I don't know how to say this in a normal way, so I'm saying it in a long way. I wanted to give you something better than a half-sentence or a song of my own to hide behind. So here it is, written out, with the edges left on.
01The playlist
I've listened to it more times than I'd like to admit. Not casually. I listen the way you read a letter in a language you only half speak, hunting for the one word that tells you what the rest means.
Was that track order an accident? Was that song a message, or just a song you like? Did it mean something that one came right after another, or am I building a cathedral out of a few loose bricks? Indirect memos are a special kind of confusing. They're deniable by design. They can mean everything or nothing, and I can't ask without breaking the spell, or without finding out it was never a spell at all.
A message you can't be sure you received is the loudest kind of quiet.
02The battle in my head
It's a strange thing, fighting yourself over a maybe. One half of me says it's obviously nothing, you're being kind, and kindness isn't a confession. The other half plays the song again and says, but what if.
Neither side wins. They just trade the lead back and forth through the day, in the shower, on the drive home, at 2 a.m. when everything sounds more certain than it is. It's exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to anyone, because from the outside nothing is happening. Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. And still it takes up an entire room in my head.
03The math I keep doing
Here's the part that's hardest to write. I keep running the numbers, and they never come out in my favor. Whatever this is, whatever it could be, it would come with complications, with weight, with a cost to people and peace. And when I set myself on the other side of the scale, I honestly don't think I'm worth the trouble.
I don't say that to fish for reassurance. It's just the conclusion my head reaches every time, calmly, like arithmetic. You deserve something uncomplicated and easy and bright. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not that. And I'd rather be honest about it than pretend the math is different.
04And yet
Here's the thing that undoes all the arithmetic, though. Somewhere in all of this, a person I think is genuinely remarkable looked at me and thought something good. Maybe a small good thing. Maybe a passing one. It doesn't even matter how big, because I'm still stuck on the fact that it happened at all.
That's a kind of luck I didn't see coming. To be thought of warmly by someone like you is a gift whether or not anything ever comes of it. If this is the whole story, a playlist, a few songs I'll never hear the same way again, then it's still one of the nicest things that's happened to me in a long time.
I'd rather be this lucky and uncertain than certain and unnoticed.
You don't have to answer this. You don't have to decode it back. I wrote it so that the thing in my chest finally has somewhere to live other than my own head, and so that you know, plainly, that I see how good you are.
Thank you for thinking of me kindly. I mean that more than anything else I've said here.
With all my heart, carefully,
— Me