Now I know what it's like to love someone deeply and not have them love you back. I understand everything in your letter to me-- The phone ringing and my heart exploding with hope, drifting off during conversations, wondering where you are, what you're doing, who you're with, and how it can be so easy for you to go along as always, go for days without talking to me or seeing me. We used to talk every day, see each other almost every day, and now? Now I feel like I'm missing half of me, and like the cliche says, it's the "better half".

You've told me it's over, that you'll never date me again. Now my role in your life has been filled, and I don't figure into your thoughts, your plans, your daily cares anymore. It feels as though everything you ever wrote to me in your love letters and said on the phone to me while I was away have been stripped of all their meaning and have been turned to lies by time's passage. To make it all the worse, the people who now occupy your life-- your backstabbing ex-boyfriend and his backstabbing friends, your cocaine-addicted boss who thinks he's hunted by aliens-- only make me feel worse, making me wonder how worthless my love must be if you reject it for these.

I write this letter as an expression of defeat. I know that you're never coming back to me. I know that, to you, I was once special. Now I'm not special any longer. I only wish the Anna I remember, MY Anna-- who I let cut my hair after knowing her less than a week; whose beautiful cats (you can hear the love in her voice when she calls them "Kitlets") I held, and gave medicine to, and played with for countless hours; who, fully clad in jeans, sneakers, and flannel, joyfully danced on top of my bar because she "always wanted to do that"; who told me, night after night, when she was lying in my arms, how glad she was that I was there-- I wish she was still here. Because if she was, I'd hold her, and love her, and court her, and cherish her until the end of time.

All my love,

Karl