Tonight I was going through some papers from almost a year ago, and I came across an unmailed letter I wrote to the Louse when I was in the worst of my fury. I remember the night well; I had spent the night at JeaNa and Justin�s new home in Elizabeth and I wrote as I sprawled out across the bed in their guest room. It was a touch chilly and so very quiet � the quiet seemed to punctuate the grief that welled up in my throat. I had had to put Frankie to sleep a few weeks earlier, I had just been struck with the news of John�s death just a day before, and I latched onto the affront of the Louse hoarding my things still as an antidote, a distraction, from my grief. The pen practically tore through the paper as I slashed out my words.

Louis, I am not going to tell you anything you don�t already know � deep in that shriveled, blackened corpse of an organ you call a heart � but you are vile, irredeemable, unworthy of not one shred of beauty or happiness in the entire span of what passes for your life. You are, as Keith so eloquently phrased it, a waste of flesh. And believe me, it isn�t just Keith. There is not one person in my life who does not despise you, who did not always think you beneath me. You said it yourself, that I deserved better than you, and you couldn�t bear it, could you?

You saw my beauty, both external and internal, my competence and intelligence and generosity and heart, you saw how respected and adored and loved and cherished I am by everyone in my life, and all I ever wanted to do was share that with you, but that wasn�t good enough. You looked into your decayed heart, your shriveled soul, and knew you could never be like me, you felt like the fraud you are, and you decided to destroy all the good in me, to make me suffer along with you.

And oh, how you tried. You isolated me, took advantage of me, preyed upon my generosity and goodwill, confused me, belittled me, rejected me � you treated me as if I were the worthless piece of excrement you are and yet my inherent goodness shone through nonetheless. I may not have been able to see it you but you still could, you caught the glimmers. Seeing my humanity assert itself in the midst of your cruelty must have felt like a slap in the face to you , so you hit back for real. How much you must have panicked, knowing I wouldn�t put up with it for long. You thought that by calling my bluff, beating me to the punch, in one way or another you would keep me with you. How pathetic and stupid and worthless you must have felt to see your plan backfire so dramatically.

Don�t you get it? If you had been truly contrite, I probably would have maintained some speck of sympathy for you, would have harbored some tiny bit of longing for what could have been. I might have maintained some of the fiction, actually believed your delusions of morality and character. But with every day that you deprive me of what is rightfully mine, you scream to the world how repellent and despicable you are, how monstrously selfish and callous and cruel you are. You may think that you are somehow winning some kind of battle � sort of like the battle when I felt suicidal so you decided to punch me and slam my head in the wall in response? � but you will never, ever win.

Because as much as I still loathe you, someday you will mean absolutely nothing to me, just like you are nothing deep in your core. I hope you spend the rest of your life � and I hope it is unbearably, painfully long (especially since you are too chickenshit to really kill yourself) � alone forever, loved by none, scorned by all, disgusting and contemptible. I want you to live as a pariah and never enjoy a moment of relief or happiness in all your years, and forever be haunted by what you could have had and instead threw away.

The reason I found this so noteworthy with the distance of a year is how much this has faded. How much the Louse is becoming more and more a vague and distant character who was once in my life. How past he is becoming. Sure, he still comes up � I wouldn�t have posted this letter if he were completely erased � and especially as I am forging a relationship with Ben, I can�t help but be reminded of what it was like to be with the Louse in comparison. (If nothing else, it is such a relief to be with Ben � to not have to be constantly on guard, waiting for that one wrong word to fall from my lips that would spark an entire weekend of exhausting, grueling belittlement.) He is not completely exorcised from my memories, and probably never will be. But he is drained and powerless and faint. I imagine that I will every once in a while still be consumed with the curiosity of what he is up to � every once in a while I entertain (as a pure lark) the idea of hiring a private investigator to find out what his life has been like since I left him � but the sting is gone.

Last year, I never could have imagined that.

Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the realization how much life is constantly changing. How people and interests and events ebb and flow in and out of my life. How much I really am changing and growing and evolving even if I don�t feel the movements (I think of continental drift, of India pushing into Asia to create the Himalayas a centimeter at a time.) It can be a bit much at times. But it can also be helpful to look back and realize: something can feel absolutely unbearable at the moment, but in months, in years, it can lessen. I can bear it.

Of course, I do say this still never having lived through huge adversity. The Louse was the hardest thing I ever lived through, and I won�t lie, it was hard, but a night of Forensic Fridays on Court TV reminds me of a larger perspective. That I�ve never lost someone to a brutal and senseless crime, which to me, seems the worst thing possible. I watch these shows for the science but it is always the humanity that stays with me. The astounding grief of a father whose daughter was abducted from the backyard when his back was turned for mere moments. The women trying to make sense of their sister�s brutal butchering by her husband of 35 years. The woman who was raped for hours and barely escaped alive after being forced to watch her husband clubbed to death in their own home. It is mere luck, nothing else, that has kept me safe from such horrors, and I do not care to lose sight of that.

But these morbid thoughts are fleeting. Instead there is this sense of calm I feel. Last year I could never have imagined it.

An aside: for some reason lately, I have been watching inordinate amounts of the Game Show Network . For some reason, as a very young kid, I adored The Match Game , and I�m getting quite a kitschy kick out of watching the cadaverous Gene Rayburn and various 70�s pseudo-celebrities make groan-inducing double entendres you could drive a truck through. I also always enjoyed Love Connection - Marty and I used to watch it after school religiously, and we misanthropically relished the bad dates (I wonder if my multitudes of bad dates was karmic payback?) � and now it is again a delicious guilty pleasure. Ah, the delight of reruns!

Can you tell I don�t get out much during the dark months?

Wednesday night my office threw an unprecedented happy hour � I�ve been there for almost four years (I think I�m gonna just pass out with the shock at that realization) and it was the first time we�ve ever gone out for drinks. Where at Bonita, we would go out and get plastered on a regular basis and have just the most outrageous outings, my current office�s usual level of revelry is limited to potluck lunches (though I�ve gotta tell you, we can cook � my boss Shelley jokes that if we ever lose our funding, we can go into the catering business.) It was brief but fun � I had a mango margarita and a pomegranate margarita and got really tipsy because they were strong and then thankfully we all went home before I got too silly and started telling outrageous stories.

Then later in the evening Ben came over and spent the night with me and we had another really lovely time and it is still surprising me, how enjoyably gradual it is, getting to know each other, easing into each other. If we haven�t already, we definitely earned our nerd credentials that night � after sex we were lounging around on my bed, nude (I remember originally having lots of anxiety around being totally naked with him � I would make sure to wear skirts so that I could just take off my underwear and still have the skirt around my waist during sex � and yes, I am well aware that that is not wholly body accepting but I seem to have gotten over it with a short amount of time and now I enjoy that post-coital nonchalance that suffuses itself through my flesh and obliterates my unease.)

Later in the night (okay, it was about 2 or 3 in the morning) as we laid in bed we drifted in and out of sleep and talked about a variety of minutiae: how we both prefer 30-day MetroCards, my tax-deferred annuity, keeping kosher for Passover (he couldn�t answer some question I had about kosher salt and I bopped him with my pillow and teased him - "what kind of Jew are you anyway?" "A bad one!", he replied) and we kept giggling about how pathetic we were being (talk about pillow talk, eh?) and it was so good.

The second night he spent the night I had woken up to find myself near the edge of the bed and still mostly asleep, I gently nudged him over and murmured "move over, love" and my eyes popped open with shock � did I actually use the "L" word? (and it was before his use of it himself) � and while I don�t feel ready to say hey, I love him � I don�t know yet, still, and I�m not rushing it � but the idea doesn�t scare me anymore either.

Sigh. Life is good, you know?