An odd but relieving moment tonight, for the hundredth time this week I almost called her K. We were standing in her kitchen/living room, and this newfound urge for directness and confrontation swept over me.

"Do you ever almost call me your ex's name?" I ask.

She doesn't even hesitate like she usually does, and responds with an emphatic, "Yes!" She's been struggling with it since we considered us something worth pursuing.

We can come up with some pseudo-scientific theories, that we've compartmentalized these automatic responses to relationship stimuli in a certain area of our brains, and we're stirring them now. Some bullshit like that.

It may be the letter, for me. Forwarded to me from my mother, thirteen pages of a teenage girl trapped in the body of a woman in her late 20s. I may have given her a hair more than an inch in my response, selfishly trying to make her feel stupid. But it doesn't change my brief and blunt responses to her previous yearly outreach messages, with some iteration of, "I have no desire to rebuild a friendship with you."

The letter's in the trash now, where it should be, and probably where it should have gone when I picked the envelope off my gross kitchen counter.

"I'm writing because I have something specific to say. It could change everything, or it could change nothing," or something like that on the first page.

Thirteen pages later, she has said nothing specific, nothing has changed, she still sounds like an idiot, and she has most definitely fucked me up for the next 72 hours.