Love Letters to Write Before I Die

Robert Scott took off his reading glasses as soon as he heard the door closed gently from the hallway a few feet away and a pair of footsteps walking towards the living room.

“Oh, hey dad. You’re home early.”

Robert took one look at the person behind him, who was staring blankly at the wooden floors beneath her feet. The girl, he realized, was the person his son took to the company’s party he held nights before. She looked different.

Confused, Robert closed the lid of his laptop and set it aside.

“Nathan, what did you do?”

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“Your mother is out with a few friends of her, she won’t be back until later. Care to tell me why you brought a sobbing girl into our house?” said Robert, sounding really suspicious that it irked Nathan.

“I didn’t do anything!” said Nathan, raising his palms up. “It’s just really complicated and confusing…and stuff.”

His father had that look in his eyes that made Nathan groaned loudly, ruffling his hair. He was eventually forced into telling his father exactly what happened. And fifteen minutes later, leaving a stunned father in the middle of the living room, he rushed upstairs and entered their quaint guest room. There was no use for knocking. Haley refused to talk ever since she got into the car.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked her earlier in the car but she was unresponsive. She rested her head against the cold window, her arms lying limp beside her and her eyes stared at the vast nothingness in front of her. Tears after tears fall, trailing down her cheeks until she couldn’t find the strength to cry anymore. She couldn’t find the strength to do anything.

It was no use calling her friends either, considering that Nathan didn’t actually know any of her friends. There was that dude who was always in the hospital with her. Duncan or whatever. And again, it was not as if he knew where he lived or what his phone number was.

The mood change was overwhelming for him to fully comprehend.

“Why didn’t I see it?” she said.

Her voice sent shivers down his spine in a quite unpleasant way. Nathan always saw her as this radiant burst of sunlight – so radiant that it was almost blinding, considering how dark he was at times. Considering how he was the one who always had these morbid thoughts in his head and for some reason, she brought them out, just because she wanted to listen. Nobody, not even his parents, managed to do that.

And now it seemed as if the cards changed, and from the looks of it, he was at loss of words. What would you say to someone who saw both of her parents cheated? It was a sickening thought.

Haley gave him a simple question that could mean a lot of things. Was it a rhetoric question? Was she speaking to herself? Was she asking him for an opinion? Or did she prefer the brutal honesty? It was a blue-wire-red-wire moment – anything he might say, he was afraid that he’ll end up rubbing a pile of salt violently against her open wound. But instead of being presented by blue or red, he was presented with a bunch of other colors of the same shade.

When he failed to come up with an answer, Haley rested her chin on her knees and began sobbing again.

At that moment, he had a slight hatred towards colors. And wires. Colored wires, particularly.