SO, I read your short note.

To the point.

Pleasant.
Diplomatic.

With a door prize. My bracelet returned. Thanks for playing.

Did I do good, Mammi?
Or, maybe I failed? I pressed too hard. Maybe the note to your dad and your sister was the last straw. Or, given your months of stoney deadly silence they simply forced you to act beyond the cowardice I have always perceived in you, the child’s maturity level in a woman’s gorgeous figurine. You speak all the right words but all your actions – and that of your poisonous friend – show me you a. like the toxic world in which you live and b. I was right to not capitulate to your manipulative, inappropriately written not spoken, demand, ultimatum.

“As I already explained, I need to be on my path,” you say.
Ah, no. You held our relationship at tearful gunpoint to your demands that I, once again, externally compensate for what you cannot reconcile within. Now the question is do I send you the loving gifts I had intended for Christmas? Do I send Papi a Red Sox World Championship hat as planned if they won? Do I send the necklace, the cd, all with ‘friendship’ when you revised “Eternal Love” with a terse “Glad we reconnected,” and no sign off with love.

Why did you give so much, so intensely, so quickl? I’ll never understand how I came to this place but I also know I was pissing blood and cornered by a woman knowingly had me against the ropes. My wish is I could play Sigmund Freud and question you out of your instinctive, territorial, jealous manipulations – not malevolent just bad habits. I would love to know why you could not distinguish you the nubile nymph drawing her professor away from his then wife from the middle aged mom who was with a man who loved and saw only her and was maybe a little too needy in trying to move forward with his life.

Now, in the wake of the wreckage – your only communication with me to first remove me from social media then block me, more passive aggression like your bestie posting you both on my birthday knowing I’d see just to confirm her clutches and your compliance – I am left wondering if I ought parcel out your gifts to others who can hear or, still send to you in loving friendship

Too bad.

We had such a promising sunrise on the waters of the Summer of our Life together.

We blew it. But, you blew it more. Fear wins. I lose.

I Love You. &iempre.