Email to Cherise

You totally broke me down emotionally. That was obvious last Sunday night when I was literally crying that I wanted to go home. If I hadn't drank any alcohol, then those feelings would probably have remained bottled up inside me; but they still would have been there. Drinking the alcohol only meant that I no longer had the self-control to keep those feelings within myself. But with or without the alcohol, the fact still remained: you totally broke me down emotionally.

So the question is: how did you break me down emotionally?

1) Over the course of three nights and three days, you never said one positive word toward me. Not one compliment. Not one nice thing. Not one thing to make me feel good about myself. You made me feel that I was worthless for you.

2) You very rarely showed any positive emotions to me through actions either. The only rare times that you tried to act nicely toward me was at nighttime when you tried to hug me. But by not having said one nice thing to me over the course of many hours during the day, I couldn't be sure that your actions were genuine. That is to say, I asked myself: is she trying to hug me because she really cares about me, or is she trying to hug me because she really wants to please herself by knowing she has someone that she can hug? In other words, I wasn't sure if your reasons for trying to hug me were caring for me or selfish for you.

3) You didn't make any positive material effort toward me. In other words, you didn't offer any kind of token of love or any gift as an apology for how you had treated me. So in the end, I didn't even have anything, like a handwritten note or a thoughtful gift, that I could look at as a reassurance of how you say you feel about me. I literally had nothing to hold on to to show me that you loved me.

4) When I got upset, you purposely antagonized me. You made fun of me. You looked at me like I was a freak. You criticized me. You made me even angrier. You made the whole situation worse. If you had cared about me, you would have tried to hear me out. You would've tried to calm me down. You would've given me a hug. You would've reassured me that you loved me. But instead you wouldn't even show me the respect of letting me finish a sentence. You wouldn't even let me speak. That makes me feel like what I have to say, how I feel, what I'm thinking, is not important to you, it doesn't matter to you, it isn't even worth two seconds of your time or your life. Your approach makes me feel like you think you're superior to me. If you don't show me any respect, much less love or caring, then you must be looking down at me. But if we aren't equals, then why are you with me?

We should end our relationship. My head tells me that we should end our relationship. And although my heart is very reluctant, it wants to end our relationship too. So the question is: why? Why do I think we should end our relationship?

1) As everything above clearly indicates, we cannot communicate. We have never been able to communicate with each other. You know just as well as I do that we have had only very rare moments where we were able to communicate with each other. Almost all of our communication has been superficial, just like any conversation we could have with a stranger off the street.

2) Any progress we have ever made with each other has been fleeting. Due to the pressures of law school and due to you almost always being apart from me, we cannot realistically grow closer. The few times we have grown is when I have felt relatively unpressured from school and when you have been here with me. But those times have been few and far between. Is that how a relationship is supposed to be? One step forward, then two or three steps back?

3) We must accept the fact that neither one of us is going to change the other. And so, since we have never been happy together, what makes us believe that that will ever change? If I wanted to, I could make a list now that you should be with someone that does A, B, and C, and I should be with someone who does D, E, and F. There's no point in doing that though, even though it's true. Each of us simply needs someone who is different than who we have now. As for me, I will only say that I desperately want to feel loved by someone. And I have only rarely felt that from you.

4) And that's the final point, what it all really boils down: I feel completely and utterly empty when I'm with you:

I feel like a man who has been walking a desert for many, many years, waiting for the day to drink more than a few drops of water at at time. Although I know that my parents love me, I was never told "I love you" as a child. Besides my birthday and Christmas, my parents never had money to buy me any gifts or take me out to dinner. After my early toddler years, I was never hugged and kissed. I never saw my parents hug and kiss each other. Because we were relatively poor for the town that we grew up in, there were never any other kids around; all of our classmates lived in the neighborhoods with two-story houses and backyards, while we lived in a two-bedroom apartment with no yard at all. That's almost certainly why Jess and I find it hard to make friends sometimes and why she is yet to find a boyfriend. Our childhood was cold and tough. Despite that, I've grown up to be a mature, well-rounded man. But I still crave for something that I never really had: Love, expressed openly and explicitly. And unfortunately, even with you I never got more than a few drops at a time. I pray to God for the day that I can drink a tall glass of love. Then I will be happy. Then I will know that I have met the woman that I am supposed to spend the rest of my life with. For reasons probably relating back to your childhood, you are cold. As much as I care for you, I can't be with someone who is cold. I've lived with that for too long, and I deserve better.

Last Sunday night I felt so alone. I missed my home so much. I missed Rocky and Moda. I missed Philadelphia, the only witness to my many tears over the years, and yet the city where I have grown up to be a man. Yesterday morning, I had to take the EL to get to the testing site to take the MPRE. A couple in their early twenties sat down two rows in front of me. They were lower-class, blue-collar, and they had a thick Philadelphia accent. They were talking with a friend of theirs sitting in the row directly in front of me. The boyfriend was telling the guy how he and his girlfriend had moved to Voorhees, a town in New Jersey, for a little while before coming back to Philly. He was telling the guy that he should never go to Voorhees. And as he and his girlfriend got up to walk out the subway in Fishtown, he told the guy, "There ain't nuttin' like Philly." When he said that, my heart fluttered. That's exactly how I felt when I was sitting in handcuffs, surrounded by cops, at LAX. And even though I knew you were sitting somewhere nearby, I hadn't felt so lonely in years.