dear lehna,

I saw this persimmon tree on my walk home so I picked you a few. I remember you said that persimmons taste like sunshine and honey and I want you to eat them and think about me like I’m sunshine and honey.

xo,

greta

On day zero she says, “I just don’t love you, Lehna. I don’t know why I was trying to convince myself that I did. What I’ve figured out, what Sara has helped me figure out, is that I had been searching for someone who had the same baggage as me instead of finding someone to carry it for me.”

She tells me this with an air of finality. Sara is the new girlfriend, though I didn’t even know I was the ex-girlfriend yet. In the back of my mind I register how bad Sara’s advice is, because putting all your shit on someone else isn’t the recipe for a healthy relationship. Sara writes poetry, though, so it makes sense that she’d give shitty advice.

I try to work with this stupid metaphor despite myself. “Gret, just because we have the same baggage”—we don’t, first of all—“doesn’t mean I can’t carry yours for you.” I reach my hand across our little two-person dining table. Her fingernails are painted dark green.

“I should’ve known you’d be difficult about this,” she sighs and looks down. “My horoscope told me to look out for people trying to prevent me from making progress.”

“What did mine say? Not to let go of the ones that I love?”

She gives me a pained look and mutters, “You are so textbook Pisces it’s actually ridiculous sometimes.” I consider asking which fabled astrology guide she’s so keen to fit me in, but it’s not the time or place. And anyway, that would probably seem “textbook Pisces” to her.

“This just seems very sudden to me, Gret,” I start, words balling up in my mouth. “I love you, and I think that you love me. I get that sometimes things are confusing and maybe we forget along the way how we feel, but we’re for each other, we’ve said it time and again and it’s true!” I’m fumbling my words.

She interrupts, “If you noticed anything at all you’d know it’s not sudden, at least not to me. I’m sorry you feel that way. But I can’t hold on for your sake.” My stomach ties itself into eight different sailor’s knots. This is not just another fight.

“It’s like, in ‘Wuthering Heights!’ With Catherine and Heathcliffe, that quote, the … we’re made of the same soul stuff, Greta.” I try so hard not to cry, but it’s pointless. I do, and she’s uncomfortable, but leans forward to gently touch my hand.

“Lehna, that’s a novel. This is life.”

“I will do anything to make you stay. Anything you want. What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything.”

Greta tells me she thinks she has a star inside of her, her energy, her something. Greta tells me that I am killing her star, that I will make her a supernova and eventually a black hole. Greta tells me she is leaving me—it’s final. Her phone starts buzzing on the table. It’s Sara. Sara’s poetry collection was apparently just published by an independent publisher in Chicago. It’s called, “while I was saying it I wished that I weren’t.” That night when I order it online, I laugh because maybe if she wished she hadn’t said it, she shouldn’t have published an entire fucking book of it. I laugh so hard I choke, and keep laughing until I cry.

dear lehna,

happiest halloween morning! I’ll be back by six or seven, the show might go late but I’ll try my best to make it. remember to get candy just in case the hansen’s kids knock. they’re so precious I could cry. makes you wonder about someday, doesn’t it?

xo,

greta

Day one. Today I won’t change out of my sweatpants or wash my hair, or really do anything. Cara calls to check in and tell me to eat. Greta left last night after we talked. Sara came to pick her up on her motorcycle. I hate Sara because she’s a cooler queer than me. She has tattoos her friends gave her of daggers on her thighs and carnivorous plants on her biceps. She’s tall and thin and model-like in her sexy androgyny. Sara is the kind of edgy but non-threatening queer, the kind magazines feature to seem modern and politically aware. Sara spent a year in Berlin, and she got into Berghain every time without a problem. Somewhere in the back of my mind, or maybe the front of my mind, or really all over my mind, I wonder if Greta loves Sara because of these stupid things she is and I am not. Greta wants the flash and fire of long nights out and cigarettes at 6 a.m., not Joni Mitchell albums and tea. Maybe I have it all wrong, maybe I’m using an old model of Appropriate Gayness. I forgot to update my operating system. I bet Sara has no bed frame, I bet Sara’s mattress just sits on the ground. But I love bed frames, I think as I lie on the bed.

Greta’s things are still here. I pick up her comb and stare at the bright blonde strands dangling from the plastic rectangle. I consider eating one strand. Love makes us do crazy things. I don’t eat a strand, but because Cara told me to eat, I eat 11 applesauce cups and then sit on my bed and listen to Greta’s records. Greta says she listens to vinyl because it makes listening to music more special, more of “an event.” I think it’s kind of stupid, but here I am. Once, I found her the British version of the Beach Boys’ single “God Only Knows,” where it’s the A-side and not the B-side. She says that was the best thing I ever did for her. The best thing Greta did for me is love me. I think. If she did.

I don’t know when she’s coming back. She ended our conversation last night with, “I’ll come back soon. To get my things,” which was promising in a doomed kind of way. I couldn’t wait to see her again, to try and convince her to stay.

I suddenly realize she could come at any moment, and I am already playing the part of the deserted girlfriend, desolate and greasy and clutching the remaining traces of her, so I throw myself into the shower. My stomach is bloated from all the applesauce, and my eyes are still puffy from crying, lying under the striped cotton sheets, alone for the first time in two years.

Greta’s shampoo smells like coconut. She said she needed special shampoo for curl definition, so I bought it for her. I squeeze the pearlescent, viscous liquid into my hand and slather it into my hair even though she hates when I use it. The smell is familiar. Suds well up between my fingers, and I scratch my head over and over again until I feel something like clean. I see my body, alone, reflected on the glass of the shower door. I remember the showers we would take together when we first moved into the apartment, hot water glistening on her skin and kissing her collarbone and the soft underneath of her arm down to her fingertips. We would get out of the shower and, shivering, dripping—wrap towels around one another and sit next to the window and decide what we would plant in the garden we did not have.

In the mornings, when I left before her, she would stretch her arms out to me and arch her back and half-whisper-half-whine, “Don’t leave, stay here and kiss me,” and I’d think in my head about how I didn’t have to stay because there she’d be when I got home. And then there she’d be, when I got home, belly up underneath the dining room table trying to fix its loose leg.

I get out of the shower and crouch on the bathmat with my towel wrapped around me like a cape. I find that 2 p.m. is quite possibly the loneliest hour of the day.

dear lehna,

please try to understand where I’m coming from. I know words can hurt and I’m trying my best to say how I feel. remember that honesty is important and I wouldn’t say these things if I didn’t care for you. I want to be the person you see in me, for both of our sakes.

xo,

greta

Greta knew definitively that she was gay after her third boyfriend told her, “Greta, maybe you’re gay,” as a joke after he watched her kiss their mutual friend at a high school party on a dare. It had started with that special teenage boy breed of lechery, boys intrigued by women together after their first forays into the lesbian section of Pornhub. Greta, ever impressionable but also host to a voracious curiosity, caved into the boys’ dares and tentatively kissed Ella, a volleyball player four inches taller with a body that Greta had always been drawn to. She’d always figured it was just envy, but when Ella tucked a long black piece of hair behind her ear before they kissed, Greta realized envy was not the word for it.

Fifteen-year-old Greta, three beers in and still reeling from the rightness of the kiss, broke up with her boyfriend later that night. He did not connect the dots. Afterwards, she snuck back into her house, quietly tiptoed past her parents’ bedroom door, and laid down in her clothes. She couldn’t sleep for hours.