13 Letters I Never Wrote: Dear S, I cannot believe I forgot your name.

Dear S,

Honestly, I cannot believe I forgot your name. For days I have been searching the recesses of my brain and I cannot find it. I cannot find your name inside my mind. That seems so odd to me, darling, because I still remember, so well, what it is was like to love you.

I remember everything else. I remember putting on my little blue skirt and the shirt with the pierced baby on it, and coming by to the studio on Friday afternoons. You loved that shirt so much, you tried to steal it right off my back, and it was so unlike me to not let you have it. It was so long ago that I decided I would hand over anything I had that someone else liked over to them immediately. I've only broken that rule twice. I didn't let my best friend have the pants we both found (but I bought) at our favourite market three months ago and I didn't let you have that shirt. I understand about the pants, and maybe you would too, because they're just so comfortable, I cannot imagine life without them now that I've put them on, but I don't understand about the shirt. I didn't even like it that much. It was cute and weird, but I could have parted with it without so much as noticing that it was gone.

It's strange, because that's what happened with you. I wouldn't give you up, but I felt nothing when you were gone. I thought I wanted you so much, but I don't even remember your name, and I don't remember hurting when I couldn't see you anymore. I remember the scandal, though. They had a field day with us, didn't they? Forty-two year old man caught cheating with a seventeen year old girl by his wife. God. The flashbacks are blinding. They made us sound so cheap, pornographic, criminal. Like we were heathens. I know I should feel bad about some parts of that. I should feel bad about aiding a cheater, but I don't. There are many reasons why I don't hold myself responsible for that, but the most consistent one is that it wasn't my marriage. I wasn't the one violating an agreement you made with somone.

Of course, I knew about it, and honestly, I didn't care. I have never cared about the betrayal of cheating, and part of that is because I never had relationships, and I never will, where my partners cannot fuck and love whoever the hell they desire. I value the communication and honesty, now, but the truth is that if my husband (yeah, I'm the one that is married now, hard to imagine, is it?) just went out and fucked someone and told me later, I don't believe that would qualify as dishonesty to me, and while part of that is because I trust him to a point where all that matters to me is that he would never let the slightest harm, even emotional, come to me through his actions on purpose, the other part is that I don't feel ownership of people quite in the way that allows you to see cheating as the problem. To me the problem has always been lies. I don't do that, and I have never done that, but I never signed up to save other people from their lies. I made my bed but you made yours. Yours had someone else in it, and while mine did as well, mine knew I kept multiple beds. Did it never alarm you that the child was more honest than you?

I'm not blaming you, I'm really not, I do actually understand. I grew up with cheaters all around me, and each one of them cheated for reasons and in ways that was more spectacular than the other. Even today, cheaters are attracted to me. The heterosexual female ones seek me out and confess their doings to me, as if I can help, and the heterosexual male ones want me to be the thing they are doing. Sometimes I give both those categories what they want, and on one spectacular occasion I actually gave the heterosexual female confessor something to do in me. I feel like that would have amused you, is there still amusement after death? I really hope so. The thing that I find is true of all cheaters though, the confessors and the doers, I never am able to see how the cheating is what killed their relationships.

They come to me having already killed their relationships. Cheating doesn't destroy the relationship, it's just the moment in which the cops find the bloody knife buried in your backyard. I've always believed cheating is symptomatic, and I will always say it, but I'll never be the one to exonerate anyone for it, and sometimes that's what they come for. Is that what you came for? Sometimes people tell me they are cheating, I think, because they see in me a prospect for what they consider enough immorality to tell them that it is okay. It's okay to me, because it's not my problem. I don't cheat, because I don't ever let myself need that, I have truth in my side, and that's what really hurt me about that scandal, you know?

Everyone seemed to think this was my fault. Everyone seemed to ask me how I was okay with destroying a marriage. I lived in a graveyard of marriages, there was nothing around to fuck but the dead. That's dark, but not immoral. I guess, maybe I thought you would defend me. Say something. Take responsibility. Instead you just packed your bags and moved away, and we never spoke again. V told me when you died, and I haven't spoken to him in a decade either. He's married too, and not to the girl that you tattooed onto his chest. Life is strange, darling. I don't hold it against you that you didn't say or do anything to fix things, I moved out of there, unscathed. Unlike you, the things people say to me, or about me, don't bother me unless my conscience is not clear, and when my conscience is not clear, I come clean. You, all of you, taught me never to build castles out of lies, because like champagne towers they don't get slightly damaged, they come crashing down entirely.

It just baffles me now why I was so sure I needed you in my life. You fucked me like a dirty little girl who made you just a little bit mad, but they all did. I wouldn't have let any of you fuck me if you didn't, unless you paid me (and yeah, I did that too later, and I don't love that I never got to tell you about it, you had such faith in my prospects as a whore). It wasn't how you fucked me, though, it was the romance. The darkness of that little studio. The way you looked at me when you pulled the shutters down. The way you gripped the pain in my heart and introduced it to the grief inside you. You said, and I cannot believe that you said this every day, that I would prevail.

I did.

I just cannot believe you didn't. You were the first person I loved (or fucked) who died. I didn't know how to grieve that at all. I loved you once, and if I had known the last time we spoke would be the last time we spoke, I would have told you that once more, but we hadn't spoken in years. I didn't know what you did anymore or who you loved. V told me a few things every once in a while, but after he got married I only ever spoke to him once again. I wondered if I should fly down for your funeral, but I didn't know who was hosting it, and I knew I wouldn't be welcome. What would I have said anyway? I still don't know. I loved you, darling, I did. I loved you when you fucked me under the stars. I loved you when you called me a sick little girl. I loved you when you pushed metal through all the parts of me that needed to hurt. I loved you when you cried in my arms about losing a child, and all the promise you had once known.

I loved you.

But I only have one question to ask you.

Why can't I remember your name, darling? Why can't I remember your name?

Rest in peace,
Ancilla.