Tenth Letter — Eurydice
Your name hasn’t crossed my mind in the longest time. Sure, my friends have joked about you and all but I haven’t really spoken about you and I had intended not to, for as long as I could. Moving on takes a lot of steps and I had religiously done my part. I even stopped writing the sequel to a play I wrote two years ago.
Seeing you again on the first night of December was definitely not in my bingo cards this year.
What would Orpheus do if he bumped into Eurydice one day? Years after he condemned her to the Underworld? I’d like to know.
I told my boyfriend what happened — we had just celebrated a year together. I was on my way to the gym, crossing Shibuya Scramble, when I caught a glimpse of you. Or so I thought. It was fast so I wasn’t entirely sure if it was even you. I ignored the thought and went to my spin class. 45 minutes of endorphins. Kesha’s cover of This is Me really did it this time.
I told him how overwhelming it would be to see someone I thought I would never see again. He knows about you and he couldn’t be more supportive when I told him last night. It would have been a very different reaction if I were him.
You moved halfway across the globe. We have each other blocked on all social media — as a mutual decision so that we could move on with our lives. That was three years ago. Both of us now live in two of the biggest cities on the planet.
Except I forgot about the part where your parents still live here and it was not impossible to actually bump into you again. I just didn’t really prepare myself for that.
I told my friends, too. The odds of it being actually you was something I was positive about — I have the pandemic to thank for. I didn’t really worry about it even when Japan opened their borders a month ago.
They thought I knew. They thought I knew that you have been back for a while now and it was actually more surprising that I only saw you last night.
So it was you.
What would Orpheus do if he bumped into Eurydice one day? Years after he condemned her to the Underworld? I’d like to know.
I would like to believe that what I am feeling now, apart from the daunting experience of seeing your ex again, is guilt. Guilt that I thought I had everything under control. I had imagined our first reunion to be calm, peaceful — the kind of scene like when Hannah Montana left her apartment and gave a goodbye look one last time. I had pictured a “hi, hello, bye” moment in my head for as long as I could remember. Not me running frantically so as to hide myself as quickly as possible.
Seeing you last night made me feel guilty. If my boyfriend told me that they saw their ex and felt overwhelmed, I wouldn’t know how to feel.
Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that I have moved on. Perhaps faster than I had initially thought. Grief, in any form, does not disappear because someone has decided they have no use for it anymore. Time does not make it go away. People are not supposed to forget about it.
We grow around the pain of grief, hoping that it may never have any control over you. After all, that’s the goal: to be able to control when and how it haunts you again. Time allows us to heal and be okay that it will forever be part of us.
I just need to be honest with myself and accept that the overwhelming feeling of seeing you again is normal, and that it doesn’t pull my progress back to zero. I am only human, but if I were to believe the stars, they might have intended for me to see you again to finally realize that I have full control of the grief we might have mutually inflicted on each other.
I hope you’re doing fine, I really do.
