A Letter to a Friend about Rejection, Enthymemes, and Good Omens
Article and Art by Mira Springer
Dear Leyla,
I am getting stuck writing letters to the wrong people. I started with a response to a letter written to me in high school by this boy who sucked who I loved. He wrote:
"The more I think about your romantic life, the more I think about ‘the guy’ I see you with, who is just so not me, someone who will drop anything to watch whatever show you think is interesting and want to talk about; someone who has as much, or more, energy than you, someone who can keep up."
The letter ends: "I want you to know that I see everything you do, no good deed goes unpunished."
There are 44 commas in the letter and two periods. I find myself thinking about "the guy" often, far more often than I think about the boy who invented him.
Dear Reed,
I have no idea where you are now or how you're doing. I don't want to know. It was funny to me that you made a reference to Wicked in that letter when we were both so vehemently not musical theater kids. Recently I realized that “no good deed goes unpunished” was something an old Italian priest said and was not invented by the people who wrote Wicked. This makes it less funny. There was a time when I thought you were the most interesting person on earth; I would have stayed up all night listening to you talk about comedy. You did things to me I can forgive and things to other people I can't. Either way, I think you would bore me now.
That line, “keep up,” came up again last fall. Another boy told me that he wasn’t good enough for me, that I needed someone who could “keep up.” I wanted to tell him that I didn’t think I was moving that fast. I wanted to tell him that he was doing a better job keeping up than anyone ever had before. I wanted to tell him that sometimes, I struggled to keep up with him, but that the footrace was part of what was so fun about it.
Dear "the guy,"
I wanted to tell him I thought he might be you. He’d been telling me in different ways, over and over again that he wasn’t, but I swear I saw it embroidered on the tag of one of his sweatshirts. I swear I caught a glimpse of that boundless energy just behind the green in his eyes.
Leyla, what if this person doesn't exist? What if I spend the rest of my life writing letters in my head, in my journal, scratched into the soft parts of my skin to the people that I mistake for them?
I spent an entire evening writing descriptions of all ten of the boys who rejected me in high school and how they did it. The one who stopped giving me drum lessons, the one who later recounted to me in great detail a theater-related sex dream he had about me, the one where I confessed my feelings with Love Actually style posters and my friends bought me a strawberry milkshake afterward. I couldn't remember who the tenth one was.
I deleted the list. I'm not sure why I wrote it, or why I feel the urge to keep track of these things so obsessively. I want to make a graph and plot every point: which rejections were physical, which were emotional, which ones were casual brushes off the shoulder, and which ones were heart-wrenching gut punches. I envy people who lived during times when letter-writing was more rampant. They got to keep records of all of those correspondences, pieces of carbon-copied, flimsy paper that got passed down to their children who don't know what to do with them. So much of what I've written to people exists only in the digital realm. My children will never read it unless I leave them my passwords in my will.
Getting rejected is a point of pride for me. When I try to explain this to people, they seem to think I am being dishonest and pathetic, but it's completely true. Putting my heart out on the line like that gives me this floating and unsettled feeling in my stomach, like biting into a sour apple or riding that frog hopper thing at amusement parks. But also, it makes me feel powerful somehow, in control of my own destiny.
It turns out that rejecting someone else feels much worse. There is a power there too, but it does not feel like freedom. It's strange that when I am harboring feelings for someone, it's at the top of my mind for months on end, waiting to be mentioned, but when someone harbors feelings for me, it's possible for me to be completely oblivious. For people to be out there having these big, dumb, Mira-style crushes on me and for me to not know that they're noticing what I'm wearing, the way I speak, the places I go where they might run into me. With the big ones, I used to wait to confess my feelings until being with them hurt more than it felt good. I hate to think I might have been hurting someone in that way.
You're allowed to write about rejection when you're the underdog. Now, there are these things I can't write about. I have an irresistible compulsion to be so honest all the time. I’m working on becoming a better liar, or on fictionalizing the truth.
When I say I want someone to like me, I used to think I meant I wanted someone to love me. I thought I wanted someone to yearn for me so much that it ached. But now I don't think I do. It turns out I want to kiss someone at a party and then keep kissing them and figure it out together and go for walks. Something mutual like this has happened to me three times in my life I think. All three ended in me yearning anyway, so maybe that's a law of the universe.
Dear "the guy,"
What if I settle for someone like the boy who wrote you, or the boy who conjured you up for me recently; someone who gets high more days than he doesn’t, won't shut up about his credit score, writes run-on sentences with 44 commas and no period? Both times I was ready to do it. Both times, I would have gotten high with him most days and asked him to explain how credit cards work. Both times, he pushed me away gently, saying “it isn’t me. The guy is out there but it isn’t me.”
Really, it’s a gentler way of saying “I don’t want to be with you.” I hate when people tell me I deserve better, because shouldn’t what I want matter more than what I deserve? Men have been telling me this for eight years now. “You deserve better.” So what! So what if I deserve better and I know it and I want them anyway! But no, they tell me, I have to keep holding out for you. You’re out there somewhere and when I find you, it will be so magical.
I wrote a bad song once about Reed before he invented "the guy," about how he used to make my heart explode, but now he makes my chest feel like a muffled firework. As soon as I wrote it, I wanted to send it to him. I'm not sure why. Did I think my pain would be numbed if he understood it? Did I think that if I loved him enough, it would make him love me? I asked him if he wanted to hear it and he said no.
I have written so much about people who will never read it. A huge part of me wants them to. I think I want to read everything anyone has ever written about me. But I understand now why he said no. It had never occurred to me that someone might see me, might write me the way I’ve been writing people. There is a cognitive dissonance between the version of me she describes and the version of me that lives in my head every day. It's a gift to be seen with such gorgeous specificity, but it's just that—a gift. I never did anything to deserve it, and I've always been uncomfortable receiving.
It had been snowing for a couple of days, but I had been holed up in my room. As soon as I stepped outside that morning, the first thing that struck me was how quiet it was. I couldn’t hear the hum of I-25 or anyone speaking. There was no one in sight, just piles and piles of snow in every direction. I felt that I had to think of something to say to make up for how quiet it was.
“It’s so quiet,” I said.
He agreed.
Suddenly there was a crack and, across the field, a huge, snow-laden branch broke from a tree and plunged into the snow below. He and I looked at each other in shared disbelief, like, there's no way we just saw that happen. We got into a discussion with Tim later about whether the snow was bad for the trees because it was wet and so heavy. Margot says this is normal for Colorado in early spring.
In class, we learned about enthymemes. When someone makes an argument, they state premises that lead naturally to their claim, but often they leave out one of their premises because it's obvious or implicit. For example, if I say I'm going for a walk at 8 PM and therefore I will wear a jacket, the enthymeme is that it will be cold at 8 PM. But sometimes enthymemes are left out for other reasons; the speaker is trying to conceal something or there's a part of their argument that they're unwilling to say out loud.
Rejections are rife with enthymemes. People say "I'm not looking for a relationship right now" when their unspoken premises are "you're interested in a relationship with me" and "I'm not interested in a relationship with you."
What are the enthymemes of "we can't be friends?" The possibilities run through the dishwasher and come out dirty. I run through them again. I scrub them with the rough side of the sponge until they sparkle.
Dear vowel girls,
Some women have taken up residence in my head of their own accord, but mostly I have loved women through the eyes of men. Smiled and nodded as he described the dark tendrils of hair floating around her face or the ache in his chest when he’s away from her. I convince myself that if I study these women hard enough, someday I could transform into one of them and be loved too. All of their names start with vowels.
I don't resent you and I wish I could hear that you hated me. I wish he would tell me that you're the enthymeme supporting his arguments. This would make more sense.
I look at you with writer’s eyes because I swallowed everything he wrote about you. It went down like whiskey, neat– burned my throat and made me callous. If I could make him swallow everything I’ve written, it would be like gum– sticky, then gone like it was never there (it wouldn’t stay in his stomach for seven years). (I hope he doesn’t stay in mine that long.)
I showed up once when he wasn't expecting me. I always put the door code in wrong the first time, so by the time I got inside, he was already on his feet. He looked scared. I made up an excuse about something I needed in the filing cabinet and he agreed wearily, knowing that it wasn't true, coming down from his panic. I hadn't meant to show up. I didn't want anything in particular from him. I was walking home and I knew he was there and my legs took me, out of habit. I used to walk through the library basement on my way out, even though it was a floor out of the way, just in case I ran into him there. You aren't allowed to talk in the basement, so I knew we wouldn't speak, but back then at least he would have been happy to see me. He would have yelped or whimpered in that somehow flattering way he did when he saw someone he wasn't expecting to see. Feigned fear, implied submission, playful, nothing real.
That night as I was trying to fall asleep, I couldn't get the image of him out of my mind; standing in the archway, backlit by a single lamp, body tense, face full of fear. Did he think someone was breaking in and then was relieved when it was just me? Was he hoping it was someone else and was disappointed? Or was I exactly who he was afraid to see: this person who he couldn't shake, no matter how hard he tried. Who was following him like a shadow. I would be scared too.
I kept pushing it with him, against my own will. All I wanted was for things to be normal between us. I had stopped yearning, stopped writing about him in the second person; all I wanted was to be his friend, and still, I wanted it with such recklessness it became destructive. I was carrying around this quiver of arrows all the time of things I wanted to say to him, things I knew I wasn't supposed to say. Anyone else would have just carried it and kept quiet, but my arm kept reaching into it mechanically and pulling one out, over and over. Nock, aim, shoot. Nock, aim, shoot. I never hit the bullseye (I'm not even sure what I was aiming for) but I kept getting close enough that I couldn't give up.
That moment felt like the end of something. I'm not sure what. Leyla, you tell me it's just the end of me pushing it with him, that maybe I managed to shoot my last arrow. I hit an animal that ran in front of the target; it made my guts twist with shame and I won't shoot anymore. My quiver is empty.
I think it might have been the end of our friendship. Every time he looks at me, I'll imagine his face as it was that night, contorted with terror, and I'll have to look away.
I sat on a bench behind my house to finish my book. I could hear the constant drip of snow melting somewhere. The paper was so bright in the sun, it hurt my eyes. I was three pages away from the end when suddenly, without any ceremony at all, a small twig fell into my lap, in the crevice between my stomach and my book. It was alive. Maybe six or seven inches long, broken off at one end, still green. Buds crept up along either side; four at the bottom had already bloomed into these tiny pink and purple flowers. I wasn’t sure whether this was a good luck charm, a celebration of the coming spring, a dance the tree was doing to the sound of the snow melting— or if I was supposed to be mourning the fact that these buds would never bloom. I had no idea how this twig might have become detached from the tree. It wasn’t windy. The sun was out and the sky was still.
A man with a long gray beard, a green sweater, and sweatpants rode up the hill swiftly on an electric scooter. A lanyard in his pocket flew out behind him and I decided it was a good omen.
Dear letters,
I keep writing you all the time, even when I am not writing you.
Stop composing yourselves in my head in the shower. Get out of my journal.
Un-address and rip off your stamps and come back to bed.
I stopped writing to read for a while. Maybe today is meant for consumption and not creation. I just want to pretend to have arguments about stuff that doesn't matter with someone who likes me and I like them too and when they kiss me I don't have to think twice about whether or not I want them to kiss me. I recognize that it is boring of me to want this.
Leyla, do you want things that are boring? What are they? Tell me about it.
With love,
Mira
P.S. This letter ended up becoming a collage of scraps from everything I've written since October. A lot of it is old and faded now. Thank you for being patient with me while I wielded scissors and a glue stick clumsily. We became friends in October because we skipped the Bruce Springsteen event to drink lime-a-ritas and read our writing out loud to each other. You make me fall in love with writing again when I feel disillusioned. Everything you write sparkles and it makes the world around me sparkle too. I hope this ending isn't The End. (I don't think it will be.)