I have it on good authority that you're a jerk.

Well, not exactly a jerk.

More like... well... you just have a problematic habit.

But this supposed habit contradicts everything I thought I knew about you.

But then again, how well do I really know you?

Really, deary, I told you, it's the ambiguities that bother me most.

The not knowing whom to believe.

If I could just accept that you're a jerk, well, then, I could just break off all contact with you and hate you and feel good about myself.

If I could accept that this good authority is mistaken I could just let myself dream on, and make up scenarios in which your conduct makes sense.

But then again, is it truly good for my mental health to build these scenarios, either way?

I wasn't in love with you while we were together.

I may be falling in love with you now.

As always, I'm safer falling in love with what I know I cannot have.

But goddamnit, I cannot let you play me like that, that makes you dangerous and I only fall for the safe ones.

Really, if you were to devise a plan to make me truly fall in love with you, this would probably have been it. But you don't know me long enough to have that sort of insight into my mind to realize this is how I can be truly taken.

I can feel my heart tethered there on the brink. I could fall head over heels. I could hate you. You could break my heart. You could be who I believed you were, goddamnit.

I want you to be who I believed you were.

I want to believe that in 21 years, I've learned something. Admittedly, not everything, but *something* about men, what they think, what they know, what they feel. I'd like to think that when you said I took your breath away you weren't only kidding. I'd like to think when you kissed me, when you touched me, when you made love to me, you were truly there, and maybe it was never true love, but it certainly was something, something which's memory you wouldn't marr like my good authority claims you are marring. You just wouldn't, would you?

Please be who I thought you are.

Please.

Maital.