Long-Distance Love Affairs

by Megan Detrie

I'd already earned 1,400 frequent flyer miles in silence before you thought to apologize, and even then, it was just a postscript to the painful break-up (the one where you called me worthless and matched my humiliation with hauteur). As a gesture of good faith, you attached your latest manuscript to the e-mail and asked me to read it, buttering me up by calling me your "favorite critic," praising my honesty and good teeth. I waited a few days before opening the file and then I clicked straight to the final page, page 86. It was blank. There was no hidden message at the end; no grandiloquent love letter; no cloying goodbyes; not even an explanation for why you gave up the moment I boarded the plane after wanting "us" to "work" so fiercely; no insight to what made you so mean, and worst still, there was no hint that you'd changed your mind about me and would fly here immediately. Stripped of your bombastic gestures, I've come to accept you would only behave rationally when it was too late, and by then have nothing to say.

6S

Megan Detrie lives in Cairo, Egypt and is known for flurries of passion followed quickly by a failure of attention span (or a red-eye out of town). Her latest project can be found here.