Day 4: One Final Letter

From: Karate Kid
Date: 5/6/04 1:58 am
To: PhD Boy
Subj: Eternal Sunshine of My Spotless Mind

Ok,

Before you ran off (and before I forget this thought) I wanted to say this and now I will just to make sure its said:

I talked about (before you ran off) memory erasure a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the context of the brief relationship (before you ran off - see the trend here).

If you haven't seen the movie, go see it, it's brilliant.

But i digress, since what I meant to say (before you ran off … I can be brutal, but you know that ;-) so I'm just being honest, to reuse the phrase).

In eternal sunshine, the protagonist wants to hang on to the happiest moment of his relationship, the one where he thinks he's so happy he could die, lying next to his girlfriend on the frozen Charles river on a winters night looking up at the stars.

Me, I actually want to erase what I think was my happiest moments with you, but its the only thing I'd erase. I think that if I did that, I could be friends with you instantaneously without any of the awkwardness I feel now. I mean, I really want to now, but am not sure how to without treading on your toes and making you run away. (like so)

I'm not sure the e-mail will do you any favours, but I'm sure it's therapeutic for me to write this so I can move on for sure. You of all people will now how crap it is to spin one's wheels for more than 2 weeks at a go and it is more than two weeks - the feeling that you're getting somewhere but not nearly as fast as you'd like

In which case you should stop reading right about now.

Anyway, you remember that moment in the Fullerton the Sunday before you left, after we had spent the whole day together, the mid-afternoon when we were sitting down for drinks at the sofa, leaning back, cheek on shoulder looking up at the skylight, bathed in the intense clarity of the moment? Where moments before we were whispering, alternately conspiratorially about the couple in front of us and in the next, about how amazing what was happening between us there and then was?

I don’t know about you, but I would erase that particular moment and I’ll tell you why:sI have had moments like that with one other person in the past, but nothing approaching this clarity, nothing quite like that particular moment where I felt inexorably, ineluctably drawn to the concept of effortlessly spending the rest of my life with you and the secure in the knowledge that it was indeed possible and reciprocated. No, nothing quite like that euphoria/delusion.

So I’d erase that particular hour (and that one only) from my memory for the simple reason that the next time I feel that way with someone else (if I am so lucky), I would like to be able to trust that what I feel is reciprocated for more than a week. Or just trust that feeling without having it tainted with any doubt that it is otherwise than what it is. Or perhaps I give what I felt then too much credence and failed to attribute enough credit to the excellent white wine that afternoon. Or it is only the distinctiveness of recent memory that gives it this intensity. In some way, time does its own erasing of memories.

Trying hard to be friends, but probably only succeeding in making you run away,

Karate Kid (brutal as always)

P.S. If it were only so easy for the rest of my suitors.