Shannon-

Whelp, I went and got day drunk. By myself. On a fucking Friday. Jesus. Those Other Half Green Diamonds beers? The old tampon-smelling ones? I HAD FIVE OF THEM!

I was going to call you, but I didn’t. I have restraint!! Good boy Charlie, is what you’d have said. Now go to your mat.

I watched a lot of TV. You took all the passwords with you when you took the TV, so all I can watch is Freevee. It’s OK. There’s tons of stuff on Freevee. Highway to Heaven with Michael Landon. Little Man Tate. Tons. Oh, and they have some nature show. Not Nat Geo because they have their own app, but some knockoff. Probably just stock footage with an AI British VO. But anyway, it was a nature program, so I quit my surfing and settled in.

Bugs.

It was all about bugs. Insects of the Amazon, or Egypt, or something Indiana Jones-y like that. There was all the regular nature-program cycle of life shit, birth, mating, death, more mating, more death, etc.. Like Pornhub, but with 8 legs and antennas instead of tits and anal. I can’t remember all of it, but one segment stuck out. I need to check with viewing history so I can recite it verbatim: the bug’s name, genus, species. But back to the point, it followed the male-female relationship of this pair of cricket-like bugs from some rainforest, and, well, it’s no wonder they’re fucking endangered. See, the female is the dominant one of the pair, and when she wants to mate, she scopes out the most attractive guy on the tree. There’s not much in the way of courtship in the insect world, no dinner and a movie, no drinks and a fumbled attempt to steal a kiss on the way up to the Rainbow Room. Instead, she picks her man, gets him to do his duty right then and there, and then, boom, she tears his fucking legs off. Tears his legs off! All 6 or 8 or 200 of them! He’s still alive, just totally immobile, and, being the helpful bitch she is, the female pulls his body to an area of the forest only she knows about. Then, she goes on with her life, preparing to have her babies, all the while coming back to the male to feed him just enough to keep him alive, still getting him to hump her a few more times, for old time’s sake, I guess, no legs and all. When she finally does have her babies, she stops coming back, leaving him to die slowly.

Now why did this stick with me so much? Well, Shan, it’s because that was us. Discount the number of legs, the explicit violence, and the children, and pretty much that was you and I. Now, granted, I was pretty hammered when this came to me, and, it’s been a few hours since, so I’m not as shitfaced, but I’ll still say that’s what you did to me. You bit my legs off. And, guess what? Even though you’re gone, they’re still not growing back.

Granted, we did have a lot more courting than the crickets. We fell in something I thought I could call love, right?  But somewhere in there, a few months in I think, you silently and discreetly started chewing off my legs. I didn’t notice, or I didn’t mind, because you were still there, keeping me alive. The food I needed to survive I found in your arms around me, a smile across a room, a text, an unexpected note. God, if only I’d seen this program earlier, maybe I would have noticed the signs, the base realities of what was going on. Nope. Instead, I was so goddamn giddy that I was the chosen bug, that you and I had found each other out of all the other crickets in the forest. Then you took off, and the minute I read your note, telling me you were headed back to Boulder, and why you had to go, my legs started burning. And when I looked down, I saw they were gone. You’d taken my legs.

I heard from Christie that you’ve got tons of college friends in Boulder, that I shouldn’t expect you back anytime soon, if ever. That’s cool. I’m happy for you. But back to the program…At the end of it, they focused in on that dying male cricket, and they had this soaring aria playing in the background signalling his impending demise, the camera following his final herky-jerky spasms. The last shot was of his huge black bug eyes, staring off at nothing in particular, totally empty.

I knew how he felt.

Go to your mat, Charlie. Go to your mat.

That’s what you’re saying.

I will.