Dear [REDACTED]

A letter to a boy I do not know.

PREFACE: I received a letter in late December of this year, and wrote this response to send back to the boy who wrote it. I thought I’d share it with all of you. I will actually be sending this to him, but I’ve removed certain details, including his name, in an effort to preserve his anonymity here.

Dear [REDACTED],

I must admit, I had completely forgotten about you when I received your letter. It’s less that I frequently give out my address to boys on dating apps after only a few pleasantries, but more that I have an absolutely awful memory in the best of circumstances. As you’ve deleted your dating app profiles and have excluded your last name in your letter, I have the rare pleasure of writing to a relatively complete stranger. It’s oddly refreshing — usually I go into first dates having seen their middle school profile pictures and their full job history. All I know about you is what you’ve written about yourself in your letter… which is a sentence I never thought I’d encounter outside of a John Green novel.

You said that you hoped I “enjoy this letter of an anxiety filled mid 20s boy,” and I absolutely did. You say four times in your letter that you’re “for sure not that interesting,” and I respectfully have to disagree. I think we’re part of a generation that tends to think that we’re more remarkable than we are, and the fact that you self-described as uninteresting (four times!) actually sets you apart from the pack. So if you’d like to be uninteresting, perhaps you should stop identifying as such.

I found your letter fascinating. You thoughts are scattered yet ordered, alternating between withholding and giving, hilarious and heartbreaking. I particularly liked you told me a juicy family secret, and then followed it with:

John Green could never!

Anyway, you asked me a variety of questions in your letter. I’m going to answer them as best I can.

“What’s a passion of yours?” Honestly, I really do love writing and receiving letters. There is something in knowing that you will never see a letter again — unlike texts, which stay glued to your phone, mocking you the next morning — that opens the doors to emotion. I have received letters from camp acquaintances sweeter than the words of previous lovers. Additionally, I fear that everything on the Cloud will one day be lost, and I want to be sure that there is something for my grandchildren to find when they wander up to the attic, searching for some “vintage shirt from the 2010s.”

“What’s your deepest darkest secret?” On one hand, a boy from Tinder who I’ve never met and likely never will meet is the perfect person to tell that kind of thing to. On the other hand, you know my last name and I’m very present on the internet, so I feel like giving you blackmail material probably isn’t a smart choice. I won’t tell you my deepest darkest secret — I’m not even sure I know what secret is my deepest and darkest — but I will tell you this: I’ve learned over the last four years that I could kill someone and still sleep at night. Not just anyone, of course, but there are several politicians that I could shoot — gun to their head — and kill, remorse-free. I don’t think I ever wanted to know that about myself, but here we are.

“What’s your favorite hobby?” I feel like hobbies among our generation are dying — in the gig economy, there’s pressure for everything that you do to be earning you money in some respect. I think I would say cooking — it’s very therapeutic for me, and is truly a hobby in that it’s just for my personal enjoyment. Not to derail this answer, but one of my biggest fantasies is just to be slicing something in the kitchen and to have someone slip their arms around my waist from behind. It’s a very attainable fantasy in theory, but I’ve found it aggravating because it’s not something you can tell someone to do — it has to be done instinctually by the other person, or it loses its value. But on to the next question.

“What’s a story from your most recent relationship?” I haven’t seriously dated anyone in about 4 years now, probably for reasons you’re gleaning as you read this letter. I went on a few wonderful dates with a boy earlier this year before it crumbled, though, and once we went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. The waitress was so sweet, and kept telling us “You are so cute. You two are so cute together.” She said it with such kindness, but it was tinged with something like longing, or pain, or an effort to prove something to both us and herself. I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot since then. Though, writing this, I wonder if most compliments are tinged with these things.

“What’s something you learned about yourself this past year?” I’m not sure if it qualifies as something I’ve learned “about myself,” but I think I’ve learned how to find joy in grief. I used to hate being sad (duh, right?), but after four years of being single and one year of quarantine, I’ve discovered that apathy and inertia are so much worse. These days, I feel incredibly grateful to feel sad, because it means that I was invested in something enough to feel its loss. Despair cannot be felt without love, and disappointment cannot be felt without hope. I know so many people (especially gay people) who prioritize protecting themselves, and have become shut-off and icy. And I understand that, completely, because this world is terrible. But I feel so lucky that my heart is in my hand, raw and bloody, and that I feel everything like the cold fire inside your mouth when you chew a piece of minty gum and then inhale.

“What are your aspirations?” My grandfather was a writer, and he wrote his own obituary. I don’t have many memories of him, as he died when I was fairly young, but he wrote this:

I think about this so often. I have many aspirations, but one of them is to avoid a life of “Almost.” However, I also hope to avoid having the type of disposition that would characterize my life as “Almost,” particularly if my life had involved being married for decades and raising a large family.

And lastly, “Have you watched The Undoing?” No, I have not.

Dear [REDACTED],

Your letter was written on a typewriter and closed with a wax seal, which is a lot of effort for someone you do not know and don’t want to have sex with (you noted that you deleted your dating apps because you feel “too unstable to be seeking anything besides friendship”). I found myself worrying about you while reading your letter, too. There was a lot of hurt in those short pages.

I hope you are succeeding on your journey of self-love, and that you’re showing yourself as much affection as you showed your letter to me. Anyone who takes the time to write out “Biiiiitch” on a typewriter is extremely worthy of love, in my opinion.

Lastly, please forgive my stilted text. Watching Bridgerton has a way of affecting one’s writing.

Johnny