I think I liked it better when she was just your friend and I was suspicious about your history. Something about knowing that she was your fuck buddy for in and around a year doesn't quite sit well with me, but I guess that we're all entitled to having our own pasts. You admitted that you'd thought about how you wished I was still a virgin when we met, not because you wanted to know what it'd be like to be just anybody's first. You wanted to know what it'd be like to be mine. I can't convey how dirty and disappointed in myself your saying that made me feel, but it wasn't your intention to ruin me with honesty. I'm sorry for being stuck inside my own self so often. You can't change what happened when I was seventeen. I told you about that little toy elephant that I lost, probably in that hotel when I got so drunk I didn't understand that you weren't even there, or why you wouldn't be, and I told you about how it made me sad and you understood as best as you could. But I never told you that that was the toy that they gave me in the hospital after I tried to kill myself and that there was a woman next to me in intensive care and she had a little giraffe clutched in her right hand, the hand nearest mine, and she didn't wake up all that time that I was there but my elephant and her giraffe had all of these conversations that made me cry when the curtains were closed because all of a sudden I'd managed to feel lonely again. I only told one other person about why that stupid little toy was so important and he told me that maybe it was for the best and so that I could let go but I've done so much letting go of so many things I couldn't bear to lose this year, why this cruel twist? He fit in my hand just so. Turns out that one day in my post-suicidal counseling that my parents bought me a giraffe too and I wonder where they got the idea, it almost felt cruel because nobody else had known that little giraffe. I wonder if she ever woke up. I found another elephant in Tesco today, where my last one was found, and he looked the same only so much different and he wasn't nearly as soft, but the killer was that he had these little beans in his butt and it made him so, so heavy and so he didn't feel like he fit in my hand just right. You gave me the best birthday present of all, you know. Nobody else would've ever thought of anything at all like that, and even though you weren't there while I opened it because I'd asked you not to come, I laughed aloud because you just make me feel that good about myself. My birthday made me think about how you finished secondary school the year that I started and about how I was twelve when you were eighteen and I mentioned it and we both laughed because it made things seem kind of dirty even though everything really is that right. I find it hard to believe. Truth is though, I don't want to be yours just yet. I want some time to pretend that I am nothing for anybody. I'll be back quickly, you know, I just don't want the start of something new be the only signifier of the end of something stale. We will be new. That's my promise to you.