Right after you caught me you knew I wasn't a keeper. As one knows immediately when they've fallen In Love with someone else does one know immediately when they've fallen head over heels in like. Only days after we met did you tell me with nothing but the most sincere, well-meaning intentions and a genuine smile "not to get (my) hopes up".

And so I watched you grow and succeed through the glass, listening to me tell myself that I was almost good enough to maybe be a part of your life outside the fishbowl. But if a girl doesn't introduce a guy to her dad, he's lost the race. If a girl doesn't introduce a guy to her dad while he and his dad are moving her furniture out of her dad's house while they're all in the same room, he's not even in the same league.

I knew what I was getting into. I knew that someday I would have to pay the price for being with you until you caught someone else. It's a testament to both our character that for years - years - after you told me you weren't In Love with me did we still share a boundless dialog in which no subject was forbidden. We even spoke of the day when you would find your next husband.

I was trying, failing, to tell you that soon I would hurt. Bad. Real Bad. And I also tried yet, apparently, failed to get you to understand that you would be the Most Unable Person To Help Or Fix Me On Earth when In Love happens again for you.

So I jumped out of my fishbowl that was the lonely comfort of You. I didn't want to leave the silly, intelligent reality of your reason. I lived without seeing you for years but I didn't want to go on without knowing you. My life was terrible always except those ninety-minute conversations we used to have every other day. Your conversations were the only thing to which I looked forward.

When I asked you to let me go without talking to you, you said you were going to miss me. I'm sorry. For years I had already been feeling that way. Ever since Valentines Day 2003 was I missing you. And in August of 2006, my heart finally told my brain that it had given up.

But the funniest thing happened. Almost immediately did I begin to succeed, complete, accomplish, discipline, exercise, mature, object, question, build, fix. Write. My inability to do so previously had nothing to do with you. We both knew I was broken before I met you. But since I had made an intentional effort to get out of bed without crying over the absence of you did I just let myself live again in a manner that suited me surprisingly well. I was older but I didn't know it until 2006.

But in 2007 you caught me again. Of course we can be friends. We've done it before and I feel better about me than I did when I used to just be content with being with you. It'll be more than nice to be able to make it up to my Best Friend for abandoning her. I knew she'd be okay.

I hope she'll forgive me.

But soon as you pulled me out of the water did you fling me to the bottom of your Love Boat still on the troll for your trade-up. Can't risk talking to me too often or on the weeknights or weekends lest your Real Friends know you've started talking to the Clown again. Without even yanking the rusty hook of indifference from the memory I had of you did I have to wonder or question or even offer opinion about anything you were doing or seeing.

All but three times we have spoken this year you called only to tell me you were too busy to call me. And when I called you, I heard you speak, yet the voice you were using was one I had till then heard before but have become familiar with it in the terrible Summer that just past.

And to ice the poison cake, I had finally the presence to ask of you the type of questions, I guess, adults ask of each other. Without prying or malice did I finally get you tell me you were "serious" about someone else.

If you had run a knife from my belly button to my chin, fried me in butter and used my guts to catch your new Significant Other you would have treated me better than you did this year. You made me sit in the front row and force me to watch the movie I knew I didn't want to see. You had and still have a support network of many to whom you can go to combat loneliness. You have become the person you wanted to be when I first met you. There was no cavity in your life that could only be filled by me.

This year - and maybe in years past as well - you called me only because you wanted to know that you still could.

I hope your holidays went well. Have a Happy New Year.

Say goodbye to me Susy.

Say goodbye.