Letter Be

By Sophia S

She fell in love in a quiet sort of way, like the last gasps of a dying animal, settled down to sleep beneath a sun-soaked tree in the California sun. It was a sweet sort of falling, in the sense that it came slowly, and took twists and turns to get there. It started with fear, of course, the fear of falling, but disguised to herself at the time. She wrote stories, excuses really, about how it wasn’t him, wasn’t him, she just loved somebody else.

But she didn’t, because she forgot all about the other boy until she found her ramblings. The ramblings she knew, later, were mad and had no grip on reality. After the fear there came a period of time where she tried to fool herself into thinking that there had been no loss, that honestly she was just glad to be done (done, of course, with a two week long tryst that she thought about years later).

She wrote songs about it, how angry she was at him, how she was glad to be free, etcetera, ad nauseum. Except, eventually, they morphed into sort of love songs (but that was much later).

She remembered a specific moment, where everything seemed to collide and she heard her breath, waiting for him to make the first move, except he didn’t, and she didn’t, and she still regretted. But it was such a perfect moment, a cherished memory, one to bottle and save for a rainy day. She went through their conversations in her head at night, writing and rewriting different endings, different ways it might have gone, if she just wasn’t so afraid. She was right to be afraid, she thought, because it really had only been two weeks and he had moved on the month after but she didn’t, and she disguised it as disgust but what it really was was that she couldn’t keep her mind off him.

Her one consolation was that he would never forget her, because she was his first kiss, and he was hers, and it was on Valentine’s Day. What she didn’t know was that it was perfect in its imperfections. She wished, so desperately wished, that she could go back and change things. Tell herself to wait, wait on the kissing, tell herself to stop talking to that stupid boy that she thought she liked, to stick with it for just a little longer, because then maybe something would have happened. But she didn’t, and she couldn’t, and that was truly a tragedy because over the course of the next year, she fell in love with him. 

They took things too fast, and she never learned after that. In fact, she took things faster and faster, because she was afraid of losing, afraid of getting scared. It was to her detriment. Because the worst thing about all of it was that they didn’t talk. There was no friendship anymore. He vanished away to Greece after that final, perfect moment by the fire and they didn’t talk.

She could still see the fire rush down the big stick, sprayed with bug repellant, could see it lick across his knuckles and singe away the hair. They talked about Nair. She loved him and it hurt every day. She was a bird that had flown into a window and fell to the ground, twitching, twitching, falling still. The love ate her alive. The longer she waited, the stronger it seemed to get, and she didn’t know what to do about it. She thought of texting him after a year of no contact and saying, “Happy one year of not speaking, I love you.”

She hid herself in boys, desperately searching for someone that she could love in a similar sort of way, so that this aching, aching feeling in her chest might be replaced by something lighter, more buoyant. But it couldn’t, because none of them were him, him, him. She really, truly loved him and it ached, ached in a way that felt like someone pressing on her chest and squeezing her heart. She loved him and it was perfect and awful and incredible and devastating and irreplaceable and irredeemable and everything in between because she kept thinking about that night by the fire where she wished she had told him the truth.