Dear Body of Mine,
Just quietly, this is a slightly awkward letter for me to write to you, given the extremely close proximity you and I are forced to coexist each and every day.
And as I write this, I honestly cannot help but feel like the very worst kind of passive-aggressive roommate. The kind of person who makes awkward small talk with you in the hallway as they leave for work, moments before you wander into the kitchen to find a list of snide ‘housemate rules’ they believe you’ve broken taped to the fridge door, when all you wanted was some toast.
But that’s sadly almost what you and I have become now, isn’t it? Uneasy yet permanent roommates, living in tandem and only ever bothering to really talk to one another when urgent household matters need to be discussed.
But before I go any further, yes, I know you have a lot of cause to be angry at me thanks to all the ways I’ve psychically hurt you over the years.
Your hit list against me must read like the very worst page ripped directly from the binding of a teenage girl’s burn book.
I can see now that causing you to fall from a broken parasail in Thailand, thereby making you crash onto golden sand that ended up feeling like a sheet of cement, was a poorly made decision on my part.
As was that time I forced you to down shots of illegally strong vodka in some dingy pop-up basement bar in Moscow, leaving you so ill on a side street that a lovely homeless man felt sorry enough for us to offer up his water.
And I can see now that dyeing our hair an intense shade of Ronald McDonald red in high school, until I’m pretty sure it actually died of embarrassment and started falling out from the roots, was also the wrong call on my part.
But as much as those questionable decisions caused you extreme discomfort, we both know the deepest source of the real pain I’ve caused you has had nothing to do with overseas adventures gone awry or with my failed quest to mimic Lindsay Lohan’s Parent Trap era hair.
It has to do with the embarrassment and shame I’ve felt around you, and with the cruel things I’ve done to you to mask those growing feelings and thoughts, particularly last year.
For all those things, I need to say that I’m sorry. Because, and please forgive me for using perhaps the worst pre-Tinder break-up phrase ever uttered in the history of man. But in this case, it’s really not you, it’s me.