Austin,

So it's almost 3am and I have to be up for work in about 3 hours, yet I can't sleep. Although that's not an uncommon occurrence for me, I also can't seem to concentrate. It took me an hour to get through one essay for all the rereading I had to do. My brain just keeps twitching and I want to talk. Since talking to myself doesn't seem to be helping, I thought I would write. And when I thought about who I would write to, because writing to myself didn't seem particularly helpful, I figured I should just write to you. Even though, as it stands, I don't know what I want to say or if I'll even ever show this to you. Yet... I feel as if I should keep going anyway.

Earlier this evening, I watched the movie Ex Machina with Josh. Now this doesn't really matter much other than the fact that it's what made me start thinking. I don't know if you've seen the movie, or even heard of it, but it's basically about a guy who created an AI and is testing it. And in the end, the AI wins. And she does it so by manipulating another guy's emotions and then in the end, she leaves him to die. And Josh said that since she's an AI, she isn't fully capable of feeling and I disagreed. It wasn't that she wasn't capable of feeling, otherwise she wouldn't feel the desire to escape, it was that she was able to use logic to control those emotions instead of being controlled by them. Using logic to get what she wants and deflect from pain. If she never opens her synthetic heart, she can never be hurt. Completely reasonable and logical. But then I thought, maybe it wasn't so much deflection as an inability to take that risk and what if it's that ability to open ourselves up to that possible pain that makes us human. At that point Josh decided the conversation was too deep for him and went to bed but I... I keep thinking about it.

I like you Austin. I really like you and I really care about you and to be honest, that scares me. I don't have the best track record with these kind of emotions and sometimes I really do think I'm cursed. The first guy I fell in love with ended up sleeping with a sorority girl. Not just in the apartment we decorated together but actually in the bed we shared. I know this for a fact because I walked in and caught them. And then he actually blamed me for it. He told me that I spent so much time focusing on school and papers and anything but him. That he had to turn to other girls for affection because I was so cold and distant. He had been a nice guy when he first got together, so sweet and supportive, and then he became a monster and he said it was my fault. That I turned him into that. I was strong enough to leave him but that doesn't mean his words didn't affect me or make me doubt myself. I didn't really date again until after I graduated. It was easier to focus on my books than on my emotions. Books didn't have the power to hurt me.

I met Jake a few years ago and we became friends. He was just getting out of a bad relationship and dealing with having a kid and I was focusing on my last year of college, so it was nothing but friendship. But it became a really close friendship. Strictly platonic for a long time, but a dependence on each other to the point that others assumed we were dating. I slept in his bed more often than my own and in a way, I helped him raise his little boy. It seemed a logical step when we decided to actually date. It took me some time to feel comfortable with the idea of our relationship turning physical but it did. And then after it did, he almost immediately began to pull away and distance himself from me. Even if we were in the same house, he would spend time in any room that I wasn't in and it felt like I had to beg him for attention. Eventually I couldn't beg anymore and I had to give up but it left me wondering what I had done. Before we started dating, he was a great guy and then a after a couple months with me, he became an asshole. It was a little like history repeating itself and the only common denominator was me.

I wonder at times. Do I just have bad taste and pick guys who are bad at their core? Or do I pick good guys and then turn them bad? Because, it has to be one of these options, right? I worry about that because it's not good either way. I can't believe that you're a bad guy at your core because I've seen the evidence to the contrary. And that makes me worry because what if this curse of mine someday ruins you? You say stuff about having to put up with you and having to deal with your issues but sometimes I wonder if the same can't be said about me. Do you deserve to have to put up with me? I know I put up a really strong front and I act like everything is always so fine but it's because I don't really know how to let people in to see the big ball of insecurities that I am underneath it all. I suppose I just fear that if they knew, they would reject me.

I'm sure you're wondering why I'm dumping all this on you like this and I can explain that pretty simply. I think you deserve to know this stuff. You deserve to know what I'm thinking and feeling behind my mask and since I'm not always the greatest at expressing myself on a verbal level, I thought maybe a written medium would give me the best chance of getting it all out. I hope that all this doesn't scare you away or change however you might feel about me, but if it does... Better now than some ways down the road when it hurts even more. I don't know that I expect any sort of reply or even acknowledgement of all this. I just thought that if anyone deserved to know where my head is and what I'm feeling, it was you. And now you do.