A Relic from a War I Started
On leaving, losing, and learning to surrender
Author’s Note: Written in the aftermath of a love I thought I had outgrown, this essay is about ambition, regret, and the self-made wars of my twenties. I don’t know if it’s good. I don’t care. It has taken me so long just to name what I’m really feeling—grief. Not insanity, not absurdity, just the grief and guilt of giving up a place and a person that I loved. I appreciate having a space to share this, and sorry that it’s been a while. 🤍🌲
You share a name with a Beatnik poet, no doubt just a common American name. Your memory, no doubt, a common American tragedy.
I have a photo of us in my bed—a Polaroid under the pillows. We are back in my apartment in Vermont, where those green mountains knew my story as well as you did. A photo of a New Year’s Kiss—our outline traced by balloons. You know the one.
But I made this bed, in this new apartment far away from you, and told you not to visit me here. That’s the first of many things I’m sorry for. You became a casualty of my ambition; a loss born from all I hoped to win.
So I hold onto just one kiss—in black and white. It would be easier this way, I thought, than remembering it all in full color.
I imagine—for a moment—if the worst of history had been captured in color. Would it have made any difference at all? It doesn’t now, I decide, and I scroll through us in color. Green was always my favorite on you.
A cloud of smoke fills my lungs as I pull an old XL t-shirt over my head. I wear your scent, your deodorant and cologne, though I’m angry I let myself keep just one of your shirts to wear at night. I have ended up with so little of you.
I watch reruns of The Joy of Painting. My wheels spin, remembering moments of us like shrapnel that I can’t quite piece together.
A passionate holiday kiss, the kind that stops time completely.
A fight in February. Distance. March. Tears. April. May. June. Voicemail.
When, in that time, did you meet her? She seems good for you. Perhaps she is kind to you when you are late picking her up at the airport. Maybe she’s predictable and calm—traits that could characterize a girl born far away from the chaos of the Kingdom that I come from.
I met someone here. I don’t know if we should talk anymore. I don’t know if you’re my person.
My words in late March: the reason for your swift exile from my life.
By June, though, I already hated him. Oops. I’d really fucked up, hadn’t I?
July. August. September. Silence.
October. You called on my birthday—you knew you’d be the first, calling me like that at midnight. Long talks, hours and hours long. More tears. Regret. Closure? No, certainly not closure. It still haunts me.
What didn’t we say that we meant to say?
We were just kids, in college, in a pandemic of change.
And of course, there is no vaccine for change.
Is this forever, do you know? Your life with her—is she your family now?
Did she struggle as a child, or have a good father?
Does she want this life with you, and would she make a good mother?
I believe these are important questions, urgent ones, although I hold onto hope that you have hardly even considered them.
If you have, won’t you tell me? Spare me the miserable silence that echoes through these streets, keeps me wandering the woods in the middle of Manhattan?
I know, I came here to be someone. You told me you didn’t want to hold me back. And it’s true, I can be anyone here, except—a scientist who can turn back time, a cartographer who can draw a map to you, a doctor who can cure a heartbreak, or create a drug to make you fall in love with New York City, with me again.
I cannot be any of those things.
So, I am only what I can be, in a playlist called “DO NOT LISTEN”, in a photo with you under my pillow, in a dream, a dozen dreams, a hundred—the Vermont kind, with a picket fence and a porch swing. In another life, this might have been different.
But ‘in another life’ is so silly, so foolish—we only get one, from which there is no turning back. An hourglass glued to the table.
Who will you become as the sand steadily trickles down, with only the rest of your life to consider?
I have considered your absence in my life for some time now, haunted by a love I was late to discover as rare. Not a perfect love, no—not a perfect love.
But a love that sanded and painted and repainted a vintage Ethan Allen vanity with me.
A love that brought me brick-oven pizzas, brought my cat to the vet, brought me home.
Whenever I needed it, you brought me home.
I didn’t grow up with love at home—I had to invent it.
It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve always known just how to destroy it.
Cannons. Armaments. The element of surprise. Loving and leaving you has been a revolution of its own. But even revolutions can crumble like sandcastles.
And that’s exactly what I did.
I called a dozen times in the spring, drunk on elevation and tequila in Colombia, dialing the contact saved with a graveyard emoji while throwing up in the sink.
I texted on Thanksgiving from England to tell you that it was bitterly cold without you, that all the wool in the world couldn’t match your warmth.
And on New Year’s Day, I apologized again, swore I was done with the poetry and the wistful bullshit, that I would finally move on.
That is what I wanted, and what you’d been able to do. Not a rebound. Not a situationship. Not another messy love story. You’d been able to find the real thing in no time, and so why couldn’t I do the same?
I still wonder what you think of now, when you see me frozen in those tiny squares — smiling, but still reeling from the same melancholy refrains of the past.
Our photos in color are hidden in the archives, and our early twenties were erased from history (or forever, damningly, locked inside that Polaroid).
But history has taught us all, in the hardest of ways, that it doesn’t need color to haunt you.
You’ve moved on, this much I can finally be sure of—I’ve healed and hurt you too many times. I left you, Green Mountain Boy, for a city and a dream of becoming someone new. And then, soon after, you left the mountains too. Shipped south to Boston. Signed your own Declaration of Independence—had your own revolution.
I know we wanted to give each other freedom, but you should know that I have failed, because I only want to take it from you now.
It’s selfish of me—how much I want to take from you, I know.
And this is the thing that haunts me the most, more than any Polaroid or playlist—that I am selfish, an Empress, like America.
And that all my desires to conquer the world, to be independent, to storm all of your forts and bunkers, at any cost, have been selfish like her, too.
I wanted to be your self-evident truths and your manifest destiny. A state of contradictions, I know.
And maybe you knew this all along. Perhaps any Green Mountain Boy would. But I am just learning it: how to begin to topple an empire.
How to stop wandering my city like a battlefield, my pockets full of failed treaties. Our history, written too, by all we ruin trying to be remembered.
The photo of us still tucked under my pillow—a relic from a war I started.