You say you hope I find what I’m looking for, on your way out the door. You tell me you can’t be what I want you to be. That I’m in love with love. I don’t understand half the things you say. They seem like ideas you throw against the wall to explain to yourself why you’re leaving. They don’t have much to do with me or my feelings.

I don’t mean to say you don’t care about me. You do in your self-involved way. Can anyone actually see or feel into anyone else? We have relationships with projections of others for the most part, I believe.

By making yourself the bad guy you feel better about ditching me. You think you’re softening the blow. If anything, you’re making it worse. Because now, not only am I alone, but if I believe you were shit to begin with, that you don’t deserve me, or whatever, I then have to admit I’m a bad judge of others. If I’m so great and smart and cool, how could I make the mistake of getting involved with someone like you?

You left all the stuff that wouldn’t fit into that little yellow car here with me. I have to wake up every day in this graveyard of our marriage. Some days I want to throw all your shit out the window into the backyard and make a bonfire. Would that exorcise the demons you’ve left in your absence?

Then you call and say you miss me. But you don’t want to work things out. You just want to wallow in the sadness of failure. The way you describe failing again at a relationship, this time with me, after a series of failures with other men, sounds like a setback on a resumé or your goal/career arc rather than a human interaction with someone of your own species. This failure is like a work project that didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped. You’re taking responsibility. The buck stops with you. Like no one else on ‘the team’ could do anything to salvage the thing in the end.

I’ve never worked in an office so I don’t have the language or training to make sense of my life in corporate terms.