Dear Student,
As you read this, your girlfriend from home is fucking someone else. Your girlfriend (with whom you spent teary evenings discussing not just the need to make “long distance” work, but also the tedious logistics of regular London-provinces commutes) whose face, still slathered in neon paint, is writhing on top of another man making noises that, in their difference from the noises she makes for you, would drive you mad with insecurity.
Although you were going out for three months before she finally slept with you, she is fucking someone else whom she met no more than twenty-four hours ago but who, in the carefree way he distinguished himself at “pre- lash”, seemed like the antithesis of the staid and boring life that you represent.
University, you will have often been told, is a time for personal growth and change and your girlfriend has decided to prove this by fucking someone other than you. Though she is still responding to your texts about the difficulty you’re having adjusting to student life, you may have noticed that she has not spent much time describing the people she’s met. This is because she is fucking one of them. Your friend exhorted you to “think of the gash” you’d be passing up in order to have awkward phone sex while your creepy new flatmate listens through the paper-thin walls of your room. Last month, you drunkenly told the same friend that you couldn’t imagine life without her, but you also failed to imagine that she would be fucking the first male student she met who asked her what her A-levels were.
In her sweaty, low-quality-MDMA- enhanced bouts of fucking someone else, your girlfriend is finally shaking off the shackles of your relationship and feeling more like the person that she wanted to be but felt you stopped her from being. That’s what the word “fine” means when you ask how she is.
The picture of your girlfriend that you have on your corkboard has nothing on the picture that someone else now has on his phone. When you travel to meet her next week she will probably pay half your megabus fare out of guilt but as you lean against the same writing desk which someone else lifted her on to and fucked her, while suggesting that you see what’s on iPlayer, the chasm of excitement between you and someone else will grow immeasurably vaster in her mind; your relationship’s fate will be sealed.
Yours faithfully,
Malcolm Grant