from the other side

of the text to your ex

You will work on this letter for ten months. It begins honest, raw, juvenile. You try to collapse four years into a few paragraphs. Considering the audience is your ex-boyfriend, you edit, restructure, and overhaul fragments of your life and emotions. You reference your journals. You have to strike the perfect balance. 

You have a specific set of aims with this breach of no-contact, four years later. You need him to know what you know now: He cheated, and you knew when, who with, what happened, and exactly how he hid it. 

You are not sure why you need him to know it—in fact, you spent time challenging this inclination of yours, wondering how leaving it alone might feel. You could keep your current peace of tossing and turning each night, maladaptive air fist-fighting, and treating showers as an imaginary court of law (you’re always the prosecutor, obviously).

A year or two of compulsive mental drafting will prove that you could not handle how that felt. 

So you write.