Dear Alex,

I have started to forget the cadence of your voice. Your hair is longer now and you are older now and you are now in love with a boy who I couldn’t love. It has been too hot to wear pants on Mondays, even the fun ones. I can feel our traditions making artifacts out of themselves. I am forgetting your rituals in the way my mom stopped going to church but still looks whenever she sees a cross. They are still in my muscles’ memories, the memories I am breaking and rebuilding every night.

I am finding a way to be my own person again. You were always the beautiful one but now I am learning to be beautiful as one. I am letting go of Chaelee-and-Alex and of us automatically correcting the speaker to include the other, of us loving the same songs the same clothes the same boys. I wear your clothes and think of them as mine. They don’t smell like you anymore but I remember how you wore this shirt with your long tan sweater and how these shorts never fit your hips quite right they looked fine. And I think of you with your long hair and how it’s almost like before we met when you had long hair and I was a freshman and we both led different lives.

Here is a short list of things I gave you:

1. Love, in more ways than one
2. My kiwi sweatshirt
3. Language
4. Sickness, in more ways than one

I have a cold and I wish I could infect you through my computer screen. I will cover this paper in my germs and send it to you because if I can’t breathe you shouldn’t either. I haven’t sat in a car in a while so I’ve almost forgotten your smooth seats and the way the rain would chase itself across the windows and how you would teach me strange and beautiful words and how on Valentine’s Day, I was kissing your boyfriend in the backseat when your best friend started throwing up.

I’m sorry that I’m writing about this and I’m not writing about the way we danced on water, Jesus ain’t got nothin’ on us, and how here I am dancing in a drought, in my underwear with my friends who are not you, in my pajamas with a boy whose name I do not know, in a sheet with a boy whose name I wish I did not know, intoxicated with a boy who you don’t know. I’m sorry that I’m writing about how I don’t think of you enough and how our memories are confetti and sparkles that were floating and were falling and are appearing in the most unexpected places. I’m sorry that I’m writing about how hard it was to write with you and how easy it is to write in your absence in how easy it is to be Chaelee here there are so many people who I can compare myself to but none of them are you.

I’m happy here. I’m finding “Chaelee” without “-and-Alex” but “Chaelee” isn’t what it was before “-and-Alex” and I’m afraid that you won’t know this later “Chaelee” without Alex and maybe that you won’t like this later “Chaelee” without Alex but that doesn’t matter as much as the knowing. Because you knew me as part of our unit and now I am my own line I am my own measurement of sound and sense and you are becoming part of a new unit a new line a new measurement of sound and sense and we sounded beautiful together and we sound beautiful without each other and I keep hearing your sound and it is a song I have listened to the cover to but now am hearing the original and it is beautiful but it is not the way I know it.