Into the Oven

The Letter

Amaryllis sat on her bed, hugging a pillow between her knees and her chest. It had been three years since she's seen them. Three years since they've talked, three years since they'd laughed together. They had promised to always be friends--to be friends was the key phrase, Amaryllis had thought--but their definition of friendship turned out to be different. She didn't realize that "be friends" meant keeping in touch every hour of every day. She thought that they would be friends, despite the words. Or maybe that sort of friendship didn't work out in real life. There was no such thing as telepathy, after all. Friendship without contact didn't exist.

Who are you?

Amaryllis stared at her phone blankly, wondering if this dreadful anticipation was how others felt when she deleted them from her life. How easy it was, now that technology existed, to remove someone from one's life. How simple. A tap on the contacts app, a swipe from right to left, a red button. Gone.

She felt like an app downloaded from the online database. Talk to me for free, she thought bitterly, achieve some milestones. Then uninstall me out of boredom. Reinstall me again.

This wasn't the first time they did this to her. It was the fourth. Did they want to keep in touch or not? Did she want to keep going with this? To talk to them each time, re-explain why they were friends? Did she have to keep pulling them back, keeping them with her?

Of course, not. But then why was she acting like an overprotective parent?

Amaryllis tapped furiously on her phone, blinking away tears and pulling her feet closer towards herself. It was a letter. It would be her last message. It would be closure.

Dear you,

She wasn't sure why she wrote you. Maybe she wanted to keep it ambiguous. Maybe she wanted them to figure things out for once. To guess who it was. Surely, after everything she said, they would recognize her. Recognize her without a name. The name didn't matter in a relationship, Amaryllis realized. She wanted, desperately, for them to recognize her soul. Her spirit.

Sometimes I feel a rage, boiling under my skin, climbing up my throat, and bubbling beneath the surface. I want to scream, to spew these toxic words and phrases, to spit out all my bitterness and misgivings and frustrations. But I don't.

Because if I do, I know I'll cause needless conflict and hurt people for no reason at all. It wouldn't make me feel better afterward, it would just end friendships in ways worse than they've already ended and added to problems that were supposedly resolved.

Resolved without me.

But now, you probably know that I am a person of closure; of last words and goodbyes, of ending things right if they have to end. That's why I'm here today. Because if I don't write it somehow, this rage will burn inside me and eat me up. This is my closure for something I never got the chance to do.

I now realize that we are different people with different beliefs about how the world should work. Maybe you think that I haven't changed from my clingy ways, and perhaps I feel as if you haven't as well. But the reality is that we both have changed, but we can't see the other change because we haven't seen each other in three years.

You have your jumps. You fling from one friend to the next, not allowing yourself to get hurt or attached because you know in your heart that people are unreliable and will eventually leave you anyways, no matter what. Your family is no different. Your conservative parents don't understand you, they won't try to understand you because you're into girls. They don't understand you because you identify not as "he" or "she" but instead, by "they." "It's a phase," your parents say because the world simply doesn't work that way in their eyes.