Chapter 12
What Does That Even Mean?
Afew days later, I flew back to school feeling much more optimistic than when I left. After my drunken insight on New Year’s Eve, I knew that Joshua still loved me, even though I’d yet to hear from him. When the taxi dropped me off at Zeta, I went to my room to unpack and realized I’d forgotten my toothbrush at home. The door key was still not working consistently on my car so I’d left it unlocked the whole time I was gone. I didn’t have to worry about any of my rich classmates trying to steal anything and E-C had a security gate to keep the riff-raff off campus. I tried my brother’s tip to kick the key to get it to unlock. But Drew must not have been wearing heels because when I did it, I broke the end of the key clean off. Luckily, the ignition required a separate key, so I drove out of the parking lot with the broken key stub sticking out of the door.
Even that incident didn’t faze me because when I stopped by my mailbox on my way off campus, I was so confident that there would be a letter from the other side of the Atlantic waiting for me that I chanted “Joshua, Joshua, Joshua,” in my head. The mailbox was overflowing due to my two-week’s absence. I was sorting through magazine subscription ads and credit card offers when a small letter fell to the ground, postmarked from Yorkshire, England. I didn’t open it right away, deciding to wait until I got home in order to give its contents my full concentration. I ran my errands, the letter burning a hole in the passenger seat of my ghetto car. I stopped at the closest drugstore to purchase a new toothbrush and some feminine products—although it’d been a few months, it was still a relief to get my period. I stuck a CD of Chicago’s Love Songs in my cart before I checked out, anticipating the profusions of love declarations that awaited me in the letter.
When I finally got back to my room and tore open Joshua’s letter, it definitely wasn’t what I’d expected. All of his other letters were all about how much he loved me and that he wanted to be with me forever. How he would sacrifice everything to be with me, not that I ever asked him too.
Dear Tammy,
As you know, circumstances will keep me from being at camp this summer. In light of that, I’m letting you know that it’s over. What we had was cool but we both knew it wouldn't last. I’ve met someone else. I will always remember you in a way.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Bullshit. I put the letter down and then got up to throw my new CD into my stereo. Apparently the only love declarations I’d hear of that day would come from Peter Cetera. How could Joshua have met someone else? He’d only been gone for two months, and anyway, shouldn’t he be glued to his dying father’s side? When I sat back down, I didn’t cry. I felt confused, hurt, numb. We were supposed to be together forever. How did we both know “it wasn’t going to last?” I may have once had doubts about our future, but he was the one who was supposed to have blind faith. How could someone who had such hopes for us as a couple suddenly give up and never even explain why? I was never given a chance to defend myself, to fight for him, to battle for us. He decided it was over, cut me out of his life, and left me reeling. What happened to those obstacles we were supposed to overcome together? Where is he now, and why isn’t he helping me get through the pain of losing him?
I tried to let it go as easily as he did. After I’d read the letter, the one to end it all by his terms, a few dozen times, I shoved it into my desk drawer. I didn’t have time to mull over the end of our relationship. I had to spend the next three weeks concentrating on my comprehensive exams in order to graduate and get out of the dungeon that was Eckhart College.
I somehow managed to scrape by with Nishaan’s help, passing only just barely with a C. Only one semester to go.
After comps were over, I finally reopened my desk drawer and perused the letter again. I’d half hoped the words would have magically changed, along with Joshua’s feelings, in the weeks since I’d seen it. But the terrible words were as dark on the page as they were the first time I’d read them. “I will always remember you in a way.” What does that even mean?
I studied the space between the written lines, as if to find a clue as to why we were over. Maybe the words themselves were code—if I could only decipher them, the usual love declarations would be revealed. I thought about asking my next-door neighbor if I could borrow her black light and see if Joshua had written a message with invisible ink in the margins, but decided against it. Joshua wasn’t the type to play games, and besides, he wasn’t that clever.
My final semester began with Jane leaving. She had enough credits to graduate early and was heading back to Rhode Island to volunteer at a hospital and work on her medical school applications.
The night she left, I went to her room with trepidation. After Kellen, I had always wished for a best girlfriend, someone who I could confide my deepest-darkest secrets to—the sister that Corrie never was. Jane and I became fast friends at the beginning of our freshmen year. We barely ever argued, not even about what show to watch on TV during the two years we were roommates. And she was still the person who knew me best.
Tall, beautiful and red-headed, Jane always had a certain exotic quality that boys found exciting—she couldn’t get a guy to look at her cross-eyed if she spilled her drink on his crotch and apologized with garlic on her breath. It wasn’t Jane’s fault that guys always noticed her first. Likewise, it wasn’t her fault that some of them would befriend me to get to Jane. Including Dallas.
It wasn’t enough that Joshua and I were over. I also had to lose my best friend.
“You don’t have to look so sad,” she told me as she stuffed a few last-minute items into a bag.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
“You have Lizzie. And Nishaan.” I knew we were both thinking that was all I had, but Jane didn’t say it.
“I hate this place.”
“I know.” Jane sat on her empty bed. “You have more personality in your little finger than most people around here have in their entire existence. Tammy, just ignore all the losers in your way and concentrate on your future.”
I sat next to her on the bed. “I will.”
“No, I mean it.” She gave me a sideways hairy eyeball. “I know when you’re just saying things to placate me. I think that this journalism thing is a good idea. Make sure you get your recommendations covered. You’re taking the GRE, right?”
“Yeah, just what I need at this point. Another test.”
“Plus you were going to try to get a job to pay off all of those credit card bills.”
“From my visit from Prince Charming.”
“Tammy.” Jane turned toward me and put her hand on mine. “Joshua just left you, he barely even said goodbye. Prince Charming wouldn’t do that.”
I pulled my hand out from under hers. “I know. But it still hurts.”
“Someday you’ll see what I see, that he wasn’t good enough for you.” Jane stood up from the bed and hoisted the bag over her shoulders. “I’ll see you at graduation, okay?”
I could myself tear up for the first time in a few weeks. “Okay.”
“Tammy.” Jane’s brown eyes had also filled with tears, but her face held a worried look. “Please say you’ll be okay.”
“I’ll be okay. Quit worrying about me.”
Her thin arms wrapped around me as I struggled to hold it together. After I left her room, I performed the all too familiar act of throwing myself on my couch and crying until I fell asleep.
It was dark when I woke up, but I changed into my workout clothes anyway. I put on my tennis shoes and grabbed a tape to plop into my Walkman. I ran as fast as I could, venturing out toward the baseball fields on the edge of campus. The cool January air in my burning lungs felt good. It was almost as if I was running away from all of the hurt that waited for me back in my dorm room.
I continued the habit for the rest of the semester. Sometimes, right in the middle of a long run, I’d start crying. But it was a cathartic cry—jogging made me think I could do something about my pain. As my legs and lungs grew stronger, I felt powerful.
It was the only time I felt like I had control. I still managed to slip by with C’s in my classes, but Lizzie and I would go out drinking and partying most of the weekend and some weeknights as well. I would meet some random guy and more often than not end up making out with him in the corner. Sometimes the guy would ask for my phone number. Sometimes, if I thought he was cute, I’d give him my real number. But in the morning, I would regret it and begin screening my calls for the next five days—the amount of time the average guy waited before he stopped calling. Most of the time, though, I gave those random guys the wrong number, changing the last digit 7 to a 4 so I wouldn’t have to forgo answering the phone for the next week. I was always tempted to call that number and ask if they had any messages for Tammy, but I figured whoever was on the other end probably hated me. I gave that number to a lot of guys.
One night in February, shortly before the dreaded Valentine’s Day, Nishaan and Lizzie took me out to a club. I was actually having a decent time until that song came on, the one where the chorus kept repeating, “ooh, I got your boyfriend… I got your man.” I suddenly got a vision of her. His “someone” that he met. The girl that now had my boyfriend. I sat down at a nearby table, feeling as though someone had punched me in the gut. I had never been so filled with hate for someone I never met. Who was she, and why was she better than me? Why had Joshua chosen her?
I was sleeping off a nasty hangover the next day when someone knocked at my door. I tried to play the door like a ringing phone and ignore it, but the person didn’t go away. I finally dragged my bleary-eyed self out of bed and threw on a sweatshirt over my pajama top. My old friend Adam was outside.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, tugging down on the boxer shorts I’d worn to bed. I’d found them in my laundry basket at home last summer. They’d either once belonged to Drew or Kellen.
“I heard Jane was gone and I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Adam and I had met my freshman year at a party when he was a friend of a friend, and then he lived in our complex the year after that. With his stocky figure and glasses, he wasn’t necessarily my type, but I still thought he was cute. There was a time when he might have liked me too. His favorite movie was Pulp Fiction and at the beginning of my sophomore year, we watched it in his room together. We sat next to each other on his couch, but didn’t do anything more than hold hands. That night he stopped by our dorm room to say goodnight, boldly kissing me with opened lips. Then he went over to Jane’s bed.
“Did he kiss you goodnight?” she asked after he left.
“Yes,” I said hesitantly.
“Did he stick his tongue in your mouth, too?”
“He kissed you too? That’s disgusting!! I can’t believe he just frenched both of us,” I said, kicking off my blanket.
“What are you worried about? He kissed me second, which means I have some of your saliva in my mouth.”
From then on, I gave up on Adam. He was always hanging around the complex, but I ignored him. Not to mention he was friends with Kerr, of “Cottage Cheese and Pantyhose” fame.
Now he pushed past me to take a seat on my couch.
“What are doing here, Adam?”
“Like I said, I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“We haven’t spoken in years.”
“And?” He patted the seat next to him before propping his arm across the top of the couch.
I sat in my desk chair instead.
“So this is a single,” he said, looking around my room. “I’m living in Omega this year.”
“Good for you.” Omega was the brand-new dorm on the waterfront. It was arranged in quads, with each person having their own room and—instead of sharing one bathroom with the whole floor like me—there were only two roommates to a bathroom. It was completely posh, and, needless to say, way out of my dad’s price range.
“Anyway, my roommates and I are having a party tonight, and I wanted to invite you.”
I wanted to reiterate that we weren’t friends, but instead I told him I didn’t really go to E-C parties anymore.
“Why not? It’s your senior year. You’ll never see any of these people again.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I hope you’ll come.” He tossed a flyer onto my desk before getting off the couch. “Tammy, for what it’s worth… I’m sorry about whatever happened between us to make us quit talking to each other.”
“Thanks.”
A few hours later, I pulled out Joshua’s letter and re-read it while I pre-partied by myself with a few rum and diet Cokes. I tried to hate him. I really did. I hated the words—especially the “what we had was cool,” part—hated the letter, hated the situation. But I couldn’t hate Joshua. I couldn’t even pretend to. I hated ‘her,’ for sure, the new someone that he supposedly met two weeks after leaving the US, a month after leaving me in person. I wasn’t even positive there was a her, a part of me didn’t believe it—it could have been something he made up to make me feel better about the end of us. But if there was, then it took him only weeks to meet someone new, while for me it had been months, and I still didn’t have anyone. If there was a her, then what we had wasn’t special. And that left me, sitting there in my dorm room with a half-drunk rum and Coke, an idiot. Afraid to go to a party full of drunk guys because I once might have had feelings for one of them. Afraid of any guy that came too close; only concentrating on stupid Blockheads who couldn’t commit. Drunken make-out sessions because they were safe, because they couldn’t deceive me. Dammit. A thousand times dammit. Four thousand times, for every freezing cold Atlantic mile that came between us. I can’t do it. I can’t fall in “love” with anyone else. If only… crud, I’m going to cry.
I gave in for a few minutes and let myself have a really good one—hysterics turned into blubbering, blubbering into whimpering, until finally my tears dried up. I got an ice pack out of the mini-fridge and put it on my eyes while I poured another drink. After my swollen visage had shrunken to an acceptable diameter, I reapplied my make-up and got dressed. All of that jogging meant that I could fit into a pair of pants I’d bought in England; at the time, I couldn’t figure out the sizing and when I’d bought them on a whim, they were too snug to look good. Now they slid on easily and looked great with my strapless tank top.
Omega held up to the meat market reputation that preceded it. There was no ground floor, the first floor was actually the second—as if all of the residents held themselves in higher esteem than sea level. The rooms were arranged around a central courtyard so that visitors to any quad not situated next to the walkway entrance had to parade past all the other residents sitting out on lawn chairs, making you feel that you were on display. Not my scene at all. Luckily I had my drink in hand, safely concealed in a plastic red cup.
Adam’s dorm was a couple of doors down from the entrance. He was standing outside joking around with a few other people. They were all guys, I noticed gratefully as I got closer, as I wasn’t in the mood to interact with other females.
“Tammy!” Adam called. “Over here.”
“Hey,” I said as I approached them.
“This is my roommate, Mike,” Adam said, gesturing to a tall blonde-haired guy.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my hand.
“Tammy,” Mike’s hands were sturdy. “As in Tammy’s Tymes?”
“Oh?” I asked, tucking a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Do you read the paper?”
“Sure. I’m actually an English major.” Mike put his hand on the railing and leaned in toward me. “I think I’ve read all of your columns. My favorite was the one about getting even with love.”
“Yeah,” Adam said from over Mike’s left shoulder. “That was a good one.”
“Are you still drowning your sorrows in Ben and Jerry’s and watching Mark Hamill movies or have you moved on from that stage?” Mike asked.
“Wait a minute,” I took a sip from my plastic cup. “Did you just quote my column?”
Mike shot me an easy grin. “I think I did. I told you I really liked that one.”
I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. After all of these months, it felt almost like plaster cracking. “I’ve never had anyone quote me before.”
“You can’t be a Lit major or I would have met you by now. What’s your concentration?” Mike asked.
“Marine bio.”
“Still?” Adam moved over to the other side of me.
“Yeah.” I took another sip. “But I’ve been thinking about going to journalism school. To be a science writer.”
“You should,” Mike said, taking a step closer. “You’re a really good writer.”
“Hey,” a dark-haired guy peered out of the open doorway. “I need someone to help me with the keg.”
Adam raised his eyebrows at Mike, who held out his hands helplessly. Adam’s eyebrows furrowed as Mike pointed at him.
I nodded my head toward a room on the opposite side of the courtyard. “I’m going to just take a quick walk. I think my friend Sarah lives over there,” I lied.
“Okay. We’ll be here!” Mike called.
I could detect the fury in Adam’s whispering as I walked off. I clutched my cup closer to me as I felt my E-C peers’ eyes on me. It seemed as they were also furiously whispering about me, but that was probably my imagination.
Now what? I asked myself as I strolled down the catwalk. It was probably obvious to everyone that I didn’t belong in Omega. I considered leaving, exiting the walkway down the back stairs toward the sea wall, but I kept going. I turned a corner to come face to face with… the Horse, of course. I looked around, but short of jumping from the balcony, there was no way to avoid him.
“Dallas.”
“Tammy.” He had grown his hair out over break into a sort of Farrah Faucet-style. A winged horse
“Do you live here?” If Omega wasn’t my scene, it was definitely not Dallas’s. I didn’t see the residents here as the type to look kindly on egg crates lying above unmade beds and puke buckets in the corner.
“No. I’m living on the beach now. I started the year living off campus with Ian,” Sonofabitch, I silently corrected him, “but it was too unproductive.”
“Oh.” Unproductive? I had a feeling that Dallas never had a productive day in his life. I turned sideways to scoot past him.
“Hey, Tammy.” Dallas leaned against the railing. “You know I’ve only been to one baseball game my whole life.”
“Yes?” I cautiously encouraged him, pausing in my effort to sneak by. You never knew where Dallas was going when he started one of his stories.
“It was the Tigers.”
I turned to face him. “That’s my team.”
“I know.”
“How?” I was pretty sure the course of our conversations never covered what respective baseball teams we rooted for, although I recalled that one of his excuses for why he couldn’t hang out our freshmen year was because he was watching the World Series.
“The game I went to was on your 21st birthday.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know because I saw the game board. It said ‘Happy 21st birthday, Tamara T. Tymes.’ I was like, holy shit, I know that girl.”
I was surprised Dallas remembered my full name. Humph. Psycho Guardian Angel-2, Tammy-0. I politely said goodbye to Dallas before he could blow my mind anymore. As I walked away, I pondered what he really said when he said he knew me to whoever he attended the game with. As in, Holy shit, that’s the girl that stalked me my freshman year. Did he tell him/ her about the Christmas present I made him?
I felt disturbed, again, a feeling that was starting to become familiar and seemed to stem from every time Dallas was nice to me. All of a sudden, I just wanted to go home, hide under my comforter and watch recorded episodes of Ally McBeal.
Even though I walked as quickly as possible to the edge of Omega from the other side of Adam’s room, he caught sight of me anyway.
“Tammy… you’re not leaving, are you?”
“Actually, I am. I have a headache.” I held my hand up to my forehead to be more convincing.
“I’ll walk you home.”
“No, that’s all right. I’m in Zeta.”
“I know. I was there yesterday, remember?”
I gave him a weak smile.
He fell in step with me as I started down the walkway.
“Zeta’s kind of fitting for you,” he said when we reached the bottom.
“Yeah. Have you seen my view?”
“No. Will you show it to me?”
He was smooth, I had to give him that much, using that as an excuse to invite himself into my room. I was too weary and upset over Dallas to insist that he leave. I was sick of fighting, tired of being alone. Adam crawled into my bed as I grabbed my face wash and toothpaste.
“I had such a big crush on you,” Adam said when I came back into the room.
“Me too. I think.” I said as I turned out the light and crawled in next to him.
I could feel him sit up. “Really? How come you never showed it?”
“Do you not remember kissing my roommate right after you kissed me?”
He settled back down. “That was just a joke.”
“A stupid one at that.”
“I guess so.”
“And you were always talking about Jane. Whenever you saw me, the first thing you asked was, ‘Where’s Jane’?”
“That’s because you two were joined at the hip. It was a rarity to see you alone.”
“Whatever,” I replied. Soon enough, Adam’s snoring started. I laid awake a while longer in the dark, wondering why I was so hopeless at love.
I left Adam sleeping on my bed to meet up with Nishaan and count fruit flies in the genetics lab.
“You’re late,” he said when I got there.
“Rough night.”
“You’ve had a lot of those lately.” He placed a cotton ball dipped in Fly Nap over the top of a beaker full of fruit flies.
“I guess so.” I bent over the microscope and spun the focus dial.
“Where’s he now?”
“Who?”
“The guy you left Omega with last night.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Tammy.”
I looked over at Nishaan. One hand was wrapped around the beaker of flies as he met my gaze. “I told Jane I’d keep an eye on you.”
“I’m fine. For your information, I didn’t do anything with the Omega guy.”
“If you say so.” He began pouring the comatose flies onto the sorting tray in front of me.
My room was empty when I got back that afternoon, with the exception of Joshua’s picture staring back at me from the frame. I’d replaced the one I’d taken of him at camp with the one I took his last night in Florida—the blues and greens of the ocean and pinks and oranges of the sunset in perfect contrast with his favorite gray sweater. I grabbed a flowered box from the depths of my closet and dumped the extra bra straps and buttons that filled it into my top drawer. A lump formed in my throat as I picked up the picture and placed it into the box, adding the withered carnation, the empty of bottle of rum we drank during Fall Break, the wristband from the (Dallas) game on my 21st birthday, carefully placing the barbelled Jakey dog on top of it all. Then I went to my desk drawer and pulled out every letter he’d sent me, including the last one, and placed them in the box before shutting it. I stood on my tiptoes to shove it onto my closet shelf and then pulled the fish-covered shower curtain in front of it.
“Goodbye for now, Joshua,” I said aloud before pulling on my jogging shoes.
When I got back, there was a message on my answering machine. I did a quick tally of random bar guys, and, realizing I hadn’t given my number out lately, figured it was safe to press ‘play.’
“Hey, Tammy, it’s Adam. Just wanted to see what you were doing tonight.”
Harmless enough. But the answering machine wasn’t done yet. The next message started playing.
“Tammy, it’s Mike. From the Omega party last night. I was wondering, if you weren’t busy, if you wouldn’t mind getting dinner sometime. My number is…” I hit ‘end’ on the machine before he dictated his number to the room. So, after such a massive dry spell with guys—as the first twenty-one years of my life—now at least two guys were interested, and it had barely been two months since my boyfriend broke up with me. Guardian Angel-3, Tammy-0.
I glanced at the clock. Nine o’clock. The stab of pain I felt at that time—the time I used to call Joshua—never went away. Against my will, I looked up Adam’s number in the campus directory and called him. He wasn’t home so I left a message: “Hey.” I didn’t feel the need to use my name. “Just wanted to see what you were up to tonight. Give me a call back sometime.”
I waited a whole week for Adam’s reply, which seemed too eerily familiar, reminding me of the painful nights when I waited for Dallas to return my calls. I contemplated calling Mike, just to get revenge on Adam, but I didn’t. I kept on with my pattern of writing, jogging, and barely studying. I took the GRE’s and asked Dr. Shu and my old Western Heritage professor, Alan, to write me a letter of recommendation for U of M’s journalism school.
I had a few too many rum and diet Coke’s Friday night and tried calling Adam again at nine.
“What are you doing?” I asked when he picked up.
“Nothing. I’ll be right over.”
I hung up, contemplating how quickly that transpired considering I hadn’t heard from him in almost a week. I greeted him at the door with, “Where’s Jane?”
“That’s not even funny,” he slurred, obviously past a few rum and Cokes himself.
“It’s your fault,” I replied.
“What is?” he asked, settling in on my couch.
“Why we never became nothing. Wow, that’s a lot double negatives.”
“It’s okay. You’re not writing a column right now.”
“Yeah. Why’d you always have to bring Jane into it?”
“I told you: it’s because I barely ever saw you alone. You do realize that you’re the one bringing Jane up now, don’t you?”
“No.” I sat next to him, contemplating. “You know Jane never knew you were alive, right?”
“Tammy, I don’t really want to talk about Jane right now.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
He stretched his arm over the back of the couch. “Let’s talk about the guy you wrote the column over.”
“No.”
“Okay then,” he said quickly. “Why did you call me over?”
“To talk of things that might have been.”
“Why ‘might have been’?”
“It wouldn’t have worked out between us, Adam.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’m too high maintenance. You didn’t have the wherewithal.” I didn’t actually know what that word meant, but Helen had written it on my recommendation letter, so it sounded good.
“I could have handled you.”
“No, you couldn’t.” I got up to grab the bottle of rum. “Better men have tried,” I said, pouring both of us a generous portion. “I have a lot of baggage. Plus, I wouldn’t have been that good of a girlfriend.”
“I think you would have been fine.”
“No. I wouldn’t have been. I wasn’t to Joshua. I didn’t tell him that I loved him enough. For him, it was lust at first sight. Not for me. And he wins. I’m still in love with him, and he’s already moved on, probably twice-over by now.”
“I don’t believe that.” Adam must have known that he was in dangerous territory: by consoling me on my ex, he was about to pass into the permanent friend zone. He leaned in to kiss me, ending the possibility of a Joshua tirade. His lips remained on mine as he took my shirt off and then my bra. I got up from the couch and climbed onto my bed as he undressed. He entered me easily, and this time I didn’t feel the need to make any undue noises.
Afterward, as I lay in bed, staring up at Joshua’s box on the exposed closet shelf, Adam stroked my arm. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “All that talk about being high maintenance and a bad girlfriend. If you don’t like me, just say it.”
I shifted toward him. “But that’s the problem. I think I do like you.”
“If you did, then it wouldn’t be so hard.”
“I told you it would be. Only Joshua could break through all the walls I put up.” I pulled my knees in. “And now that he’s gone, there’s even more.”
“I hate that you are stuck on this guy. He’s gone, Tammy. He’s not coming back.”
I turned back toward my closet. “You don’t even know him. You don’t know that.”
“But I do know that. And I think you do too.”
I was silent for a while, mulling over what Adam had said. “Is it ever going to get easier?” I asked. But he was asleep.
This time Adam was gone when I woke up. I walked over to my desk and began writing on a piece of notebook paper. After I was done, I went over it, edited it, and then wrote it again and then again. My hand was sore, so I took a break and walked to my mailbox. It was still early for a Saturday morning and no one was around. There was a slim white envelope waiting for me in the mailbox. My heart sped up as I pulled it out. It was from the University of Michigan, letting me know they received my application and would get back to me in a month with a decision.
I strolled back to Zeta feeling numb. Ultimately, I was hoping for a letter from Joshua, telling me it was all a mistake: his father’s lungs were fine, he was coming back to Michigan soon, and he still loved me.
But it was pointless. I sat down with a purple pen and rewrote the letter a few more times, adding in this new piece of information, until at last I was satisfied.
Dear Joshua,
I wasn’t going to write you back. I didn’t want to dignify your last letter with a response. I’m so tired of trying to put my thoughts down on paper; the depth of my feelings is something I can never convey. I really don’t want you to know how many nights I cry myself to sleep (if I’m able to sleep at all); how I think about you every day. I don’t want you to know any of that.
When I decided to apply to grad school at Michigan, all I could think about was that I first wanted to go there to be near you. None of that matters anymore. I wish, though, that I could share my news with you, the way I wish I could be there to support whatever you are going through.
We had a good friendship once, before there was love. I trusted you very much. I’m aware that certain circumstances placed us into different categories, but I didn’t care. I may or may not be a “princess” but I’m easily satisfied. And I WAS satisfied with you, just you and your love. I never expected you to sacrifice anything for me.
You were my knight in shining armor, even if we never rode off into the sunset on a white horse. Whoever said that princesses have to live Happily Ever After never saw life for what it really is: the good, the bad, the wonderful, and the horribly tragic all working together. I’m fine with living Mostly Happy Ever After. Some people can live their whole lives without ever being truly happy. Not me. I’ve already been there. I don’t hate you. I can’t even pretend to.
I thought I’d be OK. I really did. I just can’t see everything go to waste. It’s all right for you and me to go up in flames, the “us” to die in vain. But I can’t, I won’t let you go down. If anything, we had an amazing trust once, and you let me in to share your dreams. I guess I’ll never understand why you chose to shut me out, but I hope you’ll never give up those dreams. It may not be right at this point to think about what you want. Someday, though, you’ll be faced with important decisions about your future and I hope at that time the boy I fell in love with will resurface and follow his heart. I believe in you so much, Joshua Buckingham. Just don’t settle for less than you’re worth, and to me, you’ll always be worth a lot. Promise to the stars that you’ll listen to your heart, and I’ll know, from four thousand miles away, that you’ll be OK too. If you ever need another friend, an extra ear to listen, I’ll be here for you.
Love Always,
Tammy
P.S. I’ll always think of you when I hear my favorite song, How’s It Gonna Be, the one we heard in the toy-store the night after Mal. Funny how well it fits now.
He never replied to my letter.