I find myself missing you in the same way I miss people I have never met, and amidst the entanglement of loneliness I sometimes dote upon, I find myself longing for someone to love me like you love Zelda—say hello to her for me.

I know The Great Gatsby wasn’t written for me, but when I received on my thirteenth birthday as a present from my grandfather, it might as well have been.

Your book arrived on my doorstep and my grandfather had written on the inside front cover in tentative handwriting that “[I] reminded [him] of the person in [your] story.” I didn’t know which character he was alluding to, nor did I care, because thirteen-year-olds are rather presumptuous that way, and so I put the book in a pile I labeled ‘books to read.’ It took a year and my grandfather’s hospital visit for me to pick it up: it will take a lifetime for me to put it down.

You see, I was enchanted by Gatsby—enamoured with his charm and elegance, enthralled with his embodiment of ambition and passion, charmed by the way he was golden or at least the way he pretended to be. I found myself longing to be the purpose of debaucherous parties, worth more than my weights worth of gold. But what I found most endearing was Gatsby’s boundless love for things that didn’t exist anywhere other than his heart—a quality everyone I know possesses.

Awash in your writing, I see myself the way I see photographs when they were developing; as I drip with saturation, I recall a little girl and the first boy who loved her. I remember the way her hands wrapped in his and how the lines on his palms were an extension of hers. I reminisce the summer she waited for him in rain that dripped like ink, and her walking home alone, stained. Since then, I’ve paid close attention to the moments she gets caught in the rain. I have pictures of her sleeping on staircases of a home her father will leave; polaroids of the look on her mother’s face when she was handed prescription pills for her daughter’s lack of being; photographs of everyone she knows who has left. There are burning bridges eating the edges of photographs and it’s only when they have all turned to ash that I feel sorry for that girl because I am her, but she is not me.

But even Gatsby, as elegant and magnanimous as he was, wasn’t enough to resist being eaten alive by a fire that began in his own heart. I wasn’t the only one dripping with a saturation that made me fear what I hold inside of me. I wasn’t the only one who had been left behind, abandoned, loved and lost. I am Gatsby and you are Gatsby and as I lie awake at night, missing people I no longer reserve the right to miss and loving people I never reserved the right to love, I feel not so alone.

And that’s all thirteen-year-old me really needed: to know I was not alone.

That’s all I still really need—when I wash prescription pills down my throat to dull the bitter pain; when I lurch awake at three o’clock in the morning startled by nightmares I cannot recall; when I wake up with bruises on my face from fights I cannot remember losing; when mother comes home late, too beat and tired to look at me; when father doesn’t come home at all.

I discovered that we are greatly dissatisfied: with life, with love, with ourselves. We chase things that don’t exist to find inspiration in faint rememberings of things that never happened. The desperation of nostalgia is written in every story, and thus every story becomes a love story.

And because of you, I’m not who I wish I was, but I’m also not who I remember. Instead, I’m running headfirst towards memories I’m not sure are mine to remember, my arms outstretched for
Friday, January 24, 2019
truths that don’t exist and green lights lit by the fragility of my past and how I let my heart bend it. Perhaps one day, I will get to lie in fields of gold with a daughter, and in the wake of dusk, I will tell her stories about a little girl who ran her fingers along your books and loved a boy and the way his hand fit in hers. I will tell her memories and heartbreaks of a girl who didn’t exist but I wish did. I will tell her how I have never met her, never reached her, and yet, “among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” how much I miss her.