So here’s the embarrassing thing: I still don’t wish I’d never met you.

One of my first memories is playing this game with you, and you were cheating, and I was half-heartedly arguing with you and then let it go, because you were seven and I was all of five. As a reward, you taught me how to lie convincingly.

You said you were the President of the United States, and I looked into your eyes and believed you.

It’s always been sort of like that.

When you were in tenth grade, you tried to commit suicide, ended up in the hospital, and were relocated to jewish private school. My parents bought you yiddish flash cards for your birthday, and I sat back and watched the boy who had taught me to question my world spin more and more out of control.

In my fifth grade year, I told my friends I’d had my first kiss with you.
In eighth grade, it happened.
In between, you came out of the closet.

So here, I guess, is the thing I never got to say:
I forgive you for breaking a fifteen-year-old heart
for straining a friendship that defined my life
for how I still miss you when the wind blows so hard that my hair ends up a tangled mess that you called Raphaelite.