I dressed up all pretty, tight jeans and a satin red shirt with a bow in the back on our last date, last Friday night. I liked you enough depending on what time of the day you asked me. Early morning after a steamy shower, I was usually happy enough to indulge in fantasies of us dancing around the kitchen splashing wine in glasses and sprinkling spices on meat. Thirty minutes past seven, stumbling home after two shifts at the diner, if you asked me then, I'd curse my way across the living room and express how much I hated your guts. Everything about you, the way you didn't put things back where they belonged, the way you spoke, slow and passive. "Are you mentally challenged," I'd say. "Or just stupid."

I didn't even know why I bothered dressing up for you every time we went out to town. The buttons would fly from my shirt to hit the glass frames of my sensual paintings of naked animals anyway. You'd soak my lacy Victoria's secret bra predictably. That would add up to forty eight bucks and sixty six cents according to my receipt. No one ever told me love was costly.

Curled up by the wintry window watching the morning frost disappear last Saturday morning and watching the sun rise to make the world pinkish, I chewed on my thumb. I looked at you on the bed and ignored my urges to grab a Newport from the medicine cabinet. Moments like those, I could never rid from my mind how you played my best friend, played her for three years and couldn't bring yourself to either tell her the truth or tell her to go away. It was ironic really because between the two of us, I was clearly the weaker one and deserved to be so easily manipulated for boredom's sake. She was headstrong with fierce blond hair and eyes that'd turn a pig into sizzling bacon. You couldn't be with her even as I heard her begging over the phone again and again. It didn't matter how I begged her to stop, told her she deserved better, told her I loved her too much to watch her be hurt like that. I never asked you why you couldn't make her happy, doubt you'd tell me but I bet it was because she could barely fit through the doorframes of your apartment. Yours were unusually narrow. For size zeros on purpose, you joked some time ago.

Some part of me, of the person I used to me, I believed you would reconsider making her your girlfriend, believed you were insecure enough to let her slip through your fingers. I trusted you that if only you saw how much she wanted you, you would go for it. I was loyal to Cynthia up to the moment when we lay on your bed feeling the air conditioner on our heated skin last August. It was the day I weighted myself and found out I had lost forty pounds. It was almost one hundred degrees out. You stroked behind my right knee like a little girl used to do when I worked at a preschool so long ago. I knew she expressed loneliness whenever she did that but I couldn't be sure about you. There was fright in your eyes so perhaps that was it. Whatever it was, it turned me on. Something about rescuing broken animals from the streets, talking to bald teenagers freshly out of mental hospitals and telling obese girls they were drop-dead gorgeous.

You told me your grandfather had just died. You two were close, spend every summer in North Carolina at a beach house three generations old with a hundred spiders in the attic and an ancient tree in the backyard next to a copper trunk no one could break into. He taught you how to fish in the morning in freezing waters and play poker at night till the roosters crowed and the sunlight shone through the cracked windows. You never could figure out where the roosters were. He promised to tell you before he was gone. Your grandmother had committed suicide some time ago though nobody knew why. I suspected you were close to death and I didn't want you to go, didn't feel right about that. We made love that afternoon after some booze and I felt your aura change from black to red. You smiled at me and my heart broke for you. I kissed you a hundred more times just to make sure you were here to stay.

Whenever I was really happy, I'd become very romantic and gushy. I'd say, "Tell me we belong together." I'd say, "I love you." You never asked me how much or for how long. We both knew neither mattered as much as the original thought, the universal gesture of beauty in humans.

You liked to go hunting in the woods down the street from us. I hated being among so many trees. The treetops spun around me endlessly. I constantly heard eerie chirping, saw eyes glow in the empty spaces, felt the hair rise on my arms, waiting for something to pounce on me. "Could you not go hunt anymore?" I asked once.

You were plucking feathers from a bird in the kitchen sink. I was cleaning the blood with paper towels. "No," he said.

"But…"

"I don't care," you said.

We ate the innocent that night and I tasted it in my mouth for days after. The image burned in my mind. The falling of the animal like a plane, crashing into a bush with thorns right before. I had ducked and saw roaring fire in the dirt ground before you pulled me up and told me it was starting to rain and we had to get home. You hated getting wet and smelling musky afterwards.

Yesterday, you said, "I am leaving."

I had never been so hurt.

"I guess you can't stay forever," I said. I could feel the tears coming. I swirled frosted flakes around with my spoon, clinking against the bowl.

"Guess not." You looked up at me beneath your bushy brows. Your sleazy brows.

I sniffed into my palm, wiped at my snot. "I'll never be the same," I choked out.

"You'll live."

"I wasn't serious." The clock had struck twelve. "Don't come back."

I am no victim, I told myself even as my lips trembled and wet tears slid down my cheeks, burning several trials over my flesh. I pressed my ear against the door, listening to his disappearing footsteps. I heard no hesitation, no pause. He left that fast.

Afterwards, I sat in the middle of the apartment and listened to it echo its hollowness. I wrote this story in a form of a letter, directly to you. I wrote about how much I missed you though a part of me burned with hatred. I was not sure why exactly. Who knew after a while, time softened everything, my bipolar emotions, your crisp scents. I was reluctant to let you go, didn't want to end up sitting here alone against the cold window watching the suburban streets, waiting for you to reappear out of the thick fog like some kind of God. Maybe holding some red tulips in your hands. Anything would be nice actually. Even some more babies for my ant farm. Help me bury the long overdue corpses. Since the beginning, I feared being here with nothing more than the hollow bones beneath my flaky skin. The heaters stopped working after my dinner of tomato soup and wheat thins. I wished I had some meat on my bones to keep me warm. Somehow being thin wasn't what I expected it to me. In the end, I was just like any other person abandoned. No more beautiful than Cynthia when she was at her lowest and overdosed. I guess I wrote this story to bury her corpse, yours and a part of mine too. The part that changed twice and was about to change again. To what, I didn't know.

Jamie Lin was raised in family-oriented Brooklyn but grew up in suffocating suburbia, New York. She likes alcohol, music and stories but not people, bugs or winter. She loves to talk in order to better understand herself and come up with likes, dislikes and neutrals. She has been published at barfing frog, laura hird, chick flicks ezine, cherry bleeds and some others. Her website is at jamielin.net.