A letter from Dec 05, 2023

Dear Future Me, Hi. I'm in my first term of college. It's crazy. I have a condo, I suddenly have new, better, nicer friends who are actually decent people. I'm dating a guy. He's got this big curly hair, this goofy smile and the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen. They're the type of eyes you never want to look away from—not even for a second. And he's a decent person. Rough around the edges but I think we mesh. I'm obsessed with cleaning the condo. He gets it too. He cleans it when I'm away, and acts like he hasn't when I come home. I feel like I'm such a bad partner; I've never been with someone for long. I would leave when it got a little bumpy because I used to think, what's the point, why worry over another person, I have enough **** on my mind already. I would always say, I don't believe in relationships. Not in a cynical, bitter way—just, I don't see the point of it for me. I still try to look at relationships as a complete separate part of my life from every other part. Because who wants to be defined by their relation to another person? I like him a lot. I'm trying to buy him some gifts for Christmas. I like him, but I cry over him every other day. I don't know, sometimes it hurts how he always says he hates this area of the city—wouldn't that hurt you too, to hear someone you like say they hate where they always end up seeing you? Because I'm associated with this place. And he called me dumb once, and I cried, and he apologized, but now instead of saying I'm dumb outright he just implies it. That's not much better. And sometimes I feel like he doesn't care; he doesn't text me much throughout the day, when I talk about things he doesn't ask anything, and he always just complains at me. And I'll ask, has anything made you happy at all, he'll say me, but that's such a copout answer. I don't want to be the main answer. I want to hear something like, I read a few pages of that book you gave me, or I walked my dog, or I made something, or I cooked something nice, literally anything. I don't care how grand it is. Why is there no expression of joy? He said his happier memories were with his friend group in junior high. We're in ******* college. What the ****? Do you not at least try to pursue some sort of satisfaction every day? Yeah sure, we "connected" over how rough we are with each other and being haters and whatever, but that's not some shtick I want to follow for the rest of the relationship. I want lovey dovey. I want regular. I want conversation, I want to see love. Not necessarily love for me. Just love for something, literally anything. How can you be without love? How can your heart be so hardened, like clay? Maybe you'll say, oh, he's had it rough, that's why he's like that. I don't know. Maybe. Everyone turns out different. But what kind of man are you (not gender man, human man kind of way)—what kind of man are you to let past dictate present? Constantly. Says he'll turn out his parents, probably. He says he "stumbles onto *****," that's how he described him getting into relationships. I hate it when people feel entitled to me, when they think they deserve something of mine. And I hate it, how casual it is to me, because this is everything to me, this is me going against how I made myself. I made myself alone and I became fine with it. Now I have a taste of some sort of shallow version of love, and I want it. I want more, I want to give more, but I feel it'll scare him off. He broke up with his last ex because their relationship just fizzled out. Like they just stopped talking. I guess that scares me here. I don't want this to fizzle out. I do enjoy our time together. And when he doesn't text, I suddenly feel like, oh, he'll do what he did with his last relationship. When they started to fizzle, he did stuff with me that a guy shouldn't do when he still technically has a girlfriend. We're pretty much broken up, he said. But they weren't actually officially broken up. So. Everything I know about him is so vague. I'm not stupid. I've never felt stupid until him. Tells me I'm dumb. Tells me I don't know him as much as he knows me, that he remembers everything about me but why can't I remember anything about him? I do my best. I never even thought I had bad memory. I put stuff down in a note about him so I can remember. He'll yap so much about certain pieces of media. I engage, I ask, I listen. I like to listen. I know that love should be given with no forethought of receiving any in return. Love is not a transaction, a trade, you give it to give it. But I can't help but hurt when he doesn't ask me much. Okay. Sure. You know I like to clean. I like this music, I like this color. What about how I feel about my family? What about what I want to do with my life? How my day was? How my days go? I know those things about him. He hates his family, his eldest sister's nice but lives in a different country and his other sister's a "*****," because she demands from him too much, and they've both got an age gap too big for him to relate to them, and it's too late anyway to build an actual good relationship with them. He has no aspirations, he said it himself. Doesn't even know why he chose his course. He could've been a lawyer, he says. Passed to go that course. So? What good is potential when not realized? What good is talk when there is no action? In a day, he'll probably do some sort of combination of: play Fortnite, go on a walk, go to the gym, play at the court, do some homework. I don't like that when I imagine us as jsut friends, we probably wouldn't even be good friends, or close friends, much less best friends. I wish I could go from great friend to girlfriend. Something where you actually get to know the person through and through. What was I thinking, dating someone I'd just known for about a month? This story has happened before. BTW, we made up.