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Merry Christmas,
It’s snowing here in Bullworth. Johnny Vincent is beating up Tad Spencer somewhere in the distance. I can see a couple of homeless men dealing drugs on the corner. The light above the Yum Yum Market flickers, like it always does. My head hurts.
I don’t understand why I’m writing to you. It’s almost funny.
Petey told me I must have some kind of disorder, because no one in their right mind goes back to someone like you after all this time. Zoe just stared at me in silence, like she always does when something is so absurd she can’t even bring herself to comment on it. I get her. I really do. I would’ve reacted the exact same way once.
Christ, Gary, why the hell am I writing to you two years later? Why do I still have even the faintest hope that you’ll answer?
I know nothing about you now, except that your father still lives in that mansion in Old Bullworth Vale. The one you once told me was so big it felt like it was suffocating you. I have so many questions for you, and I honestly don’t know if I even want to hear the answers. Is life still as cruel to you as it was when we were fifteen? Are you still fighting that sick mind of yours? Do you still live trapped in that alternating state of paranoia? Are you even alive, Gary? Or did your mind finally devour you?
I don’t think you realize how relentlessly your memory haunts me. Endless nights where I can’t sleep because the first image that comes back is your face crashing through Crabblesnitch’s office window. Your eyes. Your scar. Your shrill voice, like some furious bird. Everything hits me all at once, tearing me apart, dragging me through emotional wreckage while I try to claw together a shred of peace. You’re a war, Gary, and I’m drowning in the trenches.
I’m still just as weak, Gary. I still search for your voice in the academy halls, as if I might find you leaning casually against my locker again. Sometimes I slip into your old room. It’s empty now, Gary, and I sit on the rotting frame of a bed that no longer has a mattress. I’m still looking for you, just as foolish, just as stupid. You made me into this. You, with your fractured logic and frantic gaze, turned me into this monster made of fear and rage. I still hate you. As much as the first day I saw you. I hate you so much that I could rip my heart out and it would still keep beating out of sheer spite, out of the need to kill you. And yet, I can’t look away. I hate you, but I can’t erase you.
You make me want to vomit, Gary. It happens every time I think about you. Every time I relive that twisted magnetism, that distance neither of us could close. You would leave, but you always came back. One way or another, but always intensely, always sickly. I waited for you like a child. I waited for you in my room, an eternal Halloween. A hallucinatory image of you. A lie dressed up as reality.
I want to throw up because I think I love you. And it terrifies me, because I think I see a version of you that doesn’t exist, one that’s intimate and only mine. Because even though you’re no longer here, something inside me still wraps itself around your cursed essence. Around that venom of yours, around that sadism clinging to your heart. I wrap myself in your blurred memories, in your filthy words, in your blows full of rage. I wrap myself in the knife you stabbed me with, again and again. The knife I left inside.
I believe that even gone, you still have the power to ruin me entirely. Are you really that venomous, Gary? That corrosive?
Do you remember that day you actually took your medication? That day you came into my room wrapped in a kind of celestial calm I’d never seen in you before. You seemed like someone else, something between peace and chaos. You talked to me about your parents, your grandfather, how rich your family really was. About how they gave you that scar. About why you hated everyone. About why you hated me. I listened, staring at you, until you fell asleep in my bed. Feeling warm and strangely safe, I fell asleep beside you.
That day I felt the need to touch you. Not physically, no. I wanted to claw at your soul. I felt bare, exposed in essence; naked under your dirty gaze, under that stoic mind of yours. And just for a tiny second, I thought I wasn’t the only one. I thought you’d let yourself be clawed at too. I thought I’d reached a thin, fragile layer of who you were. That I was finally holding the hidden fragility of your mind. This mind that forced you to become the weapon that endlessly wounded me.
But the next day you acted like nothing had happened, Gary. And I played along. I ignored the erratic pounding in my chest, those uncontrollable nerves whenever I spoke to you. I focused on helping you. On living as your pack mule. And I forgot. I forgot the trembling hands, the sweat in my palms. I forgot the sick, misguided way I always kept coming back to you.
I hate you. I love you. Is “love” even a big enough word for what I feel for you? Is loving someone the same thing as enduring the instability of a disturbed mind? I don’t even know if I truly know you at all. If your head is really a sinking ship I never managed to reach. What I do know is that I have so much inside me that I’ve started living as if you were dead. Because I can’t live without you, Gary, and thinking that you might still be out there alive tears me apart. Thinking of your absence unravels me, especially knowing you might still exist somewhere. I feel incomplete. As if nothing could ever fill me. I feel like I need you so I can keep being myself. I feel like I need you just to be able to recognize myself. I feel like I need you to continue this twisted cat-and-mouse game. If you’re not here beside me, slowly destroying me… then who am I? Who am I, if not your merciful slave? Why can’t I exist freely? Why do I feel chained to you like a dog to its master?
It’s getting dark. It’s snowing harder now, and I’m staring at the waves crashing against the harbor from the beach house. The ceiling is leaking. It’s cold. Everything is silent, and I know how much you hate silence. I know your head must be screaming restlessly right now. Where are you, Gary?
I hope you’re not torturing anyone the way you tortured me. No one deserves that kind of suffering. I think I’m the only one who does. I think we’re more alike than I ever wanted to admit. I think you marked me far more deeply than I ever thought you could. I think I’m more addicted to you than I ever dared to believe.
I’m laughing to myself. I think there’s still a bottle of whiskey somewhere in this house. I’ll open it in your honor, I guess. Maybe I’ll invite Zoe over. I won’t say a word to anyone. Not about you.
Christ, Gary, I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never torn myself open like this. I’ve never been this confused, this lost without someone. I guess I’m grieving a version of you that doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this at all. I guess Galloway inspired me to be a little more poetic. Don’t you think? A laureate poet. A half-dead one.
Merry Christmas, Gary.
If you ever see this… please, don’t call me.
Love, Jimmy.