10/10/2017
Dear Aubrey,
Hey. It’s Simone. If you’re reading this, I guess I’m dead.
As of writing this, I’m packing everything up to go in-patient for my eating disorder. I really don’t want to go. I want to be able to die at home, in my room, where the sheets smell like me, and a little bit like Grace. I want to stay here a little longer, in denial. I don’t want to go away.
I’m afraid everything will hurt there. That this numbness will wear off. In my own little place, covered in cigarette butts and old, broken makeup palettes, smeared into the once red carpet from my constant absentminded ambling around to the sound of all those terribly edgy Musical.ly covers of TØP and P!ATD, I’m able to shut out reason. I’m able to ignore the changing leaves outside—to ignore the fact that in a few-weeks-time, I won’t have any other choice, locked up in a windowless room with four white walls, like a caged animal.
But that’s not what this letter is about. This letter is my apology to you, Aubrey. I know that all their ploys to get you to talk to me, to tell me I need to change, are because they knew the only person who had any power to change my mind is you. I’m sorry I put that burden on you. And I’m sorry I brought it up again, now, when it must seem like I’m suggesting it was all your fault I ended up this way. But I want you to know that no one could’ve stopped me. Not even myself, babe.
So, I think I owe it to you to tell you what the hell was going on back in California, when I decided to shut you out of my life once and for all.
When I first met you, I really didn’t want to like you. We were just too different—a shoplifting transfer student in a defunct reform program and a quiet, bookish tomboy. It was only seventh grade, but somehow, we were both already fucked up enough to feel fucked up together. Not to be cliché—I know, it’s cliché—but we had a different sort of connection. Despite all those non-verbal (sometimes verbal) fuck offs. Even on those days when I wasn’t smiling, or when I wasn’t inviting you over for a conversation (read: everyday), you’d try to cheer me up anyway. It was a little desperate, to be honest. Maybe I liked that. I was a fucked-up kid. In fact, there were a few other girls I thought might suit me better.
All straight girls, of course.
In any case, that doesn’t matter. You were the girl I fell in love with, and I wouldn’t trade the seven years we had together—first as friends, and then as lovers—for anything else in the world, damnit.
But even those years weren’t too easy for me. Turns out four years at Catholic school weren’t enough to pray the gay the away. Nor were they enough to exorcise whatever demons were possessing me to starve myself and deface Christian iconography in the name of aesthetics (upside down crosses used to be the shit in middle school).
But high school was only worse. When Mom decided to transfer me to Sacred Heart? It was because she was suspicious about us. About whatever it was we were, at that point. Back then I guess I thought skipping gym class to play kissing games with your friend in the bathroom for forty-five minutes was a totally normal, heterosexual activity.
In any case, I changed her mind real quick. Dropped the numbers. Dropped my grades. Dropped out, basically. It wasn’t half a semester before she let me transfer to your school. By then, the damage was done. Things had gone to shit. Not to be so negative. (I’m kind of dying over here.)
Sophomore year, Grace left home for the ballet.
Her eating routines stayed.
Coffee, coffee, coffee. Ibuprofen. More coffee. All throughout middle school, she was the person I watched—the person I imitated. She was this beautiful woman that I always wanted to make proud—a woman I wished I never met as a five-year-old orphan. As her sister, I grew fat and ugly and American in front of her, as she grew prettier and skinnier.
All I wanted was to be like her. I realize now she was on a strict diet at school—one to maintain her performance weight—but all I saw was the morning fasting, the nightly jump-roping, the weekly weigh-ins. Monkey see, monkey do. I didn’t go to ballet school. I didn’t see the rest of the picture. By the time I was old enough to figure it all out—you can’t undo those years of damage all on your own.
Surprise, surprise, the mother and father who “saved” me never did a thing to help me when shit hit the fan. Don’t get me wrong, babe. Not like I’m blaming them, either. That wouldn’t be right. I never expected their lives to revolve around me. I just expected that they might take a little more responsibility in raising the child they chose to raise. The child they picked for her hazel eyes and smooth skin and thick hair.
I still remember that day, you know? The day of divine intervention—the day these two angels with glowing white skin came to take me away from food shortages and hand-me-down clothes. My first ride on a plane. Meeting my sister, at that time a gangly preteen with long legs and frizzy hair and painted-over freckles. I guess I should’ve noticed how much of an outsider I already was. But I thought being different was a good thing. I thought being special was enough to keep my new mother and father around. To keep them together.
Fucking ridiculous, am I right? Maybe this is all speculation. Maybe my therapist is putting ideas in my head, saying shit like, “These things usually stem from childhood trauma.”
I was one of the lucky ones. That’s what I was always told.
Maybe moms and dads that leave troublesome twelve-year-olds with goody-two-shoes college freshmen don’t feel responsible when the college kid can’t fix the problem. Or maybe they just felt scammed. Like they got a defective child. Like I wasn’t worth the payout.
California was my last chance. It wasn’t an adventure like I said it would be. I never told you this—I didn’t think it was important—but Mrs. Ramazanova, my birth mother, died last year. Some new disease going around in Kazakhstan, apparently. I don’t know exactly. In any case, they received some sort of stipend from the embassy. It was a ton “back home.” After conversions and taxes and all the wiring fees, my parents didn’t get all that much.
But it was enough.
Enough to make them try one last time.
When my mother called you up on the phone that night, I was in bed, as always, the blanket over my head, eyes closed, sheets drenched. I could hear her. I could almost predict her lies.
She was the one who taught me to lie, I think.
“I put aside some money for you girls’ graduation,” she’d said. “I was thinking about how you always said you wanted to go out west. It would be good for Mel, too, to get to go out and explore, don’t you think? Yes. Yes, of course. We’ve got some family out there you two could stay with for a couple of weeks. San Francisco.”
Explore. My. Ass. Motherfucker.
She was sending me to an eating disorder camp, Aubrey. One of those places like in “Girl, Interrupted,” where people go crazy and hang themselves with volleyball nets.
I don’t know what the hell she was planning to do when we got there, the two of us, all alone—the two of us. But she was planning on doing something, goddamnit. I knew I couldn’t tell you, because I knew what you’d say.
You’d tell me to go. And you’d be right.
So I came to terms with it. I decided I could do it—that I’d follow through. That I was worth it, and that I’d get better, and I’d be alright and everything would hurt for a little while so that we could have our little fucking happily ever after.
But I lost it. Suddenly the eating disorder took over and I started lying again. I didn’t know the plan, but I knew that I couldn’t wait and find out. So, I fucked it up. I did the one thing Mom wouldn’t expect of me.
I pulled you the closest I’d ever pulled you.
And then I finally pushed you away.
I thought I was doing you a favor, letting you go. I thought I was freeing you from following this miserable story to the end. There were nicer ways, probably. But I’m not nice. I’m sick.
I felt your trust in me and I used it. That morning when you noticed things were different, when you saw the cigarette shaking in my trembling hand and the wind blowing through my greasy, matted hair as my vanity dissipated into the smog-filled atmosphere—my vanity, the very thing I thought was trapping me—I could see it in your eyes. I could feel you looking through me. That’s terrible, isn’t it? I wanted you to save me. I wanted you to take all the pain away. I wanted an intervention.
Another one. A real one.
Isn’t that selfish? You must’ve been able to see that I was falling apart. Maybe you thought it was some calculated descent into madness. Maybe you really did believe I always had it together. Well, I didn’t. I was dying right in front of you and making you watch.
The girl who saved my life over and over again. My girl. You were my world, Aubrey. I would do anything for you.
The girl who I told about the collection of underwear I stole from sleepovers. The girl who laid out on the roof in the starlight with me. The girl who kissed me hard every day because she was too stingy to buy her own stick of lipstick. (Revlon Super Lustrous 325, by the way. Toast of New York. In case you still haven’t bought one for yourself.) The girl who taught me how to love again. Who taught me how to live again. Who stuck by me through those days of Tamagotchi trading and Spit gambling to cigarette addictions and hair bleachings and occult phases that lasted too long.
Just for that first night out west, I wallowed in the lie. When the gentle, freezing breeze woke me up in the middle of the night, I wrapped your arms around me to warm myself up. I wondered if that woke you up and you were just pretending to sleep—if by morning you’d unwrapped your arms from me because you were afraid you might break me. I smiled at that thought. And then I hated myself for it.
Not long after, as we walked down Mission, I told you I was done with you.
“Are you feeling alright, Mel?”
I told you I was tired of the condescending.
“Simone?”
I called you a bitch—I said you’d ruined my life.
You went to embrace me. I sank away. You tried again and again and again and I wished you would just give up—I wished you’d just let me go, just let me die. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again, after that morning. After I ran into that passing taxi and left you with a wad of cash and my great uncle’s phone number—my final fuck off.
I wish I could take my brain out of my skull and trade it with yours, just for a day, to think how you think and see how you see. Maybe then I could love myself the way you love me. Maybe then I could really see how selfish hating myself this way is.
I don’t want to die, babe. I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to leave you behind.
But everything is falling apart and it’s too late and I don’t know what to do.
So, to the girl who I showed my collection of ruined notebooks, full of the numbers I counted on to undo me. To the girl I owe everything. To the girl whose life I surely ruined.
I love you. My biggest regret in life is that I hurt you. Because I know the way you are, I know that even though you shouldn’t, you’ll forgive me for everything. That’s why I had to write it all down. This is my last act of selfishness. This is how I’ll die in peace. So, I’m sorry. And thank you.
Большое спасибо,
Simone Hope-Meyers
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