Eulogy - For Plan B

Dear Plan B (that's how I always referred you behind your back):

You know how you have a letter that has been post stamped, ready to go but never get mailed because you simply want to wait for the right moment? The precise moment when the mailman is going to come to the front door, and you’d hand deliver it to the mailman, in fear that it’d get lost and the intended recipient claims that he has never received such a letter?

This is such letter. Except I won’t post stamp it, even though by now I know your street address by heart. It took a good four months to memorize the street number, and another two months to remember the building’s characteristic, and now approaching the seventh month, tomorrow to be exact, I will no longer be seeing you under the same light.

This is the goodbye I have been waiting to write.

I have been wanting to say goodbye for some time.  But you know that already.  I know it was the end when I saw you had updated your FB profile picture. You last updated it when I just saw you for the first time again. I suspect every few months you change your profile picture, signaling a new beginning, a new girl. I am the old. I knew that instinctively. I am really good with such things.  But this is not about your new beginning. This is about me, the end of me.

The end of me started since the moment I felt that I loved you. I knew that precise moment when I felt it. I felt it when you handed me that book, that really moving, loving book. The goodbye you had given me. The Savannah trip, where I should be thinking about my children, I thought of you.

I knew that I was falling in love.

In November, someone who was close to me asked me, “Do you love him?” I said, “No.” Definitively.  I pursued you fearlessly, because I didn’t love you. I lusted you.

In April, the same person asked me, “Do you love him?” I looked at her, dumbfounded. Puzzled by that question, I couldn’t answer it, because I knew I didn’t want to acknowledge the answer.

It was nice to pinpoint that precise moment of falling in love. One may not often remember such moment.

It then took another month for me to reply to you when you said “I love you,” by saying “I love you.” I cried that night. It was the last time I saw you. I will see you, I am certain of it, but it will not be in the same light again.

I cried because I knew it was the end.

You don’t love someone you can’t love.

You don’t love someone you ought not to love.

You don’t love someone who does not know what love is, or know how to show it.

You don’t love someone who says “I love you” and then drops off the face of the earth.

You don’t love someone who says “I’ll call you” but never does.

You don’t love someone who says “come to see my new office” but when you ask when he can’t tell you when but certainly not that week  when you know he’s in town.

You don’t love someone who has never spent a day with you, who has broken numerous promises, who has never introduced you to his friends, who knows nothing about you, or cares to know the near-death experience you had since you met him, or the recent medical procedure you undertook.

I cried because I knew love was not a rational thing. I cried because I thought I belonged somewhere. I cried because I knew it was the beginning of an end. 


The moment I knew that I loved you, the moment I responded your "I love you" with "I love you", I knew it was the end.

But instead, I wrote to you, declared how I wanted to try something different, to see you more, to talk to you on the phone, to go away. It was met with dead silence.

I suspected that you deleted the emails. All the emails I ever sent. I suspected I was one of the many admirers of yours.

I suspected you fed me lies after lies. I suspected that when you said, “ I’m not seeing anyone, I am yours.” You said it to everyone else you were involved with.

I suspected that you thought this was a great situation, as long as I was kept under the dark shadow.

I suspected that our dynamics worked as long as you could control me. I was the submissive one in the bedroom. So you had control over me outside of the bedroom too. I suspected that you had wanted me when you wanted me, but not when I wanted you.

I suspected that my love for you was misdirected. I suspected that in your heart, you just said whatever I wanted to hear at the time, to create a mood so that you could have a good fuck.

I suspected that when you moved closer to me, you stepped forward one step and then took two steps backwards.

I was euphoric when the declaration of “I love you’s” were exchanged. But I also knew, instinctively, it was your way to say goodbye.

You said goodbye to me by saying “I love you”, when you were fucking me.

I knew that I enjoyed being mistreated, I wanted to feel emotionally drained, devastated, I wanted to be disrespected, I wanted to be even, abused, in the bedroom. I needed that, because I was abused as a child. I found perversion exciting. I found degradation and humiliation the only way to cope with the other me.

You gave me what I needed. You knew how to tie me up, fuck me in a BDSM style.  I let you control me. You knew my moods. You knew how I enjoyed begging to be fucked, begging to be seen. You knew how I had no self-respect, self discipline or self control. You took great pride in observing it, preserving it.

You knew how to activate me, then file me away when you were tired of me. I enjoyed being regarded as an object, being treated like a whore. I had that dual personality. I confessed to you that I wanted to be submissive to you. I wrote such things to you because I felt that was how our dynamics worked. I trusted you. It was the insecure, self destruct me speaking. I was filled with gusto because I had finally let my guard down. I trusted you blindly. You had no respect for me. You never did. Not this version of me.

I had seen signs from the very beginning but I ignored it. I ignored it because I knew that I needed to get to the edge of the cliff, to free-fall, to crash and burn, before I could bounce back.

I am free falling now.

Will you please not contact me, will you please not visit my FaceBook page, will you please exit left soundlessly?

That me, the one who fell in love, not with the real you but the imaginary you (Imaginary You: the one who loved me back, the one who cared, the one who called often, the one who never cancelled on dates, the one who believed that one day we’d be together like I did), was rapidly evaporating among the misty morning fog.

That free-falling me, would hit the bottom of the cliff any moment now, she’d die of agony, sadness, desperation, and above it all, a broken heart. 

May she rest in peace.

The next time you see me, I will be the person you knew for the last fourteen fifteen years: brave, happy, satisfied with my life, a loving wife and a caring mother, a successful career woman, emotionless, and forgetful. I will already have forgotten your street address, where you have been working, or what you and that other me have ever done. I shall tell you the trips I took with my family, the trips I will be making, and I'll ask you what you’d be up to, how's your dating life, and what is new. We will be two old, platonic friends catching up.

I would like that, to catch up, to be platonic, to pretend nothing ever happened. I am a good actress, because I am truly sincere and convincing. I would like to be your friend, as I have always been.

If you were to ask this version of me, which you won't, but if you did, "Did you ever love me?" I would give you a blank stare, like when you told me that you and I took a trip from Boston to New York. I didn't remember that trip, but I remembered the morning when you left me from that hotel, in Salt Lake City, how you told me "I'll see you tomorrow when you are back to San Francisco." You never did see me that day. We never saw each other under the same light, until last autumn.

Just like that Boston to New York trip, which I had no recollection of, I will not remember this burial, this eulogy, and the lovely, crackling bones that left at the bottom basin of the cliff.