What Used To Be Love Letters, by Anonymous

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

The carpet I am sitting on is blue and brown.  In the corners, against the brushed metal baseboard and the terminal gates, is the dust and dander of world travelers.  It’s the kind of dust that will remain live there untouched until someone eventually tears this place down for a new and improved version.

“Progress” always comes.  Change always comes.  All is inevitable.

I poke at the nubs of dirty blue and listen to someone I was in love with for two years repeat, “Are you serious?  Are you serious?  Are you serious?”  He can’t believe I’ve moved on.  And the more he can’t believe I’ve moved on, the more my chest hurts and the more I suspect I haven’t moved on at all.

I don’t know what I want anymore.

I don’t know who I want anymore.

“End it,” he tells me, “Just end it.”  He wants me back and he wants me back forever.  He can see himself with me for a really long time.

Now he does.  Now he does after I’ve met someone else who has already told his parents that he’s met the woman he is going to marry.  How can I be the same impossible thing in the heads of two different boys?

Ambivalence was easier.  Ambivalence allowed me to move on.  The hurt subsided and the sobbing died down and I wiped off the saline snail trail left by tears running down the side of my face.  I moved on.  I thought I moved on.

Now I’m right back here in this place of pining for the past and missing someone I had stopped missing.  What the fuck is wrong with me?

I’m crying again.  I’m crying and I’m telling him I don’t know what I’m doing because, well, I don’t know what I’m doing.  I don’t know if he’s right for me, I don’t know if my new boyfriend is right for me.  All I know is I feel like I am being drawn and quartered by relationships old and new.

“What?!” he barks.  He never asks why.  The cell phone burns against my cheek.

I am incapable of making choices on my own. When left to my own devices, even the smallest decision is excruciating.  For me, ordering breakfast can be like buying a house.  And now I have to make a decision that is entirely my own.

“Are you sleeping with him?”

I can’t say anything.  I stare out the giant window at airplanes passing slowly through the blackness.  I notice that the ground where the planes park are painted lines that remind me of childhood hopscotch games and homicide chalk drawings.

The victim was here…

“So that’s a yes.”

I’m silent until I can muster up the courage to respond with, “I can’t say no.”

“Did you stay with him this weekend?”

I mutter an affirmative.

He says it must be serious and that he can’t believe this.  He says he feels like an idiot and he can’t believe I let him say all of the things he said to me the other day.  An amorous confessional two months too late.   He says he wishes he had been given a warning so he could have stopped thinking about me, could have stopped wasting his time.

When I can’t find any more words to describe just how confused I am I say that my flight is getting ready to board and that I will talk to him soon.

When he says that he’s wearing me down I tell him that’s not what’s going on and I’m not promising anything.  I’m not saying I’m going back to him.  I’m saying I’m confused.

I hang up the phone and I pop a Klonopin into a mouthful of spit and swallow without the intention of going to the water fountain.  I do not taste the bitter and it does not scratch my throat.

My boarding group is called and I hobble up, my body weary from the words.  I roll my luggage forward, onto the plane, into another airport with its own dusty corners, with its own unerring need for progress.

Moving forward.  Moving on.