a letter

Dear Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,

I’ve been wanting to write to you for some time—I know my absence is likely worrying you, but it was too difficult to make contact before now. Every time I think of you, I’m filled with a hauntingly familiar lust that fills my chest and pools in my fingertips. It’s silly, I know—maybe we were more obsessed with one another than “in love,” maybe the relationship was parasitic, as so many people tell me. I credit you with both saving my life and with slowly killing me. Two years ago we were in the exciting and (somewhat) exhausting phase of new love, and I couldn’t get enough of you. I felt to some extent that you reciprocated. Nobody satisfies me quite like you do, still, after all this time. I try to brush thoughts of your comforting presence aside, remembering the tools you used to control me. You were manipulative, paired with the Devil himself, as they say, leading me “carefully down to Hell,” taking my heart with your added sugars and tempting taste of toasted peanuts. The day I decided to leave you left me paralyzed, tucking myself under my bed-quilt, forcing myself to curb my appetite until I finally fell asleep in a state of near-illness. How did I ever let it go so far? But this is turning to emotional assault, see, I never wanted to hurt you, and I still don’t—I admire your perfection, and perhaps it’s too much for my uncontrolled passion to truly receive. Even now, as I write, I realize that I’ll never be truly free of you. I tried to pry myself away from you slowly, tasting, restraining, but it always turned into bags and the bags turned into pounds, and I knew cold-turkey was the only way to truly cut free.

I’m sorry for leaving. Sometimes I still regret it. Sometimes I think I can still taste you…

What it was to be drunkenly controlled by you, putting all my trust and pouring all my emotions into you. I never had a lover so reliable, so fulfilling. My mind in a sugary haze floated above all my hurt and everything seemed like the foam atop a latte for a while,

but I’m here now, and I got here without you. I’m not boasting, only validating my own decisions, knowing that my wounds were only blistering in infection when I was so distracted by you. I can still see the scars, and it’s tempting to come back to you, when everything seems fine, but I’ll try to remember the past.

For now, I send my condolences. Don’t think too hard on me,
Kalli