Dear past girl,

Looking at her photos and listening to Tegan and Sara. This is worse than drinking, than cutting. Worse than drugs. Chosen melancholy. Remembering the past makes me wish that everything existed in present tenses. Her past is just like my past. Shared but different.

It's different when you're not a person who thinks too much, who loves too hard. When you're the kind of girl who has a different hand in hers every weekend. When you're the kind of girl who wears cool sunglasses and doesn't have to hide anything under navy tights.

I am afflicted with emotions and thoughts of her. I lost the ring she gave me. I remember this as I stare at her tiny penciled handwriting. I didn't predict this aftermath. I would have been a deer then instead of now.

I don't want to apologize again. I should be long over this by now. It's the summer that reminds me of her. I know she can't have a whole season. No long ago heartbreak is worth a whole season, not even her.

I need to keep being around people, although I'm not being very social around people lately. I could talk about normal things like writing, authors, and art. Instead I'm staring into forks and at my fingernails, memorizing details of pillows and curtains.

I wish I could grab myself by the wrists and say, "This is enough," and run outside into the night. Once and for all let it go. No more thoughts that wander back to her. Sit on a sidewalk curb and feel the cold concrete under my fingertips. Breathe the night air and whisper secrets to the stars.

Every time someone says her name, or I see it written down somewhere, it's never in reference to her. It's never about her, yet I still get a guilty feeling in my chest. Just for a second I remember that I fucked it up.

We don't talk anymore, but I asked him how she was doing. I asked him if she was happy. I didn't want to know if she was dating anyone, or how school was, or how all the people that I gave up because they would have reminded me too much of her were doing.

He said she was happy, she was ok. Too busy even to keep in touch with him for awhile, but happy nonetheless. She is happy, so I should be happy too. She is definitely not sitting with her back rested against her bedroom wall writing something about me. I've been forgotten, moved past.

I should do the same and not be tempted by these momentary suffocations of nostalgia. Where memories literally suck the oxygen from my lungs and force me to think about them instead of who I am and what I need to accomplish right now.