Posted on by Liz

I keep rereading our old conversations. Over and over and over again. I get something new out of it each time. Today, I noticed you asked me six years ago if I ever watched Game of Thrones. I said no. You asked me a few times later too and I conveyed that I had no intention of watching it either.

My husband made me watch the entire series beginning this past March. I didn’t like it. I don’t know if it was because the hype surrounding the television show made my expectations higher than they would have been if I had just started watching the show from the beginning, but nevertheless, I was not impressed. From what you said me to me in that conversation though, you were.

It surprised me actually. While the show does have its fair share of violence and sex and beautiful men and women, which are things you lived for, it seems like it would have been below you in terms of the quality of writing and the amount of intelligence it requires for viewers to understand. I always assumed a show like Games of Thrones wouldn’t really pique your interest and would only be something you watched to please a boyfriend or lover. Maybe that’s how it started. Maybe he asked you to watch and then you got hooked. Maybe it became your guilty pleasure. I wonder if that’s how it was with the heroin too.

The series’s last episode airs tonight. I’ll be thinking of you. I’m always thinking of you.

Posted on by Liz

Outside

The weather is so nice today. The bluest sky, the eighty degree temperature… It reminds me of you. Your Instagram is full of poses outside, in a bikini, at the beach or by the pool. You sought it out above anything else. The attention you got was all you ever talked about. This obsession with attention was what drove you and in some way, it took away your mystery.

But in the end, looking at pictures of you makes me realize that I didn’t know you anymore. I’m not sure what you became in the last years. I know it wasn’t who I was friends with. I’m curious and afraid of what I found while searching for you online. So many nude photos, your long brown hair covering your chest. You looked so vulnerable, so desperate, like you finally let your addiction to attention take over. I guess that’s what it was. Vanity mixed with low self worth and confidence took over who you were and the friend I knew, the one who fought so hard against who she was, was gone.

And then you were gone too.

Posted on by Liz

Why.

Hello. It’s been over a month now. I can’t believe it. Time goes by so quickly when you’re preoccupied. Funny how life does that. It distracts you, puts a thousand things in front of you, and then you find yourself wondering what the fuck you were doing for the past thirty days…for the past thirty months. It certainly wasn’t anything productive.

Let me tell you about my life right now. I live in Florida. Yes, that’s right. I moved to Central Florida back in 2017. This August, I’ll have lived here for two years with my husband and two cats in a townhouse in a city located about forty five minutes away from Disney World. It’s hot and humid and it storms every afternoon in the summer and it’s wonderful. People don’t know how to drive properly in this state, but with it being the elderly capital of America, I don’t think anyone would expect any different.

I work in the office of a small business which is not a departure from what my life was up north. I have the weekends off so I can’t complain.

Anyway, that’s enough context. I don’t want to bore you with the mundanity that is always my life. It’s always the same and never interesting. Even when I thought it was interesting, it never measured up to the drama that was your constant reality. I must have reread our online conversations dozens of times in the past weeks and it amazes me how often a new boy was brought up by you. This one you like, this one you don’t, this one you wish liked you, this one stopped returning your texts… I always listened and gave you my advice but you never listened. That was just your way. And I respect that.

From the rereading, I noticed that I didn’t contribute in the same way you did. Shorter sentences, a lot of one word answers. It wasn’t that I didn’t care or that I was uninterested. A lot was going on in 2013 and 2014 and I just didn’t have the emotional capacity to take on any more at the time. I was going through a personal journey – one that I needed to go at alone. And it wasn’t easy for me to articulate that to anyone. We started speaking less and less and then when I got engaged, it stopped completely. I don’t know why. I will never know why.