2024-03-02: one-directional love

our group chat lights up. do any of you have the one who got away? in any context. we talk about friends, lovers, stray cats, penpals: m. talks about the emails she sent in the early days of the web with a boy somewhere impossibly far away — no way to track him down, neither of them using real names — & i write, then delete, about a girl i met many years ago, twenty-five this summer. we had eyes for each other. we both admitted crushes later. nothing ever happened, in that way that nothing often does.

after she went back, we talked online for years, five more years. when i was mooning over my partner, paralyzed by my inability to ask her out, she laughed, told me to give her her number, her email address, she'd do it for me. i eventually asked her out. we've been together more than two decades. but i've never forgotten this friend, who drifted out of contact with me when she went overseas to find love of her own. we haven't spoken since. my greatest fear: all of this meant more to me. that if i reached out, she wouldn't remember me. who?

i am reading molly, by blake butler. he writes,

While I'd lived in the same city my whole life, had more friends than I could count, Molly had picked up and started over so many times there were mostly only fragments and faded memories left in her wake. Her truest childhood friend, whom she'd loved more than she feld loved back by, as she explained, mostly ignored her now or didn't seem to care — and yet she hadn't given up hope, twenty years later, that someday yet that friend would come around.

on teams, l. tells me, I have a list of 50 people that are getting money from me when I win the lotto.

i type: "when"?

I firmly believe you have to speak things into existence and WHEN is me trying

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