised. So you handed him the card. 

Did your fingers brush? 

And how did this next part go? My story is not so straight. You handed him the card, and he was surprised. Then… Did you tell him your name? Did he use it when he asked? Because somewhere between you handing him the card and him coming to my apartment that morning, he asked you on a date. He gave you his number - the one I had memorized only seven months before, the one I had sent secrets to, the one that told me I’m beautiful, the one I wanted to see on the screen every time my phone made a sound. You handed him the card, and he handed you his number. 

What did you do with it?

I know you never called. Did you lose his number? Did you forget to tell him about some boyfriend of three years? Were you just not interested in celebrating him on any other day of the year except this one you somehow felt responsible for just because it’s called “birthday”? I know you don’t know this, because you don’t know him, but he is an idealist. He is more of an optimist than he would ever like to admit, and he thinks about death so often that he will probably figure out a way to beat it. So you should have called. You should have called just to say that you wouldn’t be calling. Because he deserved that. He waited. He must have. He must have also hoped because he is full of the stuff. And hope probably became so synonymous with your name that he has never looked at a rose the same way again.  

So I’d like to tell you that you broke his heart, and that’s exactly why he turned around and broke mine. 

It has to be. Broken people can’t go on holding other people together. See, he had this dream - albeit a short-lived dream - that he would have met this beautiful stranger at a coffeeshop who’d give him a birthday card and they would write a love story together to shame the masses. And you finished the story before it ever started. And that must be why he took a dream I had been weaving all year and unravelled it with just a few brief words. I know you broke his heart because otherwise he would have never looked me in the eyes and said, “I have just finally realized you aren’t my only option.” Those are breaking words. Those are words he said while he was thinking about your face and your hair and your eyes, even though he was looking at mine. 

And so I know you must have broken his heart because I couldn’t have been so foolish as to have overlooked the capacity he had within him to break me for as long as it went overlooked. I could never have been in love with someone so cruel. I would never choose someone who wouldn’t choose me. And so you handed him the card, and you broke his heart. And that’s why I blame you. 

No. 

No - I only blame you because this lie is even less ridiculous than the truth. 

And I may be the only one who knows what that is. 

The truth is that you handed that card to someone I had hoped, for as long as I knew what hope was, to marry. His name had become woven in with a promise I felt so entitled to that I couldn’t even see a reality where he didn’t choose me. And you made that reality undeniable when you handed him that card. And it’s true that his words broke me in parts that may have never gotten set back in quite the right way. You opened his eyes the day he learned you exist, and so he no longer felt caged by mine. And this isn’t the first time you’ve been framed in words either. He wrote about waking up roses, having the darkness that is me lifted from his life, seeing things clearly for the first time, feeling sun on his skin where my existence had previously shut it out. You didn’t break his heart - you woke it up. And so I can’t blame you. 

I can’t blame you or me or the dream or choice. 

I can only sit here and imagine what my life would be like if you hadn’t handed him that card. 

So you handed him that card, and you broke my heart. But it didn’t take very long for my days to shine brighter than ever. It wasn’t long before I could walk in straight lines without fearing what hid behind every corner. He got a job at that coffeeshop, and, yeah, he stayed in my life longer than I wanted him to. Funny how someone you had hoped to wake up to forever suddenly becomes the last person you want handing you your morning coffee. But he met the love of his life at that coffeeshop, and I think that’s wonderful. And I’ll meet the love of my life at a different coffeeshop, and they will choose me as if I’m the only option they could have ever dreamed of having. More than that, you handed him that card, and you handed us freedom and a life of bigger dreams than the lint-ridden ones we had been carrying around in our pockets. 

So, yeah, I blame you. 

I blame you for teaching me that I’m worth more than settling and lesser things. 

If I never get to sit down across the table from you or pass you in line at a coffeeshop, I hope you know that it was good. It was good that you handed him that card and never called and broke my heart. If I could, I would send you a birthday card every year just to thank you. 

And I want you to know that hope has become so synonymous with your name that I will never look at a rose the same way again. 

All my best, 

A Regular.

Mona Lisa

The funny thing about cyber stalking is you feel like you know a person you’ve never met. So when your ex walked in to order coffee, her face registered immediately. It was like finally being in the same room with the Mona Lisa after only ever seeing copies, like finally getting to observe the details up close when all you’ve heard is lecture after lecture after agonizing lecture, like breathing in a history you could only ever dream of participating in but could never touch. And when she smiled it certainly felt like something worth writing novels and screenplays and poems about. Maybe you thought it was Mona herself because you ran to hide the moment you saw her, but you always were one to run from things you can’t understand. 

You know, they say that the portrait of Mona Lisa is the most parodied piece of art ever created. People are always trying to recapture the same magic. You have made a life of it. It’s like you went to Paris once and saw a smile, and you’ve been asking every face since to give you that same feeling. You can’t let go of the girl who sat for you, who posed just like you told her to until she got uncomfortable and decided to exist for something other than your admiration. So you keep dressing them up and telling them to sit where she sat and entreating them to give you a smile, and it all seems so romantic until the final stroke is made and the brush drops and you realize this isn’t the portrait you wanted. It’s just a parody. 

Well, I was never one for doing what I’m told. I prefer to stand and not to sit, to dress myself with the colors of everything I am, to smile only when something is truly worthy of my delight. But I can understand how you made the mistake of thinking I would entertain your whims and reveries. I approached you with the timidness of someone who had long heard of your work, and I asked you to make me into something like a masterpiece too soon before learning you are just a copy artist. You tried, though - that’s the thing. You tried. And I thought all of your effort meant that it must be working, that the frame would finally fit, and that I would soon be admired by all whom you allowed to gaze in my direction. But I’ve never been to Paris. 

So Mona Lisa smiled in my direction, not knowing that a few shorts months ago my face had been painted to look like hers, and you ran because you’ll never understand why she stopped smiling at you. She got her coffee to go because she never sticks around for long, and you wouldn’t love her if she did. Something hung in the air when she walked out. I think it was the thought that maybe she had never really been there in the first place, and maybe it was the thought that she had never really existed. The funny thing about cyber stalking is also the funny thing about art history text books. You spend all this time studying faces that you may never see in real life, and the thing is that you’d never know if they didn’t exist at all. So maybe you went to Paris, and maybe you didn’t. But I do know that you will never find the girl with the smile you thought you saw. She doesn’t exist.

To the girl with the red hair he never wanted you to cut,

To the girl with the red hair he never wanted you to cut, 

Freedom looks good on you. 

When I met you, I could barely see you because you were hiding in your hair and in the shadow of someone who always wanted to make himself seem bigger than you. I couldn’t see you, and you scared me the way that all mysterious things do. So he became a friend because I could see him, and you disappeared beneath the mask he gave you. 

I wanted to cry when he invited me to your wedding. I wanted to cry because I finally felt so included. He has this funny way of making people feel special just because he deemed them worthy of his attention, you know? Of course you know. So I cried because it felt like family when he spoke to me, and I hoped that you would be there to welcome me, too, between the dancing and the hiding and the nervous laughter. But I couldn’t actually go to your wedding in the end, so we kept out of touch as you fell deeper down the rabbit hole. 

I remember when you cut it. I walked into the coffeeshop, and you were standing there with short hair. I think I was holding my breath waiting for him to react, as if it had just happened, just fallen off or something, and he’d be furious that you didn’t do anything to stop it all from happening. But he stood there, making himself big, and for the first time you were peeking through his shadow - just enough for the light to fall on your face. And I saw the beginnings of a girl who would be resurrected. 

I watched the death come for you from a distance, and it wasn’t until you both had been consumed by it that he put words over the silent film. Divorce doesn’t sound real until it’s happening to someone that could have been you. It’s something that’s only supposed to happen to parents and people who get married in Vegas. Still he said the word like it was normal, like this was the way the story was always meant to unfold, like it was in the script he had rehearsed since he got the part. 

This is not to say that he wasn’t sad - of course he was. He was smaller than I had ever seen him, and he sat there shrinking more and more as the minutes passed. I remember thinking that you must’ve grown too big for him to control, like a wild vine that started as a weed on the ground, only to scale the wall and overtake the whole house. I remember wanting to see you and cry with you and tell you that I understand the hiding and the growing pains that come when you finally break into the light. I remember being glad I didn’t see you dance at your wedding. 

When I saw you standing behind the counter of a different coffeeshop months later, I didn’t know how to act. It was like seeing you for the first time, like you were a stranger I had known forever, like maybe you had escaped from that room inside my mirror. I said it was good to see you and asked how you’d been, even though I knew the answer was heavier than the fake smile you made as you said the words, “I’ve been good.” And I think you doubted those words more than I did because I could finally see you, and I knew that had to mean that you were waking up from a long sleep and that good was only a few breaths away. 

The rest of that year was complicated. You ran away to yourself in the mountains, and I kept stumbling over love in coffeeshops. Something was happening to both of us that meant seeing and being seen, and we fell into a world online where we could finally break that years-long silence. It happened slowly. I couldn’t even tell you who took the first step, but we built a friendship through likes and reblogs and shares and comments - both of us creating a safe space to come out of hiding. So when I finally saw you again, it felt like coming home. 

Can you believe we knew each other two years before ever sitting down across from each other with a cup of coffee? When we finally did, the words poured out of us like a breath that had been held for much too long. It was sloppy and messy and perfect, and it meant something more than the moment could hold. I didn’t see you for a while after that, but there was something perfect about that, too. I had finally seen you, and I knew I’d be seeing you again. 

When we went out for that photoshoot how ever many months later, the winds changed. There was something about the day we spent together that settled it, that meant breaking our old patterns and coming into the light together. And the times I saw you after that made the whole complicated thing worth it. What was once only online or only in line at the coffeeshops had taken its rightful place across the table at dinner and side by side at parties and sharing drinks in the spirit of the holidays. But that sweet season was cut short too soon. 

What I mean when I say that season was cut short is to say that it had to be because we both know that freedom means cutting things short. I cut off my time in that place the same way you cut off your hair and for the same reason. He never wanted you to cut it, and she never believed I would. And if the cutting is what it takes for us to be free, I can count on the both of us to do it when we are ready. I can count on us because we do what it takes to see and be seen, you know? We are the chasers of the light. 

I hope that light leads us back to the same line again and that the woman in your mirror lets you grow out your hair as long as you want to. Freedom looks really good on you. 

I’ve run away to myself in those mountains, and it’s the chase I’ve been meaning to cut to since the first scene.

Until next time, 

the girl with the ties she never thought I would cut