dear almost boy, i wish i could say that this letter would not be a bluntly poetic collection of my thoughts. i remember clearly the day you told me i should have less of them. and so i took all my unanswered questions and stuffed them down. at your urging, i turned my dreams into time bombs that exploded in a puff of your cologne. i placed an expiration date on every relationship in my life excluding ours. and almost boy, this is when irony is found. love is called star crossed, but ours was star-cursed. from the very foundation of smarting remarks we started to crumble. like a house with termites, we became an unsteady collection of scrambled emotions and signals. like the sizzling of my thumb tip against the curling iron i used for you, our passion was short lived. we were no wildfire or volcano. i think i was an ember smeared with ash and you were a gold digger who mistaken me for something else. i was almost enough for you and you were always enough for me. i have thought of making myself sound like a victor, after all, didn’t i escape from you? but what i think only a few heart-broken people realize, is that the person doesn’t have to be good. they can have hidden villain grins that they keep in the glovebox of their car and daggered words stored alongside their major organs. isn’t that what love is all about? imperfect people making a perfection inside their own minds? you are my almost boy. you almost were prince charming, and maybe to another girl, you will be. i almost was your princess, but instead, i turned into a dragon. and while you never were my prince charming, you were forever the knight. we were two star-cursed people who believed in stereotypical fairytales and who always thought our relationship was solid until it wasn’t. i don’t know if we were foolish. in love. or perhaps both all at once. i will end in the poetic way you always hated. and if you are reading this, you might pause to let an oh so familiar smirk cross your face. perhaps it boosts your ego to think i am heartbroken over you. i’m not. almost is such a sad word. and we were such sad people who thought that yen yang couldn’t stop us from being sad together until we could form our own happiness. i don’t know what happened in our mini forever we had. all i know is that now i find myself dancing in the kitchen again, wearing a t-shirt that smells like fresh summer rain and honey. i find myself making muffins and casing them into plastic skins with a smile. you were my almost boy. my sad boy. and now i am a complexly happy person who finds herself dressing in green because somehow my yellow and your blue muddled together to form the girl i am today. you were my almost boy. and i was your maybe girl.