“The most beautiful of your works must have been leaving me”: what Edouard should have said to his ex

Dear ex,

I’ve lost count of the letters I’ve written to you without ever sending them to you, because I haven’t always been able to tell you everything I thought of you by looking at your laughing and irresistible eyes. Cerulean blue dotted with veins of gold.

Even five years after our breakup, I still can’t resist. This is a question that has always haunted me: how can you stop longing for someone you loved so much?

Even five years after our breakup, when I meet your eyes again, our whole life together passes.

From our first meeting at the museum, until the guards kicked us out. We took refuge in a bar, where I tried to drown my shyness in a few centilitres of Chardonnay. It was on that first date that you texted me and told me you were HIV positive, with an undetectable viral load. Calmly, I replied immediately: “therefore you are non-transferable: your treatment protects us both”. I was well versed in the subject, and you are reassured to note that I hadn’t even blinked an eye.

Just a few days later, I invited you to a vernissage of pedantic students, before kissing you in a stairwell. From there we never left each other, you, always playing the zouave, which occupied my entire field of vision. We kissed in the smallest artistic corners of Paris, for a few weeks, until we slept together in the middle of the afternoon, taking advantage of the absence of your embittered roommate. It’s the first time I’ve made love. Before, it was just polite sex. With you he was violent with tenderness. On the edge. In your velvet blue eyes, I never knew if it was you or me shaking.

Alors que je n’avais su répondre qu’un timide « merci » à ton premier « je t’aime », il aura fallu que tu te trouves à Saint Denis le soir des ATTATTS du 13 November 2015 pour que je réalise ô combien me too, as well.

After this bloody Black Friday, we spent a weekend closed on the threshold of horror, in a capital in mourning, with our hearts on the verge of our mouths.

Then the weeks go by and I get worried, more and more emotional, and you regularly tell me to stop crying over nothing. But it’s a completely different specter than the attacks that haunt me then, meI’m starting to wake up to your alcohol and drug use.

By dint of believing yourselves imperceptible, you have become less and less discreet, but also more and more violent. Verbally at first, and then a few rare times when you pushed a little too hard to have sex, and hearing me say no wasn’t enough to calm you down, that I was afraid I didn’t know how to handle your anger. So I did everything to get it over quickly, then I didn’t sleep a wink all night.

I stopped crying, I stopped making excuses for you, and I just insisted that you go to a shrink, get help, because I didn’t sign up to be your nurse. A distance began to grow between us, I took refuge in work, the only thing I could then control, while you began to disappear more and more regularly, 1 or 2 days without giving news.

On my way to see my best friend in manchester to try and reconcile with her finding out i neglected her from our relationship you dont answer your phone for 2 days none of your friends know where you are not even your flatmate.

On day three, you end up replying, using your adorable little boy voice caught in the act, when I spent all weekend fussing. Even at the end of the line, I have the impression of feeling the annihilating sweetness of your blue eyes.

Actually, when I find you in Paris, your eyes are misty, and now you indulge in your new fad: LSD tripe that sometimes lasts several days, when you don’t get high on sips of DXM, a cough syrup diverted into a dissociative. After 2 years of relationship, I started to know the song: go through your pockets, throw away cough syrups, tequila and LSD sticks.

The height is that it was you who dumped me, over the phone, because you couldn’t stand the thought of not being good enough. In 3 years of relationship, I had tried 3 times before, and the 3 times you had reached out to me, including one where we almost came to blows. As you prevented me from leaving the apartment, I pushed you back a little too hard and you fell onto one of the photos you would soon be exhibiting. The glass broke. No blood gushed, but it was the beginning of an incurable hemorrhage for our relationship. So when you dumped me on the phone this time, I just said “okay” crying, knowing full well it was the most constructive thing to do.

The whole irony of our story is that after our breakup, you quickly settled down with a girl who was kind of my lookalike, then split up on the other side of the planet, falling in love with a local star with whom you moved back to Paris to Instagram all our favorite places with him. I would have liked to believe it was to prank me, but you blocked me from all your networksexcept that I had created an account specifically to stalk you, of course.

Despite the pandemic, you have continued to return regularly to France. And while I was with this hypermedia dude, you started sleeping with me again. I didn’t tell any of my friends because I felt it would be like admitting I was still in love with my tormentor. But, looking back, I have absolutely no regrets about this relationship, not even the end of it. Because our breakup made you want to see mental health and addiction specialists.

You who never found me credible when I told you about the importance of self-esteem finally understood it when I stopped playing your nurse. Except I was sick too, I was addicted to taking care of you and had a really hard time cutting the cord. Even though you were 8 years older than me and sometimes you gave me the impression of infantilizing myself, in reality I often came to your rescue, physically and even financially.

I loved cuddling you so much that one of my favorite moments in our relationship, what I miss the most is smearing you rub vicks vape on your chest when you have a cold, or when you’ve agreed to use me as a guinea pig to test new products in the bathroom.

Basically, your self-destructive behavior hurt me so much, that you reluctantly taught me the importance of self-esteem. You, like me, had long been deprived of it, but that didn’t stop you from shining in my eyes, And it broke my heart to know you were so full of self loathing, when I could have given all my organs for you to love yourself. It was so powerful and visceral, that when we broke up, I thought you should give me the love that made me want to bleed for you.

In spite of you, dear first love, you helped me stop looking for esteem in the reflection of a shame-tinted mirror and in external confirmations, even from the loved one, to instead draw it and cultivate it within me. .

Not seeing me in your cerulean gaze again has upset me so much that it has taught me to love myself in a more constructive way than you have ever known how to. I admired you so much as a man and as an artist that I wanted to be both your muse and your Pygmalion. But perhaps the most beautiful of your works will have been leaving me to make me understand what self-love is, after so much tender violence. I could never have predicted it. It was undetectable.