1.6.26

Dear Abigail,

I miss you like crazy. I miss all of you like crazy. It’s really hard to be here and to be living my life so far away from everything I’ve ever known and loved. Plus there’s this sense that I’m not living up to my decision to be here—it was such a drastic thing to move across continents that I feel the need to glean every possible opportunity and experience and adventure from it. And while there have been pockets of time doing that, the majority of my days and hours are spent in my room wondering what to do. 

I don’t know if I’m good at living. When I compare myself to a person whose inner world is unknown to me, I see a human being who instinctively lives. I’m sure the inner world of a stranger is more complicated, though—it has to be—because mine is so fraught with questions about how to live, what I should be doing, what the best possible course of action is, and how much time I am wasting by fretting over all of it. Other people must feel that too. 

It feels like a distant fantasy for me, one I dream about having, to wake up and know what to do with the day, to know who I am, and to feel a sense of continuity with the person I was yesterday. Go to the store, go to work, make dinner, exercise, talk with family… these are things I’d set myself to do everyday if I were a robot following a set of fixed commands. Sometimes it feels like life would be easier lived that way. Because right now I tell myself to act out that list and I say to myself, I don’t want to, I’d rather not, what’s something more interesting, what’s something more worthwhile. Then I chase whatever comes to mind first, my basic impulses which are tied to my compulsions. Compulsions like, watch more Netflix, eat candy for dinner, don’t call a friend, listen to a podcast you don’t care about, lay in bed.

There are all these ideas and goals I had in my head when I got to this country that remain unfinished, some untouched. I wanted to be better at being alone, and I wanted to move away from codependence. The truth is I’ve been so stuck on [redacted] for so many years now that a part of me thinks I had to move across the world to get unstuck from her. But I didn’t anticipate that my problem was hardly proximal and entirely mental. It’s difficult when you love a person so much that you are literally incapable of imagining how their presence in your life could be negative. I remember a year ago in therapy my guy asked me if I thought a friendship with [redacted] was healthy for me and I shut the conversation down so quickly. It was one of the only times in therapy I ever said I didn’t want to talk about a subject. What’s clear to me now is that then I was unwilling to do the work, unwilling to admit that I hadn’t grown from the relationship, hadn’t truly moved past her, and was doing everything in my power to convince myself that I was capable of being friends with her. I remember telling him I didn’t care if it was unhealthy, she was worth it to me. At all costs I had to have her in my life in some capacity, and if she wouldn’t have me romantically, I’d bend over backwards to have her platonically. 

For better or for worse [redacted] and I are really good at rebounding from the serial blurring of platonic lines, and I always have just enough cognitive dissonance in the chamber to tell myself it’s never that serious, and sometimes friends kiss and that has nothing to do with our six years of history, it’s just a physical sensation. But how cheaply can I sell out the person I’ve loved most in this life? How much disregard can I have for the relationship that has meant everything to me, if it means I can get some watered-down version of it in the present? And so the cycle continued. Friends, kiss, justification, anger, hurt, repression, friends… a handful of times in the past year and a half.

I thought that in coming to Spain, I could still escape from the work. Distance will do it’s own thing and I won’t hardly talk to her, won’t think about her, won’t love her. So how then, to no surprise, did I continue contacting her at every step of the way, every sleepless night, every emotional beat, every small victory that felt like summiting a peak and every minor inconvenience that felt like the depths of a chasm––the bike, the apartment, the roommates, the move, the friends, the parties, the isolation… all of it she heard in the moment even though I had told myself she surely wouldn’t mean a thing to me when I got here. Outta sight, outta mind? No. Funny to see how blindly we accept our own lies.

I don’t think this new decision to cut her out of my life for good was made out of some sense that I need to ‘find myself’ and eat-pray-love here in Spain. It’s a simple recognition of patterns that I’ve always known were there for me regarding her, and it’s a long overdue acknowledgment of the cycles that we regularly engage in together. The cycles that are brutally taxing and painful to me and I’m sure to her, that I no longer have the capacity to bear, even if it comes at the cost of knowing one of the most beautiful souls I have had the luxury to meet on this planet. 

There’s a part of me that thinks, too, it’s time to grow up. To take better care of myself. To see myself as if I’m a person over whom I have been given responsibility. Like an infant that I am tasked to wash and feed and clothe daily, that does not permit days off or inattention. I am both infant and caretaker to myself, now, where before I have been only infant. Part of this responsibility is discerning for the child what is poisonous and what is nourishing. In my disinterest in myself I rarely eat a real meal, rarely will feed myself properly or fully, but at the same time it feels like I’m consuming everything all the time. I eat whatever I see, whatever is at hand and in front of me and easily swallowed. This is true both literally and metaphorically. Like an infant putting everything in its mouth without concern for toxins, so too I consume and consume and consume. The metaphor functions for many areas of my life; in the context of this letter, though, it refers to a handful of my relationships which are not safe for me and not safe from me. But it is time to cleanse.

Please know that nothing has changed about the way I feel about her, you, Emma, or anyone else. This letter also is not a ‘goodbye’ or even necessarily a distancing (though I believe things will be different going forward). It’s simply what’s on my mind today and I once promised you a letter a few months ago. I wish I had more brain space right now to tell you about Paris or Geneva or Alicante, and I regret how we won’t be seeing those places together anymore, and I’m sorry. But I stand by my decision to end my friendship with [redacted], indefinitely. I apologize for how that will inevitably affect my relationship with the group since she, at least initially and crucially, has always been the gateway for me. But, I trust that the individual relationships we’ve built over our own years of friendship are strong enough to withstand much. (A consequence of my toxic obsession with her is the belief that she is/was the center of all of my other important relationships and so without her my entire social net would disintegrate. This does little to respect the friendships I/we’ve built outside of her.) I want to emphasize here my decision comes from an admittance of my own mental unwellness since being here––I’m pretty sure I’m pretty seriously depressed and the next step in the care plan is to go to a doctor. If I were maybe a bit more stable I’d be able to manage these relationships with more tact. And that includes with people like [also redacted], who continue to text me and ask me why I haven’t responded. The truth is I don’t know why, because so much of the time I don’t understand my own actions. And even if I do understand them, I judge them or can’t accept them. But in 2026 I decided I wanted to try to live for myself non-judgementally, and to let myself act without much questioning. No more fretting over what I should or should not be doing, worrying about maximizing or minimizing experiences. I’m just going to let myself act. And this is where it’s leading me.

I miss you, I miss her, I miss who I was in Santa Barbara and I am scared that person’s gone. If not gone, changed. Here’s to changing for the better––

Luke