Week of Recklessness: Day One—Write A Letter to an Ex

As I was telling my friend Maryam this weekend, I believe that marriage has chilled me out.

It may be that I am simply chilling out with age, and that just happens to run concurrently with being married, but I would like to think that Caleb has had a calming influence on me. I used to be all bluster and passion—everything I felt, I felt strongly and all of society's propriety was sidelined because of it. The fight of the teenage brain against The Man is always a hard one.

These feelings have been stirred in me recently, however. All I want to do is burn tons of bridges and wield the mighty sword of passion against all of my foes. Thankfully, I am a little older and wiser than I used to be. Usually, I suppress these urges and work that energy out in positive ways.

But not this week!

Welcome to the Week of Recklessness!

Every day this week, I will choose an undesirable thing to do and chronicle it here each evening. I promise not to do anything to negatively affect my health, but I cannot say the same about my pride or dignity.

Week of Recklessness is a blog series that chronicles a week's worth of ill-advised decisions. Please do not try this at home, unless you are willing to wreck with your health, pride, or dignity.

I usually try to promote self-betterment, but I also believe that you have to let loose every once in awhile.

To thank you for going on this self-indulgent journey with me, I am going to be giving away over $25 worth of items from Dogbone Art handmade goods at the end of the week. The winner will be randomly chosen on Saturday, February 4th.

On each day of recklessness, leave a comment to get an entry. That's a total of five entries!

You also get a bonus entry for adding me on Google Reader—leave a comment saying you did!

Day One—Write A Letter to an Ex

The worst way to start your day is by dreaming you had gotten together with "The One Who Got Away." For me, that one is named Loren. I have mentioned him before, explaining that I was kind of a jerk to him. He broke up with me after I left for college and I haven't seen or heard from him since. According to my calculations, that's about eight and a half years.

Try carrying a torch for that long...see how tired your arm gets.

I have obviously moved on enough to date other boys, get married, and have kids. But I know in my heart that if I even saw him at the grocery store, I would faint—my feelings are still that strong for him. He is my Beatles, my Michael Jackson, my Justin Bieber.

Every now and again in those eight years, I have lost my marbles and written him a letter. It's usually very measured, very grown-up, very "just wanted to reconnect." I have yet to get a response, or even a sign that he didn't throw the letters directly in the trash without opening them.

This time, the letter is coming straight from the broken heart of an 18-year-old girl. Each paragraph is chock full of "you ruined my life" and "what did I do to make you stop loving me"; I may even get brave and spray the letter with the Calgon I used to wear when we were dating.

Does he deserve this? I don't think so. Loren's life has been hard-ish since I last saw him, and I know that he is a kind person in his heart. And why would I lay my leftover angst at his feet when there is literally nothing he can do about it now?

But this letter is still going in the mail.

I hope he reads it this time, and I hope he feels really, really bad.