Dear Thesis,

An Open Letter to my Thesis (from the person who intends to murder you, drag you home, frame you, and hang you on the wall):

Dear Thesis,

You have been my partner in a slowly unfolding, and now threadbare relationship. The butterflies are gone. You have become the thing I have to get over before I can get on with my life. While I love the things I learned from the hours we spent together, I’m ready to sign the papers.

I have historically fallen in love with mysterious and quiet ones. You, however, have been both silent and punishing. I have to watch what I say about you, and even if I’m talking about you to someone about how we’re doing, I’m afraid you’re going to walk up and correct me – expose me and my hedging half-truths, since I’m usually casting a sunnier light on our true state of union than exists on paper. People ask about you at church, at work, at the coffee-shop; they encourage me to keep going – remind me that these relationships are difficult.

I don’t always tell them about how, in one day, you went from 42 pages to 15, and most of that re-written the day that I was finally able to force you to show up. Or that I’ve gained and lost the same 10 pounds three times from the comfort eating – since complex carbohydrates bring me more emotional solace than any of your page-long insights into narrative structure or archetypal meaning. 

I thought I loved you. I thought that your topic would bring me hours of unflinching closeness to the ineffable beauty of the world, to the piercing brightness of truth, and that like a close kind friend you wouldn’t let me down – but that my love for you would spur me on to greatness and the great American novel.

Maybe it was the cheating I did that did us in – all those hulu videos I’d watch when I couldn’t think of what to say to you, or the online window-shopping when the monthly stipend was clearly not going to cover ANYTHING either vintage or ebay.

Though it was only window-shopping, those manitobah mukluks did drag little pieces of my heart away to their digital lairs. It also could have been the facebook stalking of myriad ex-boyfriends. I was bored with you like I had grown bored of them (and they of me) – compounding my regret that I didn’t just take the damn comps and get it over with.

So here we are. This is an impasse. An arm-wrestling death-match. One of us will make it out of this alive, and rest assured that it won’t be you.  I have a bowie knife, a passport and a fast car, and all you have are words lined up in the passive voice to avoid what has become an inevitable confrontation. Now I’ll read your leather-bound obituary from within the safe walls of a Canadian MFA program. Because I have loved you, I hope that your death is relatively painless.

Love,

Student