A Letter to “D”

My dear “D.”
I can no longer call you dear. Those feelings have been gone for a long time, and I cannot call you mine either, because for almost three years now, there has been nothing connecting you and me except unpleasant memories.

Today is September 15, 2026. I am writing these words at 9:33 p.m., on an ordinary Tuesday evening. Is it really that ordinary, if I am thinking about you?
I know you will never see these words. I would not want to contact you again — at least not in conversation, not in person. Anything but having to be in contact with you again.

To be honest, even now, your name makes me flinch. I have met many other girls with your name, and every time it felt like torture: “Why is it that name again?!”
Still, you are the first and last association I have with it.

Here, in this letter, sent into an inevitable emptiness and the pitch-black darkness of infinity, a letter that may never be read by anyone at all, I want to tell you — and myself — what was actually happening back then, and how it turned my little world upside down.
When I met you, I never would have imagined how deeply you would get stuck in my head.
For a very long time, I did not care about you at all. Then, little by little, we became good friends.
I cannot promise that my story is entirely accurate. So much has been lost somewhere in my memory, whether accidentally or deliberately. Some things have been cut out of my mind, and that is probably for the best.
I am almost certain that it all started with us helping each other.
For both of us, 2023 was simply an awful year. We became sisters in misfortune — two people being broken down by uncontrollable anxiety and panic attacks, when our thoughts seemed to become something autonomous, something that could destroy everything around us.
I barely talked to anyone at all.
Even though my heart was occupied by someone else at the time — and that relationship ended precisely because I could no longer bear burdening her with my problems — things were no better with that girl either.
I could disappear. I could go silent, and eventually send some pathetic message like:
“Good night. I’m sorry we didn’t really get to talk. I cried all day. I’m so sorry. I love you.”
Talking about pain was difficult for me.
But with you, “D,” I could talk a little more often.
And you shared what was weighing on your heart, too.
Oh, how badly I wanted to save you from everything afterward…
But in this story, there was no saving anyone.
After my breakup with the other girl, you were there.
I missed her terribly. I was tormented by guilt and by endless dreams about the person I had not wanted to leave, but felt I had to — obsessive thoughts can be incredibly convincing.
Summer was getting closer.
I have so few memories of that summer.
But when it comes to you, there are some very clear ones.
In my eyes, you were an unreachable ideal. You were incredibly smart, hardworking, and people seemed to gravitate toward you wherever you went.
My first reaction to that was boundless envy, and I am still ashamed of it to an almost ridiculous degree.
I wanted everything you had.
When things did not work out with people for me, I thought about you and became angry, as though you were somehow responsible for all my troubles.
But that was so stupid.
People liked you for perfectly good reasons.
For a while, there was a distance between us, and not without my own efforts.
But it did not last long.
In the end, attachment and friendship were stronger than envy.
I remember how much I cried.
For probably another week, I was tormented by guilt and anxiety, as well as a growing hatred of myself.
I was ashamed in front of you.
I had no right to feel that envy.
And eventually I realized that I simply did not care about it anymore. I buried the feeling, because I wanted to be close to you again.
If I could not be better than you, and could never become better than you, then I wanted to do what was best for you, because you deserved that.
I think that was when I decided that I had completely eradicated jealousy and envy toward my friends forever.
No jealousy. No envy.
That was my decision.
I would rather love people important to me and be even happier for their successes.
That was my choice — the kind of person I wanted to be: a good and reliable friend.
For that, I could thank you.
Thank you for helping me discover such an important and good part of myself.
I can hardly brag about having many good qualities, and this is one of the few I can name.
Now, let us move on to the next stage.
You know, it would have been nice if it had never happened.
That was the moment when something went wrong, and I should have noticed it even then.
But we are the human race.
We do everything at the last possible moment.
Procrastination will kill us.
It will kill the whole world!!
The ultimate enemy of everything.
I suppose that was when I first allowed myself to think:
“What if I were with her?”
At first it was just a game, a silly, unserious thought.
Oh, how I wish I could go back and regret that thought properly.
Looking at you that way was already my mistake.
But you were not exactly helping either.
Even now, I could give you a medal for all the false and ambiguous hopes you gave me — the kind I cannot stand from anyone anymore.
Because once, they completely confused me.
I remember that day very well.
Oh, that cursed day!!
I would love to know what the hell you were thinking.
I am not taking all the blame away from myself.
But didn't you already know me better than anyone else by then?
Why did you do that?
To understand what I mean, let me remind you.
Then and now, I have always been someone who loves discussing books, movies, and TV shows.
That day was no different. I was talking to you endlessly about nothing in particular, telling you about yet another thing I had been thinking about.
“I think matching rings are the height of romance,” I said to you. And I was absolutely not talking about wedding rings, let me make that clear. “Nowadays it feels like everything is losing its romance. People do not bind themselves to each other with rings or pendants as often anymore.”
There was not the slightest hint in my words.
Because, once again, I need to emphasize this: to me, rings were romantic.
There was nothing between you and me.
We were friends.
Nothing more.
And yet…
About an hour later, you suggested that we order two rings for us — matching, identical rings.
Of course, after the meaning I had just explained to you, I had absolutely no idea what you could possibly have been thinking.
Unfortunately, there was no common sense left in my head once feelings got involved.
Now, consciously, I can say that the whole thing was ridiculous and stupid.
But back then, my mind was completely blown away.
I was rolling around on my bed with pure, living happiness.
That was the day I realized:
Something was beginning to grow inside my chest.
After that, I wore the ring constantly.
Every morning I put it on, and every night I took it off.
I treasured it like the most precious thing in the world.
A couple of times I nearly lost it.
And when I was convinced that I would never find it again, I was overwhelmed with absolute horror and despair.
I cried and cried as though everything were over, as though I could not survive without it.
Looking ahead, after we ended, I obviously got rid of it.
A couple of months ago, I was coming home and accidentally found the ring again — something that seemed completely impossible.
I had such a clear picture in my mind of getting rid of it forever in a fit of anger.
But there it was.
And it is still there.
Maybe I do not want to throw it away now.
The anger does not consume me anymore the way it did back then.
Now comes the part that is difficult to remember.
Mostly because I still describe that period as “the worst torture my mind has ever put me through.”
And I am not exaggerating.
I was losing my mind, and it felt as though I was getting closer and closer to disappearing into the darkness for good.
The pure infatuation did not last all that long.
There was nothing coming back from you.
We were friends.
Period.
I was certain that nothing between us would ever happen.
My mistake was failing to notice the moment when I crossed the line between love and dependence.
Soon, the second one outweighed the first by a hundred percent.
I blamed myself for having feelings — because I had no right to them.
I blamed myself because I was too insignificant to deserve to be around someone as perfect as you.
I cried and cried.
I shook and shook.
Every day.
You knew.
You knew very well.
I did not even need to confess my feelings, because you already knew everything yourself.
We both knew, and neither of us wanted to talk about it.
And when I finally mentioned it directly, it was not a confession.
It was not a conversation about what would happen between us.
No.
I was writing to the person who was the cause of my pain, telling her that I could not bear the unrequited feelings anymore, that I was in terrible pain.
She did not deny it.
She knew.
All she could do was apologize.
And that was not the end.
I swore that I would let go of my feelings — as though that had ever been possible.
And that was where we left things.
Then the days kept going.
And going.
By then, I had already made you the meaning of my existence.
There was no separate “me” anymore.
Two hours without talking to you, and I was already going through withdrawal.
Addiction in the most literal sense.
The withdrawal was so intense that I was simply losing my mind.
I gave myself a goal:
Forget myself and think about you.
Your happiness.
Everything for you.
You and you and always you.
And that led to something new in an already very sick mind.
For the first time, I experienced what is called depersonalization.
God, it was horrifying.
I was terrified.
At one point, I suddenly realized that I could no longer feel anything within myself.
No desires.
No feelings.
Not even a sense of who I was anymore.
For days, there was only you in my head and nothing else.
Eventually, I simply lost myself, and that genuinely frightened me.
I understood how far everything was going.
And even then, honestly, I did not want to turn back.
Even falling apart could not make me give you up.
I felt awful all the time, and you were always the reason.
I was terrified of losing you.
I was terrified that someone would take you away from me — because you could choose anyone, while I was nothing but a discarded piece of trash.
And you already attracted everyone anyway.
Of course, I had absolutely no faith in myself.
Maybe things would have continued like that forever.
But you were the one who finally put an end to it.
And there is only one thing I can hold against you here:
Why did you put up with it for so long?
Why did you marinate both of us in that mess when it had been bothering you from the beginning?
Why did you stay silent about so many things?
Why did you lie?
All of that gave birth to hatred in me.
Especially the relationship you had been hiding with someone who had previously treated you very badly.
It made me furious that you had not even told me, when we had been so incredibly close.
And I found out at the very last moment.
Because instead of you ending things yourself, your secret girlfriend appeared.
She started pressuring me aggressively.
What horrified me was how much she knew.
I trusted only you in this world.
Everything.
And everyone.
And then I discovered that this person knew my secrets.
And do you know what you told me?
“I have no secrets from her.”
Just horrible.
Complete bullshit.
Why were my secrets part of that too?
And what is almost funny now is how hypocritical that statement was.
That girl — your girlfriend — knew that I had once had a bad opinion of her.
I told her directly that her sweet little “D” had been crying to me only a few months earlier about how badly you treated her, and not just once.
You have no secrets from her, right?
So I can tell her yours too?
Oh, of course you did not see it that way.
When I did exactly what you had done, you told me that I disgusted you and that you never wanted to see me again.
What a joke.
After that, I hated you.
The hatred was just as maddening as the dependence had been.
I thought about you every single day in exactly the same way, but now with unimaginable rage.
I realized that you had hidden so much from me, and that there had been so many lies in everything you said, that I never actually knew what kind of person you were.
It took six months for the hatred to begin fading.
After that, you started coming to me in dreams.
In some of them, you came back to me.
In others, you started hurting me.
And I would wake up crying and terrified, because you were still my weakness.
That is how you became something entirely your own.
Something I had never experienced with anyone else, and something that had never reached that kind of intensity with anyone else.
And, of course, I cannot call it love.