This time when I tell you to “have a nice life,” I want you to know I really mean it.

Dear Sylvia,

I know your first inclination was probably to delete this email the moment you saw who it was from. Who knows? Maybe even after all this time you’ve still got my email address blocked and you’ll never see it anyway. But on the off chance that you do see it and are curious enough to give it a look, I feel like I should send it anyway.

A couple days ago I was cleaning up the apartment. I know, right? Me, cleaning. That’s a new one, huh? Anyway, I figured I should pull the couch cushions off once this decade and when I did, I happened to find an old Centon 64GB SDXC Card among all the crumbs and loose change.

I didn’t know what was on it at first. I thought maybe it might have been full of old music and video files I’d downloaded or something. But when I stuck it in my computer’s memory card slot, there was only one file folder there, a file folder with your name. That’s when I remembered. This was the card I stored everything having to do with us on.

Maybe I shouldn’t have opened it, you know? It’s been, what, three years now? Sometimes it’s best to just let the past be the past and never go back. I couldn’t help clicking it, though. In there, there were tons of photos I’d taken of you with the digital camera back when we were together, some short videos of our trip to Mexico, a few playlists of some of your favorite MP3s, even an archive of emails from back when we first met. I hadn’t nearly filled the entire 64 gigabytes, of course, but there was a lot of stuff there. And that stuff got me thinking.

I was a pretty big jerk there at the end, wasn’t I? I don’t know why I was so paranoid all the time, so controlling and just plain mean sometimes. When I review all these files, I can’t imagine why I said or did any of the stuff that drove us apart. We were pretty happy from the looks of it. I guess, maybe, that’s what freaked me out. Which is, of course, the dumbest thing ever, but it’s all I got.

I’m not going to try to get you to take me back or ask if we can still be friends or whatever. I don’t even want you to forgive me, really. I mean, it’s been years now. Things happen and you eventually get over them. But I feel like I should at least try to tell you one last thing.

For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about what happened, Sylvia. That’s all.

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