Me: It�s good to be writing the letter, but don�t think I'm still not obliterated, having to.
Catharine: i know, doll
Me: I am very glad I have the therapist tomorrow aft.
Me: If he weren�t so fucked up, he'd be so amazing.
Catharine: but you're *not* obliterated, in a certain sense, because you're able to write it. because you know that it is worth Everything � just not worth you.
Me: i don't understand
Catharine: you are awesome....
Catharine: you are doing something incredibly hard because you have realized that it�s better than not doing it
Catharine: and that means that you are not-Obliterated...not-Xed. but i know it�s awful
Me: Secretly I keep waiting for someone to try to talk me out of it.
Catharine: awroo....
Catharine: oh honey.
Catharine: i'm sorry.
Catharine: i would if he weren�t so obviously wrecked
Me: I wish there were some way to say what I have to say and not have it be the end.
Catharine: he's made this bed
Me: i know
Catharine: yes
Catharine: i was just thinking that
Me: but i have to admit, even though i don�t like to, that if he wanted it badly enough then even a the-end letter would not deter him from trying to get it.
Me: you just say, "No. That is not the end."
Me: i did that in april when he first dumped me.
Catharine: yep
Catharine: exactly
Me: i think he wants to be emotionally mediocre.
Catharine: i agree
Catharine: but he can�t really. it won't make him happy
Catharine: and then he�ll realize
Me: or else become an alcoholic
Catharine: right
Catharine: exactly
Catharine: ouch. i�m glad you have therapy soon too.

I can�t even tell you how much I wanted to be talked out of writing this letter or to convince myself that there was anything else I could do.

It�s always funny what the last straw is, it�s always something so mundane that for whatever reason pushes a person over the edge. For me, it was last Sunday afternoon when I was skimming the Afterword in your copy of "The Fountainhead" and you took the book and showed me your bookmark and said, "That�s as far as I've gotten in three months of reading it. Because I�m stupid, and because I never read." Yes, that�s a direct quote, and don�t even try to tell me I have it wrong, because it was echoing in my head all the way to Broadway, all during brunch and all the way back to your house. I ignored it for a while and then when I was talking about how I wanted to stay friend-ish with you for the time being I think I was trying to create some white noise that would drown it out (sorry about that), but later that afternoon I gave in, because in addition to your me-so-stupid words it was a bell I�d heard tolling, and I had to acknowledge that I knew perfectly well whose number it had. You�re not stupid � the suggestion that you are is absolutely preposterous. I don�t think and have never thought that you�re stupid. And I don�t know whether you actually believe that you�re stupid, but the point is that you somehow need to believe, and to imply or say, that I think you are. Why is this? Everyone knows I think you�re the opposite of stupid, everyone knows I think you�re smart, dazzling, egregiously clever and the best guy ever, and that I don�t give a flying fuck about what books you've read the same way I don�t give a flying fuck what books anyone has read. Why do you have to cast me as a mean and judgmental person who doesn�t give you enough credit? How is it that your worldview is only served if I�m like that in it, if I�m all about hurting your feelings? Also, one of your stated objectives for taking time away from me was to build your self-confidence back up, and for you to have made the "stupid" crack is proof that where I�m concerned you're not even trying. Do you think that doesn�t hurt my feelings? Do you think it didn�t kill me a little that you were going around saying that it was I who was responsible for sapping your self-confidence over the past year, as if that had been my agenda and as if I�m some kind of vampire? I�ve had it with being the defense attorney and apologist for the ugly, hurtful specter version of me that you have conjured into being, who is characterized by poisonously arousing both something like love and the need to get as far away from it as possible. She doesn�t exist, and I'm done indulging you, at the expense of myself, by pretending that she does. You don�t get to tell me what I am.

And all that claptrap the same Sunday about how I was focusing too much on "us" and not enough on myself � what rot. And how dare you tell me what�s on my mind and what my priorities are. What, like you�d know? By saying those things, you insult me and trivialize the painful shit-getting-together work that I�ve been doing over the past few months and that is finally gaining some discernible momentum, when anyone who cared about me or who was even paying attention would be proud of me for it. Why do you get to be the arbiter of what you think I�m doing and what you think it means, when you rightly would balk if I tried to pull the same act with respect to your life? It�s the same thing as you deciding that I think you�re stupid � it�s not based on any empirical reality, it�s just a matter of what you need to believe. Why do you need to believe the worst of me? I�ve agonized over this question for long enough, and now I�m passing it back to you, where it belonged in the first place.

The diary was not the issue. What I wrote in the diary was not the issue. Your reading the diary and telling me you weren�t was not the issue. Vanessa was not the issue, or Lori and the invitations that were never extended to me, or Adam, or Tonya, or anyone with whom I disported myself before I met you, or any of the Amazon girls who felt like they�d missed their chance with you when I interrupted your year of living singly. My fear that your rich friends would think I was a screwup was not the issue. My tendency to have unreasonable expectations of myself was not the issue. [Another thing was not the issue.] My drunk goodnight liplock the day after you dumped me was not the issue, and neither are the women you�re dating now. The issue was that you never believed me when I said and wrote how crazy I was about you, and that you wanted to believe instead that I was a cruel snotty snob who looked down on, for starters, your intellect and background. I don�t know why you wanted that to be the truth. What I did wrong, that is to keep sticking around someone who thought so poorly of me, I did because I cared about you, and I wanted to help you and make you see how much you were in fact worthy of � and no brag, but I�m talking about myself here. I loved you so much that even after I knew you thought I was judging you and finding you wanting, even after the months during which all evidence should have convinced you that your paranoia was bullshit, I stayed in the game because I thought I could beat the system, and I had never wanted anything, in my whole life, as much as I wanted that, and I also thought that by virtue of how powerfully I felt about you, surely I deserved it. But what I was doing was staying with someone who considered me a judgmental jerk, who never gave me the benefit of the doubt, who fundamentally thought that I was a liar, and I did not deserve that. (And why on earth would you stay with someone like that? If I were truly that kind of no-count, I would hope you�d have had the dignity to cut me loose ages ago. If I thought you were a bad person in the smallest degree, I would have done it to you in a heartbeat.) I don�t know what you think you deserve. You had a valid list of reasons why you broke up with Joy, and you felt that it had been the right decision, yet you kept bringing up your relationship with her as unlike ours in its exemplification of ideal balance, that the two of you were "equal." So what is the organizing principle, love or algebra? And what are you using to measure with? I thought you deserved me, and I thought I deserved you right back, and I didn�t need any tools or formulas to tell me so.

You�ll tell your friends that I sent this letter because I wanted to go out with a skinny non-smoking graduate student from a bohemian family, that I schoolteacher-like expected you to read novels and keep up with current events and trends in literary criticism, that we didn�t have anything in common, that I disdained your liberal politics, that we never really got along. Whether or not you realize it or admit it right now, that�s all crap, the self-serving revisionism of a true coward. It�s all in your head, and you put it there. I sent this letter because, as much as I would have done to save you from your pathological selling yourself short and to save the you-and-me that I still maintain could have been a happily-ever-after worldbeater, what I�ve realized over the past few weeks (and not through my conversations with any of the therapists; this is the shit-getting-together work I was talking about, and note how it scotches your theory about me being too relationship-centric) is that I have to save myself first. By which I mean, save myself from the way you see me, get away from the grotesque distortions you keep projecting onto me and calling reality. I am sorry that you want to believe that love and contempt are aspects of each other, that anything left unsaid is necessarily a placemarker for something to be jealous of, that a relationship is like a battle to be class valedictorian and intelligence is always a weapon, that I was more devoted to the anecdote about the pizza guy than I ever was to you. I�m sorry, but I can�t try to help you anymore. I don�t have the internal resources both to keep railing against your worldview and to stay focused on mine. I gave it my best shot up until the precise moment when it almost got the best of me. Honestly I don�t think I know one other person who would have lasted this long, so I try to console myself with the knowledge that at least my failure was heroic. To me, you were worthy of heroic effort. Most of all I�m sorry it still wasn't enough.

When our paths cross at the Crocodile or wherever sometime in the future, let�s just keep our distance. I want to stop crying once and for all. You have a few of my books, I�m thinking of the Plutarch and the Natalie Angier that�s stuck between your bed and the wall, and you can drop those off at Julian�s, please, at your convenience. He�ll be expecting you to be in touch, [his e-mail address]. I�m in no hurry to get them back. I don�t have anything that�s yours. Tell Rich he can keep the music-crit anthology, I�ve read it already. Tell Rich I�m sad that we won�t get to have our "Rushmore"-"Royal Tenenbaums" double feature and that I admired him hugely and will miss him likewise. Thanks for burning those cds for me.

I still love you and I imagine I always will, and whatever you want to broadcast about me and other dudes, whatever the fuck it makes you feel better to tell yourself, the fact is that it�s going to be an awfully long time before I can think of somebody else that way, even in an abstract sense. You�ve become the exact definition of the only guy I want, thus everyone but you is absurd and abhorrent to me, and I despise each one of them as potential suitors on account of who they are not; I hope you see how my dating other people over the past few months for the sake of an ego boost would have amounted not only to using them but also acting out of moral bankruptcy. Besides, I don�t need an ego boost, because I know what a hot tomato I am: I�m such a hot tomato that I felt worthy of being loved by such a biscuit as you. Whoever gets to go out with me is one lucky bastard, and don�t think for a minute that I don�t know it. I felt lucky to have found you too. Every time you told me that I didn�t know what I wanted in a boyfriend and only thought I did, it felt like being gut-shot and left to die alone in a blizzard. The reason I started crying on Ryan Adams night when you were pressing your case that I ought to be dating wasn�t because I was upset to be reminded that you were � I don�t care about that, I wanted you to take whatever you thought you needed from whomever you thought had it, and despite the fact that I�d rather not run into you and Ms. Lady at a show, I�m too confident in myself to have felt threatened by those women and what they represent. The crying was because I had finally let myself realize the extent to which you didn�t understand how I had always felt about you, you couldn�t possibly if you were saying those things to me, and maybe because I also began to realize that you didn�t want to. That as much as I love you, I could never change your mind about what you want to believe I am. So now that I think of it, maybe that and not "The Fountainhead" was the beginning of my beginning to say goodbye.

Of course, I also hate you a little for letting me believe for so long that I could have that kind of love in my life and have it be gratified: this was the first time that I�ve had the guts really to lay myself on the line and keep trying not to back off from the tough stuff that�s the constant work of having a real, non-superficial adult relationship, and it never occurred to me that with me trying so hard and wanting it so much the mission could fail, as though my own belief and commitment were enough. In that, I was na�ve, because you would have had to believe and to work as well, and perhaps I owe you another apology for having held you to my standard. I sent this letter because, ultimately, there was nothing else left for me to do and still hold onto what�s left of my self-respect. I love you and I wish you nothing but success and happiness and recording contracts and a pretty witty uninhibited writer who digs the Geraldine Fibbers and a fantastic house to live in with her, but I�m heartbroken, blown to bits and in mourning for the last wasted year, so I get to say this other thing too that is also the truth: I hope that one of these days you�ll think about how this went down and why and that you�ll be as sorry as you�ve been in your life. Because for someone who�s so manifestly not stupid, where I was concerned you couldn�t have been stupider. You always insisted that one day it would dawn on me that I deserved better than you, and I know that among whatever else, if anything, you take away from this letter � I hardly know why I've bothered, you�ll probably also tell your friends and maybe yourself as well that it was a pack of screechy neurotic lies � will be a sense of justification that the callous, judgmental, emotionally deluded, unfaithful snob you knew I was has at last shown her true colors. Congratulations � doesn't being right feel pretty fucking awesome?

I love you more than anything except, finally, myself. I wish you could have believed that. It would have been magnificent.

� � � � � � � Annie