By Joyce Miller

Hey,

I know we agreed to go No Contact and, honestly, it’s been the best possible thing. Since our time apart, I’ve grown as a person. I finally understand and accept that the timing wasn’t right. I just want to know one thing:

When you passed me on the street without saying anything, was that really you, or was it a body double wearing a replica mask of your face?

Numerous factors go into a relationship. Love is a volatile emotional state that reveals it’s endurance over time. Even when love is engineered by a highly trained, deep cover honeytrap operative for the purpose of a clandestine intelligence mission, relationships take work and compatibility. 

This is not an excuse to break No Contact, but rather a quest for personal growth. Knowing whether it was you I saw, or a body double wearing a moulded silicone duplicate of your face, will teach me a lot about myself.

This is not only about my happiness. Regardless of our history, I still care about you as a friend. If there’s a body double wearing a synthetic duplicate of your face, I think it’s something you should know.

I find myself at a loss, because I now have to wonder:

1.) Whether you have multiple body doubles.

and

2.) Whether I was interacting with a body double instead of you at any point during our relationship.

I am now forced to re-examine our entire narrative, and what it means if the person with whom I felt such a strong connection was sometimes you and sometimes your body double. I have to wonder: if you were able to clone your own face, were you also able to clone mine? Once that trust is broken, you can never get it back.

If we are right for each other, shouldn’t I be able to accept that you occasionally need to substitute yourself with another person disguised in a prosthetic rendering of your face? Perhaps I distanced myself from you during the times when I intuited you weren’t yourself, but a masked body double, because I knew it meant that we were moving to the next level and got panicked by the intimacy.

They say love asks no questions, but this is more a general concern. If you could reply with a simple “Yes,” to confirm that it was really you I saw, and not a specialized operative who spent five hours in a make-up chair applying facial prosthesis, I will finally be able to move on. 

I considered writing this email without actually sending it, as a healing exercise, but concluded that the exchange of information is crucial in this case. It may also be necessary to inform the person your body double was meeting for dinner, in case they are in danger.

I contacted all your social media accounts due to the time-sensitive nature of this message. If none of this is your doing, and someone has grafted your face onto theirs without your consent, then I apologize if this email sounds accusatory, and will do everything I can to help you.

I understand if you prefer not to respond.  Except that I’ll be left to grapple on my own with the uncertainty of whether or not it was you, or a body double wearing a replica mask of your face--a body double who I not just confused with you on the street, but fell in love with. I know you can’t fix the issues that I need to work on, but not letting me know the times in our relationship when it was your body double instead of you feels unfair to me.