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dear adair “sappy” aliza ______,

happy birthday!

(in case you’re reading this on desktop, it should be fully responsive)

i’m not sure how to write this, to be honest. as i do, i think i’m experiencing the feelings that have inhibited me from being the friend that i wish i could have been for you. it’s a sort of paralysis, an uncertainty on what to say. my mind and heart race, yet my hands can barely choke out this letter for you. that being said, i hope you’ve been having a good birthday weekend— i’ve been busy trying to make this site work.

i had planned to make you a website for your birthday for a while, except the idea had originated from the period where we weren’t talking. i would have called the site reticence, named after my own emotions at the time. i had imagined it as something exploring my own emotions once i had processed them.

i find our friendship funny in a bittersweet way. it seems like the way everything aligned, things were meant to go wrong. a star-crossed friendship. i feel like with you, i’ve kicked myself more than any other relationship in my life.

regrets tend to stick with me, mistakes i’ve made many many years ago and have grown from, but have still yet to learn to talk about let alone forgive myself for—jersey city in 2018, london in 2022, montclair in 2023, then jersey city again in 2024— and i had expected our friendship to become another one of those… but we’re still talking—

and that has to mean something. ♫

this site is a spiritual successor of reticence but rather than a memorial of my mistakes, it serves to exist as a testament to what our friendship has meant to me.

when we had reconnected, i was surprised and heavily bothered when you said you weren’t sure how much i cared about our friendship. i still don’t know how to tell you how thankful i am that we met and that we’re still friends.

~~i cried when i lost you as a friend. i cried writing this.~~

i originally wanted this site to be an archive of our bits, what we’ve shared, everything that made me thankful i met you. i quickly found that was a sisyphan goal. (did you know in our dm’s we’ve shared over a thousand links & photos? not even including text or our yapping in osume)

so while i found it impossible to memorialize everything that’s meant everything to me, i hope that this site can share but a sliver of what i’ve never found myself able to.

when we met

maybe it’s silly but i was always nervous talking to you. i was nervous talking to anyone i didn’t know. i felt like every time you complimented me, you were talking to someone i wasn’t. i still feel this way, to some extent.

i don’t think i ever really understood what you saw in me. honestly, i don’t think i still do. this feeling of someone being interested in talking to me felt alien.

worried about overstepping

i wish you were able to hear every time you’ve made me laugh

a bit gone too far

i couldn’t bring myself to get screenshots from this time. at the time, i found it amusing, light-hearted. now, i can’t think about it without… not being happy.

i think you’ve asked a few times what was going through my mind. i think at the time it had felt like i had shoehorned myself into a sort of persona that i didn’t really know how to get out of. maybe it’s a people-pleasing tendency.

i wanted to write more about what i was thinking, what happened, but i feel i can barely do that either. i felt like i failed as a friend and that i couldn’t reasonably see myself as your friend after that. i struggle to talk about it because i still struggle to forgive myself and see myself as someone more than who i’m not.

i wanted to write this for you as a way to show the ways i’m trying to teach myself that i’m someone who can be somebody for someone else. i don’t feel comfortable talking about it because i don’t see it as anyone else’s burden but my own. i don’t feel like it’s something i can burden you with.

i don’t think i know how to feel comfortable around others. i’ve never felt as though i have a place in the life of others, that i’ll always be someone on the periphery. when you invited me to spend time with your friends, i thought maybe that i was wrong. but things went wrong and i know it’s not as simple as that. i feel like i could be at someone’s doorstep with them holding the door open for me and i still wouldn’t feel welcome.

i don’t think you deserve to have a friend who can’t tell the difference between a front door and an emergency exit. i don’t think it’s fair to you to care about someone who’s losing a fight to care about themself. but you still talk to me, so i tell myself

that it has to mean something.

Could you love me while I hate myself?
Could you love me though I don’t deserve it?
Could you love me like there’s no one else
Even though you know I can’t return it?

Could you love me when the water’s rough
Or when I leave you in a desert?
Could you love me though I speak with knives
Knowing all too well that you’ll get hurt? ♫

But God, you’re so passive, is it in your blood?
You won’t fight for a single thing you love ♫

closing

i hope you enjoyed reading through this.

congrats on turning 27— for all i’ve teased you, i would be hard pressed to find anyone else who’s made such a positive impact on my life, let alone in such a short time period (can you believe it’s only been nine months? (is that short? long?)).

i know this whole thing is rather bittersweet (but hey, i thought you like that kind of thing). in truth, there’s still a lot of apprehension and fear and reticence. i really wanted to do something for you.

i was really sad when you told me that you felt like i didn’t care. i was more disappointed in myself that i ever made you feel that way when it couldn’t ever be further from the truth.

i don’t think that making you a website makes up for that or undoes anything in any sort of way. i just build things. so i wanted to build something for you. i’m still trying to learn how to be a friend, trying to convince myself that i’m someone that you want in your life or that i might have a place in it at all.

a lot of the uncertainty is in how i don’t know what you want or are comfortable with or a million other things that my mind is too tired to even be anxious about right now.

however, i think this is accurate:

i hope this new’s years resolution is one that i can not only keep, but be proud of.

your friend,

p.s. i got this domain for 5 years. it’s absolutely unnecessary, but i thought it was a nice period of time for when you do your next set of ‘decade’ questions.

when we met

sharing

a bit gone too far

closing