Unsent Letter #1: Letter to A
A personal essay by Victoria Fedden from our anthology, My Other Ex
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Dear A,
I lost your mother’s pear cake recipe. It happened during one of the five times I moved since I got the letter from you asking me never to call or write again. When I discovered that the recipe was gone, I panicked. I searched everywhere for it or for recipes that were similar. I found nothing close and then I tried to think of mutual friends I could enlist to get the recipe from you, pretending they wanted it for themselves. You’d see through that though, because you knew how much I loved the pear cake. You would remember the time you promised to make it for me once the blizzard passed and the electricity came back on. I would hate for you to know I lost that recipe and I hate to think of you saying that of course I lost the recipe, how it was just like me to lose that recipe because I was always careless like that, even with the things I most loved. But I’m not like that now and it’s important you know that. A lot about me has changed.
Since we last spoke, most importantly, I learned to write. I learned about not using vague descriptives, to always find the most unexpected metaphors and concrete nouns. Once a teacher told me that my writing has to make me cry and that I have to be brave and write about my hurt and stop just trying to make people laugh. She said I try to be funny so that people will love me.
That’s what everyone wants ultimately — for everyone to love them, and I have written a lot about the people who do love me, but not so much about the people, like you, who don’t. I feel like I might cry if I wrote about you. I’m petrified of crying, or of people knowing that I cry or of people seeing me as anything other than light hearted. I’ve based a whole new life on being the happy girl who doesn’t cry. And then I sob when I see a TV show about a polar bear swimming for miles looking for an ice floe to rest upon, finding nothing but saltwater and drowning from exhaustion.
At some point I told myself that the one thing I would never write about was us, because if I did, you would be upset. You would say I was being an exhibitionist, that I told the story wrong, that I painted myself more favorably, that I humiliated you. Perhaps you’d be right. I know I couldn’t write it without lying by omission, and so I won’t write our story at all. If I wrote it, I know I would cry. This is not our story. I’m only writing here about how much I miss you, how I regret what happened and how I’ve changed.
My own stupidity, insecurity and lack of character led to the end of our friendship. We had been friends for over a decade when it happened. We met when we were eleven and last spoke when we were twenty-four. You ended it with the letter, which I always suspected your therapist instructed you to write. I imagined the scene where you spent an entire appointment complaining about my constant phone calls, my stinging comments whenever something good happened to you and did not also happen to me, how I behaved inappropriately around others because I simply didn’t know better. You might throw in how you had grown and I hadn’t. Ivy-League educated and well-traveled, you were now beginning a career while I, with my GED had no résumé, no degrees and couldn’t keep up with an intellectual conversation. The therapist probably talked about how people grow apart and how childhood friendships often must end in adulthood and how you had to cut me off. A letter would be the best way. End it swiftly and utterly, the therapist would say. She would explain to you that I needed consequences for my behavior (I suspect this was correct) and that if you continued your friendship with me that I would continue to torment you, to sap your energy, becoming more and more toxic and difficult to purge from your life. I am making this up. Maybe it didn’t happen that way at all, but I still have the letter you sent.
When I’m not regretful about our friendship, I am hopeful. As teenagers we fought all the time. I probably started every argument we ever had, in all fairness, but we would fight and stop speaking sometimes for weeks or months at a time. My hopeful, idealistic self convinces me that this is just another one of those incidents, one that lasted ten years, but still a temporary hiatus in what will be a lifelong friendship, what has to be a lifelong friendship, because no one has ever loved a friend like we loved one another. And I think one day we will laugh about this and then we’ll cry because we wasted ten years and missed milestones and then we’ll laugh again because we used to laugh all the time. When I’m hopeful I’m still fifteen.
I wish that I could say: A, I am sorry, but forgive me because I was young and insecure and every horrible moment I created was based in my feelings of worthlessness because I believed I was unlovable and my want was like a tantrum. What I wanted was to be like you. I felt the world cheated me out of the opportunities you had and that I too should sail the Virgin Islands, study in Brighton and work in publishing, instead of toiling in restaurant kitchens that made me reek of fried fish and garlic.
I want you to know that now I am your equal, that I also have accomplishments and because I’ve been able to haul myself up out of my misery and worthlessness I’m not so insecure anymore. I’m just as educated as you. I bought myself a plane ticket and claimed Paris as my own. I have a husband who loves me a thousand more times than I deserve, and because of this I’ve created myself as this funny, charming, silly girl, full of self-deprecation and self-help. I throw fabulous dinner parties, though I’ve often wished I could bake and serve the pear cake for my guests. I belong to a book club and there are many, many people who think I’m fun and interesting. I do all the same things you do, like shop at IKEA, pay too much for flavored sea salts to make recipes I read about in Saveur. I read The New York Times. I’d also like to throw in that I’m a published writer. I’d like you to know that, but that would be bragging, wouldn’t it and would that mean that maybe I haven’t changed so much at all?
I’m still competitive, just not as often and not in such a raw, despairing way. I don’t need that arena to act out my feelings of not-good-enough anymore. I’ve given that up. I confess that I read your husband’s blog. Paranoid, I don’t read it too often because I don’t want him or you to see that I’m reading it. Mostly I just wait for him to post pictures of you, which he rarely does, and then I look at them for a long, long time. But not too long, because you might know. But then, not long enough. I try to determine if you’re happy. I want you to be happy. I want to lie about the fact that I examined one of the pictures to determine if I was still thinner than you. I concluded that we are the exact same size, and then I was miserable that I compared myself to you again after a decade of missing you, making wishes about you.
Comparing is my worst habit. I compared myself to you. That was my tragic flaw, or one of my tragic flaws in all of this. White trash, uneducated, unsophisticated and ignorant, I never measured up. I still compare. I have compared every single female friend I’ve made since you, to you. None of them have come close.
One of the wishes I make is that I would run into you somewhere by chance. I played this one out a few different ways. Most scenarios have you being happy to see me. We hug. There are tears and apologies and we must have tea and tea becomes dinner. The restaurant closes and we are still there. We leave intertwined. We used to walk that way all the time singing, so we begin to sing again, remembering the words to “Just Like Heaven.” We go home and there is the pear cake with slivered almonds and whipped cream. You copy down the recipe for me again and tease me about losing it. We talk and at some point in the night I am brushing your hair which crackles with static. There are many reasons why this could never happen and they are all my fault and they are a part of the story that I would not get right.
I wish for the Hollywood ending because in every romantic comedy there is a time when the characters are separated. The audience sees no hope for them to ever be together again. The situation is beyond repair and we fear all is lost, though really we know they are destined to be together; they have to be together. Our definition of love and good depends on their reunion and then after grid-lock, a high speed chase ensues. One races toward the other. She is getting on the plane. They see each other at the gate. Don’t leave. You see, it was all a misunderstanding and I love you. Yes, I love you and I have always loved you. I loved you from the moment I saw you and admit, you love me too and we are meant to be together. Please come back to me. Please, I was an idiot and now I know I was wrong. I knew then. I knew the second I was away from you that all I ever wanted was to be your friend.
There are credits. Everyone in the theater moves towards the exit. The movie is over. You pull me out of my seat and we are swimming upstream through the bodies. We move in the opposite direction toward the stage, because the theater used to be a real theater with a stage and red velvet curtains, and then we are dancing on the stage. You lead. I am clumsy, but we are dancing across the blackness and the disappearing words. We laugh and dance. Do you remember when we did that?
Oh A, I am good enough now. I’m good. Look at how good I am.
Victoria Fedden is a mom and a writer from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She is the author of Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat and Sun Shower: Magic, Forgiveness and How I Learned to Bloom Where I Was Planted. Her work has appeared in Real Simple, Redbook, Chicken Soup for the Soul and on the Huffington Post and elephant journal.