Dear Imaginary Boyfriend,

When I was 14 I had my first “boyfriend.” My first boyfriend was technically a guy named D. I was hanging out with my slutty friends that I judged for being sexual back then. Now I think it is cool to be sexual, maybe because I have had sex with so many people, I don’t know. Anyway, I was trying to go home on Halloween my Freshman year by checking my watch and saying it was 9 o’clock. I was scared of hanging out with these boys and I probably should have just gone home alone. That’s my problem. I don’t listen to my intuition when it comes to walking away from people. Maybe that’s why when I am high, I end up running away from everyone all of the time.

(This letter is my proof of why I don’t want to hang out with you for fear of how intimate I’ll get with everything that I want to tell you but that it doesn’t make sense that you would want to know. I am scared to let you in because why would you want to get to know me? Maybe you want to have sex with me because bodies are fun to fuck, but fucking with my mind? That is something else entirely. It is fun to imagine you in my fantasies and then to act weird around you in real life because I have been thinking about you so much when you’re not around.)

They didn’t want to believe me when I said it was already 9 o’clock; they reached for some other random passersby to double check and then we walked to the light rail station after they chided me for lying. We “smoked weed” at the light rail station, but I didn’t really want to but they gave me shit about that too. I always wanted to prove that I wasn’t a goody-goody, but it was flavored weed so in retrospect I can never say for sure if it was weed or something else random. I felt weird about smoking and hanging out with these random skater boys. We walked from the light rail station to the alley where the slutty friends were making out with two of the boys and in the midst of the make out called out to the other boys that I had never been kissed. At this point I had been walking alone ahead of everyone dressed in my alien Halloween costume. One of the boys that had been making out with one of my friends walked up to stand next to me and slip his arm around my waist. We made it to a spot in the alley and he walks up to me under the light and his tongue is coming at my face. I keep backing away until I am pushed against a fence in this mound of ivy and then we are just making out.

It was terrible.

I felt weird and uncomfortable and I didn’t know what to do. I guess I just wanted to please him. So, I kept going or maybe it feels good on a carnal level to mash your mouth against some else, to be wanted, to be touched, to be seen as “beautiful?” The sluts and I walked home after all of the aking out and I said, “He kissed me with his tongue! We French kissed!” and they said, “That’s just kissing!”

Like, duh, idiot.

The next day I was swinging on a swing talking about it with my other friend, C, at the park across the street from my house. I remember that I had this Buzz Lightyear watch adn I had put the watch through the chain link of the swink while I was talking and then I looked up and I saw him. D.

I freaked out and I ran into the community center building that was right there and went into the bathroom in flash and ran to the last stall, locked myself in, and crouched on the floor the furthest I could get away from the door. He didn’t dare come in the ladies room. He sent my friends in as emmissaries to convince me to come out. Why someone would want a person that had just run away from them full tilt, is a whole different story.

This was the beginning of my hell. The hell being boys. Sex. Hating myself.

I kept making out with him because he waited for me outside of the building, but I had my friends break up with him on the phone a few weeks later because I had never wanted it in the first place. It was classic peer pressure and nonconsensual in my head but I didn’t let the cat out of the bed because I was embarrassed that I didn’t feel ready for sex.

Then I got into an actual relationship that was longer then 2 weeks with A. It started because I just really wanted to hang out with him. I would walk him home even though it was way out of my way and I would do it almost every day. The conversation was always so fascinating. Then he told me he liked me after weeks and we kissed and my shoes untied, but I walked home without ever tying them to be dramatic and because I wanted to believe that this was what true love felt like. Whatever that means. He went his way and I went mine after that kiss. Eventually he told me he wanted to have sex and I said I wasn’t ready and he said, “What’s the point of us being together if we don’t have sex?” and so we had already been sneaking out to meet in the basement of his dad’s church, so I let him try to stick his dick insode of me. One time his dad came downstair in the midst of our awkward fumblings and I had to hide. One time we smoked pot and he started freaking out rocking back and forth on the stairs crying and I tried to make him feel better even though I wanted to run away.

I guess I am starting to realize why we might never be able to hang out, why I need a million years of lonely nights because I am all torn up inside and that you are just a person that I don’t even know. This is insane.

You are in my life as a teaching tool to help me realize that it doesn’t matter if a man that I feel attracted to is interested in me. What matters if if I respect myself enough to acknowledge that you are clearly not interested in hanging out with me or getting to know me at a deeper level and so I have been using all of this creative energy to obsess over you just to remember that I still have a vagina and that maybe I have standards and that maybe I am desiring sex and so I have been putting you in a weird space in my mind.

I can’t apologize anymore.

I guess I just feel traumatized by men’s behavior and I don’t know how to let it go and I don’t know when I’ll be ready for anything without crying.

Today, I was feeding a woman who can’t feed herself. She said, “I’ve been through hell and back.” It really surprised me to have her be so honest with me. She said she almost died when she was 4, that she was in a coma for 3 months. I said, “That must have been really scary for your parents.” She said, “It was hardest on my mom.”

She said she left her body and talked to god. God said, “It’s not your time yet. You have to go back into your body.”

I am crying as I run to the bathroom and thinking about you and how I want to talk to you, how I need to hang out with you, how I want to tell you about her and how awesome she is and how beautiful it is that she told me her story. It came out of nowhere. It was so powerful and it was inbetween bites of sweet potato pumpkin pie that she participated in making. She said she collects cabbage patch dolls and they fill up the end of her bed and she still has the ones from when she was little. I keep thinking about how we are both special. I keep thinking about how we might understand each other if I could just trust it.

I don’t know how to trust anything.

And once I start writing you this letter that I will never send, I think about how this is how I get sucked into shit shows; my obsessive mind thinks about a person all of the time.

You are a lesson for me just like every other guy I have ever known and fallen in love with. I don’t know what to fucking do! I wanted to run away because I felt your anger, but it was probably just my own. This is the disease because I want a baby. But that will never happen like this.

I keep thinking I have found my chill zone and then something brings up emotions and I think that I can use my body to get me a man. I mean, somebody has to eat me, right?

I have to be wanted in order to be valuable?

Or we actually have a legitimate connection?

Either way, this fucking sucks! If you like me, that sucks. If you don’t like me and are just going to be a dick nugget, that sucks. But more than anything, the fact that I feel myself caring so much about you and feeling lost inside of that feeling because it is living inside of nothingness, that sucks the most.

I used to be obsessed over my ex and how he was dying and how I couldn’t save him and how he just fucked me because he was addicted to sex and not because he actually loved my pussy or worshipped women. The fact was that he heard feminist rhetoric from his older sister and then used that to get into my pants and I thought I had found a good one. I know because real love never dies and ass holes never die either. They just keep doing the same dick moves no matter how ong it has been since you fucked them. And you have to say good-bye forever.

Part of me doesn’t want to get to know you more for fear of what I will do to myself as a result of needing or desiring your attention. So, I think I figured it out. This can never work. You are not enough for me or anybody. I have to be enough for myself and maybe if we are still knowing each other one day we will hang out and be friends, after I let go of all of these fantasies that you are my soul mate brother that I have been searching for inside of my soul, that the hugs are sincere, that the love is real, that we could wrestle and that would be chill.

I just think that it takes too long to get to know people and I am annoyed by this letter and needing to write it, but I might need to write another one. I just want to lay next to you without touching, but that would be too much. It has been a long time since I have had a crush on somebody and I am doing this all wrong.

It is important to have mystery and to let it happen. But even me saying that is presumptuous to future spaces and I feel bad for putting that shit onto anything. You are just a human and you are just doing your own thing and I need to stop. Thank you, life.

Sincerely,

a love addict