Dear Melissa (or, should I say,
Doctor
Melissa),
Well! I saw the article in the paper about your role chairing that big fund-raising event, and I just had to look you up and write to you.
Yes, I only recently moved to town. I didn't even know you had ended up here, too. But I have to say, from the picture and the story -- you seem to have fulfilled every promise that everyone saw in you back in college, and in graduate school when we lived across the hall from each other. Great career; respected in your profession; married to an equally respected professional; lovely home and kids; and, of course, you are every bit as beautiful in your forties as you were in your twenties, in a casually-elegant, no-nonsense way.
But I can still see in your eyes -- not so much in that one picture in the paper, but in others; you're not active very active on social media but some of your friends are! -- that same look that I recognized twenty years ago. That little twinge of quiet desperation; that little glimmer of
regret
for the kinds of exciting experiences that you never let yourself have. Unless someone like me insisted.
I'll bet when you were in high school, even in college, you thought that losing your virginity would change you. That people would be able to tell, to see a difference in you. They would be able to see by looking at you, something in your eyes,
something in your posture... you were no longer a good girl, you were -- well, if not a slut, at least someone who lacked the willpower, the self-control, to not give in to your short-sighted desire for a little pleasure.
You found out that wasn't true. And not only could your friends and colleagues not notice a difference in your sunny, competent, professional day-to-day demeanor. Your boyfriend didn't even see it. Even when you started being a regular, compliant booty call for the guy in the next apartment; wedging an extra hour into your busy schedule to cross the hallway and get naked for me and submit to my lustful desires, three, four, five nights a week.
People see what they expect to see, and what they want to see. Which is why your boyfriend kept seeing you as his model girlfriend, oblivious to the little bite marks, to the vagaries in your schedule; accepting without question even your most facile excuses and explanations.