PATTERNS / ACCOUNTABILITY

Letter 033

Patient Zero

I wonder if you know.

Not who I am.

Not my name.

Not what happened between us.

I wonder if you know the version of him that I knew.

The one who could make you feel like the most important person in the world and then somehow make you feel like asking for his attention was asking too much.

The one who could hurt your feelings and leave you explaining why they were hurt.

The one who could make you question your own memory of a conversation you were actually there for.

I wonder if you've met him.

Because I have.

And sometimes I wonder if I was Patient Zero.

Not the person who made him this way.

The person who experienced something he might have gone on to repeat.

I used to think about the people who came before me.

What did they know that I didn't?

What had they forgiven?

What had they warned themselves about?

Were there signs I missed because I didn't know what I was looking for?

And now, for the first time, I'm thinking about the people who came after.

Did he change?

Did he learn?

Did losing me make him reconsider anything?

Or did someone else eventually find herself having conversations that sounded painfully familiar?

I hope it's the first one.

I really do.

Because I wouldn't wish some of those nights on anyone.

I wouldn't wish the feeling of staring at a phone, wondering whether someone who claims to love you is going to answer.

I wouldn't wish the exhaustion of trying to explain something that should never have required an explanation.

I wouldn't wish the confusion of loving someone and slowly becoming afraid of how they might make you feel.

I once cried because someone finally picked up the phone.

Not because he said anything wonderful.

Because he answered.

And I thought that was love.

I wonder if you've ever cried from that same relief.

I hope you haven't.

I hope the phone rings and he answers.

I hope you don't rehearse your feelings before saying them.

I hope an ordinary disagreement stays ordinary.

I hope you never learn to measure a good day by the absence of something bad.

And I hope you never have to write a letter like this.

But sometimes I wonder.

Because I know what happened to me.

And I know that when I left, I didn't take his choices with me.

The relationship ended. The possibility of the pattern didn't.

There's something particularly strange about realizing that the person who changed your understanding of love might be teaching someone else the same lessons.

Maybe he isn't.

Maybe he's different now.

Maybe someone else gets the version of him I kept waiting for.

I hope so.

But I can't pretend I don't wonder.

When I was younger, someone taught me things about trust and safety that I spent years trying to unlearn.

I once wrote:

“At the time neither of us knew you were setting a standard.”

I meant the standard that experience set for me.

What I would tolerate.

What I would question.

What I would mistake for something normal.

But now I think about another kind of standard.

The one people establish through the way they repeatedly choose to treat someone.

And whether those choices change when the person receiving them does.

Maybe I wasn't the first.

Maybe I wasn't the last.

Maybe I was somewhere in the middle of a story I only ever saw one chapter of.

And that's what makes the phrase Patient Zero so haunting.

Because it suggests a beginning.

But sometimes you don't know where the beginning was.

You only know where it reached you.

I don't know your story.

I don't know whether you're happy.

I don't know whether he's kinder to you.

I don't know whether you've experienced any of the things I did.

And I won't pretend that I do.

But if something about my story feels familiar, I want you to know something.

You don't have to experience everything I experienced for your feelings to count.

You don't have to wait until it gets worse.

You don't have to prove that he treated someone else the same way.

And you don't have to make sense of my relationship to make decisions about yours.

Your experience belongs to you.

Mine belongs to me.

And whatever similarities might exist, neither of us is responsible for the choices another person makes.

For a long time, I wanted to know whether the people who hurt me understood what they'd done.

Now I wonder whether they ever stopped doing it.

Those are different questions.

And I may never get the answers.

But here's what I needed you to know.

I hope I was the last person you treated that way.

I hope the pattern ended with me.

I hope the people who came after me have stories that sound nothing like mine.

But sometimes I wonder whether I was only the first person who wrote it down.

And if you ever find these words and recognize something of yourself in them—

I hope they help you trust what you've already been feeling.

Because maybe the most important thing about Patient Zero isn't figuring out who came first.

Maybe it's making sure the pattern doesn't get mistaken for love again.