The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done

I made the font on my laptop really small to write this note. I’m on a plane in the middle seat. 

Here’s the worst thing you can do to your girlfriend: Nothing. It’s easy. You don’t do anything. You stop responding to your recently long-distance girlfriend of 6 months, for days and eventually weeks at a time, like you’re in a war or something, while she texts you every couple of days with increasing panicked urgency, first worrying that something has happened to you and then eventually accepting that you have chosen to never respond to her ever again. 

Begging for the opportunity to return my things which I left with her in Chicago, the place she helped me move out of, box by heavy box, before helping me set up my apartment in Seattle, box by heavy box. 

All the while I know that our relationship has an expiration date. I’m not actively thinking: Ooh, I’m gonna break up with this girl. I’m thinking: Sam is nice and pleasant to be around. Why overthink it? Even if every new thing I learn about her gives me less and less faith in her ability to flourish independently, lead others, or challenge me, even if the sight of her face or body doesn’t genuinely turn me on like I once thought it did when I was less in tune with my base self and desires, even if I struggle to say “I love you” in a way that actually conveys some truth about myself and not just as a bandaid for her fatally damaged self-esteem, even if she is afraid of my friends and seems unable to convey any personality around them or really any stranger, she’s such a nice girl! 

She’s so good to me. She’s accommodating, to a fault. Polite, responsive, and totally dependent. I’ve found a good girl. I shouldn’t let her go. 

I never did really dump her. Technically, we’re still dating. This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. Knowing her, I knew that my departure from her life, no matter how, would hurt her really badly. 

I wasn’t planning on doing it like I did. I was struggling to think of responses to her texts and forgot about one, then struggling to think of justifications for why I haven’t been responding, then losing the willpower to do even that, and then… well you may have been in this situation before. It’s been too long and it’s too awkward to respond, so you just don’t. 

And with most people, this would have been it. But this is a girl I’ve been dating for 6 months, pictures posted on social media and family members met and everything. So from October to late November and even into the new year, I received a string of extremely distressing messages which I do not currently have the guts to revisit, now or at any future point in my life. It would be like watching a really sad movie that I directed, except the characters really experienced the feelings you’re imagining they did and it’s all because of you. 

Today is my 24th Birthday.