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I went to his grave yesterday for the first time in almost fourteen years. Mom tricked me into it after feeding me a forty-dollar cheeseburger, which feels important to disclose. I told Charlie he was a fucking asshole for dying and thanked him for ruining my life—oh and BTW our dad is a dick.

I also told him he gets to be my brother again instead of the warning that everything I love will disappear if I don’t toe the line.

I’m still dealing with it. I don’t expect understanding this to repair anything between us. I wanted you to know I finally found what you asked me to find—but now I have to heal it, and that is going to take time.

Also, you left in an Uber Economy even though you are a millionaire. I remain offended by that.

Charm

His response reaches me at the boutique. I recognize the return address as a hotel in Chicago and lock myself inside my office before opening it.

Charm,

Uber Economy was seven minutes closer, and I was trying to leave before I lost my nerve. Money hasn’t made me patient or frivolous. Deep breath, I flew economy too. Don’t clutch the pearls too tightly.

I have learned to splurge on seven-dollar marinara and better sheets.

Anyway, about your letter and what’s broken. Your brother wasn’t the broken piece. You already know that, but I needed to write it anyway. Charlie was a kid who died. He doesn’t deserve to carry every terrible decision the living made afterward, and you don’t deserve to spend the rest of your life obeying the fear his death left behind.

I’m sorry you lost him. I’m furious that his death became a bill everyone kept sending you, but sympathy for how you learned to survive cannot erase what surviving beside you did to me.

I don’t think you expect it to anymore, and that matters.

Understanding why your hand reached for control doesn’t mean I trust it not to reach again. It does mean I finally know what you believed you were protecting when you did it.

Understanding isn’t trust, but it also isn’t nothing. For the record, I would’ve paid a thousand dollars to hear you call your dead brother an asshole in front of your mother.

We lost tonight. Don’t ask about the score because I’ll lie.

Keep writing.

Ryan

I don’t ask about the score.

Instead, I write the letter I have avoided since treatment. It has taken me a week to send it, but I am working on my time these days.

Ryan,

I used your love.

I loved you, and I used being loved by you to regulate every feeling I didn’t know how to survive alone. Both things are true.

Your reassurance became a drug. When I felt ugly, frightened, or unworthy, I reached for you until you made the feeling stop. When the relief wore off, I needed another dose. I treated every moment you needed my reassurance as evidence that something between us had changed.

You became responsible for proving I was desirable, safe, intelligent, and worth choosing. I called that intimacy because admitting how dependent I had become would have forced me to acknowledge how sick I was.

When you asked for something in return, I failed you.

I could explain that I was starving, panicked, conditioned, and already collapsing. Those things are true too, but they don’t change the experience you had inside our relationship. You loved me, and I made that love responsible for holding me together.

You were used.

I hate writing that. I want to soften it until neither of us has to look at the ugliest version of what I did, but you deserve the sentence without my illness standing in front of it.

You were also loved. Completely, desperately, and badly.

I understand why that might not feel like enough.