Where You Left Me

Dearest Carter,

I guess, in reality, my story begins before you, though I find that hard to believe. I don’t think I ever told you much about my childhood. Maybe, I was afraid you would not understand. I was born in March, which according to my Elementary school is ‘reading month’ which meant every year for my birthday I would get too many books for one girl to read, and I would read them all. You knew that though, right? My books, all of them, stacked around everywhere, shoved into corners. You complained about how my coffee table had no legs and sat on four pillars of more books, you complained about the time you were trying to seduce me and tripped and fell over my newest stack I had forgotten to warn you about.

But you loved my books secretly, and you bought me three for my birthday each year and you used to read them out loud while I fell asleep in your lap. But now you know why the books were always there. Some habits die hard, I suppose.

Everytime I see the word ‘die’ or hear it or speak it, I see your face in my mind for one brilliant second. It hurts, I can’t say it or hear it. I just can’t, not now, while only three months rests between us. Where we started and ended. But that isn’t what I’m writing about, not you. No. Me.

So March, March 4th to be exact. And it was a sunny day my mom told me, unseasonably warm for March. And then two weeks later my father walked out, but of course you know that already. It was still when I was crying every night, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He never wanted children, and my mother insists I wasn’t a mistake, but I can’t be sure ever. Anyway, I was crying, about four a.m. and there was darkness all around, a tired wife, a new baby he didn’t want. I’m assuming he did his packing quietly, so as not to wake my mother. He left me crying in my crib, scrawled a note besides divorce papers he had been hiding from the moment my mother told him the news about me. And he walked out of our lives.

He came back five years later, and this I remember. And it was heartbreaking to see the man my mother did not want to talk about, because I looked so much like him. We had the same wide brown eyes, the same dark blonde hair, and straight nose, pointed chin. He was a beautiful man, my father was. I never told you he came back for me. Maybe because it feels to private to tell, maybe because it hurts too much to speak the words aloud.

He had two daughters, and this I did not tell you either. They were three and one, they were dark skinned, which I know they got from their mother. They had wide eyes, crooked smiles, and the same eyes I had. I never knew their names. Because they arrived at the door and my mom swung it open and spit right in my father’s face. I stood behind her legs and he looked at my face and frowned like he was both sad and disappointed and then my mother shut the door. I ran to the window, threw my face against the glass and he was walking down the driveway, and he didn’t look back, not even once. My mother held me while I cried, and I cried for a very long time, at least I remember it that way. It was still sunny when I began and when I was ending it was dark outside the window and my father was long gone.

There’s something else I didn’t tell you either. Two years ago I found him again. His daughters are mostly grown up and they are beautiful. And I couldn’t say much about him, considering he died five years ago, and his tomb stone mentioned nothing about me, but it did about his daughters, whose names I now know are Megan and Natalie. And it had his age on it, which I realized that I never even knew. And I knew his middle and his last name, since I’ve only ever gone by my mother’s. Is it bad that I feel ashamed that he left me? That I feel as if I did something wrong. Maybe if I hadn’t been so whiny when I was an infant I’d be mourning a lost father now, or I’d have siblings. But then both Megan and Natalie wouldn’t exist, and by blood they are both my half-sisters. I checked on them once when they were coming out of school, the day I told you I had a dentist’s appointment when you asked me out, and I saw them coming out of the doors, holding onto each other and their eyes were wide and familiar with their caramel skin and they smiled at the same time, a boy came up and tapped Megan, the elder one, on the shoulder and she smiled so wide I thought it might break her face in two. And I went home and cried for hours and hours and ignored your phone call that night because I had sisters that I would never know.

It is strange, to see a person’s life evolve when you are not part of it. Like that kid you always sat next to but never spoke a word too and you watch them age and mature and it’s strange that all these lives exists on the same earth and never cross. My sisters, who I do not know save their first names, who were probably too young to remember seeing me behind my mother’s legs, I wonder about them so often, and I worry and fret. Megan who has probably had her first heart break, Natalie who is still timid around boys probably at this point. It hurts that I will not know them except for a passing glance.

But do not think that my childhood was all bad. I had fun too. I played in the sand with my mother and friends, I went to school and was placed in accelerated English, I rode a bike and shopped and had movie marathons. I am not a sob story, at least, not until you. I don’t know if your boyfriend dying makes you a sob story, but I do not want to be one. There is nothing legendary in a sob story; there is nothing to be proud of there, so I will not be.

In our lives I believe we all do something of importance. Something, that marks us as having completed something, that we can be proud of and tell stories about to our grandchildren.

My important thing was you. Loving you. That was what my thing to be proud of. Our love, accomplished and beautiful and now gone. That is what I want to tell my grandchildren about. You. You and me, together, the day we met and every day after. Everything that was beautiful and sad, and I will tell them about your death, and they will cry with me, but I will tell them that your death was not the important thing. It is not important that you died, Carter. No. It is important that you lived. That is the important thing. Your life, that is what you did, every second and every breath of it was important, and will remain so. That’s what beautiful people get, a lifetime of important, and they get a beautiful death which is both sad and necessary for their life to remain so important to the stories of others.

The day we met though, I guess that is when the important thing starts. It was in the library at our High School, I was a junior and you were a senior. It was just after school and the glass wall at the southern end was full of afternoon sunlight that slanted through the shelves upon shelves of books. Our High School prided itself on its extensive library, though it was rarely ever used by the students. Except me, I used that library every day that I went to that school it seems. At least every day until I met you.

In reality, I met you two year earlier, when I was a freshman and you were a sophomore, because everyone used to talk about you all the time. And I knew your name and your face but I didn’t know to put the two together. And you had a beautiful girlfriend then, who had long black hair and almond eyes and could speak three languages. And everyone loved you and wanted you and you were important even then. You were golden, they told me, and it was true. Your hair like honey, eyes like pools of water by the Gulf of Mexico.

Until I came back for sophomore year, when suddenly, no one ever spoke of you anymore and your beautiful girlfriend was with another boy. And I wondered where you went at first before I too, forgot about you. Until that day my junior year. The library, where I spent most of all of my time, was tucked away in the back corner of the school. The far wall was completely made of one big window that had sunlight pouring in, and it was constructed of a maze of towering shelves upon shelves that were stacked with almost every book you could ever imagine. And right under the direct glare of the windows was a seating area that stretched down the middle, surrounded by shelves, piled with mismatched tables and chairs and ancient computers that would freeze no matter what.

This day I was stacked in the middle table, I had gathered every book I could see and created a series of towers around me, and I was going through the names on the spines, tossing out the one’s I had read a thousand times and rearranging the stacks based on preference. The slamming books were loud in the quiet, but I was usually so alone there, sometimes even the librarians would slip out and leave me there utterly alone, secluded, where no one or nothing could touch me.

Of course you already know that I wasn’t alone that day. And you know that when you heard my slamming books you poked your head around the far side of the maze, away from me where I was hidden from your sight. And I was too busy trying to decide between reading The Hobbit again or reading Brave New World for the first time when the southernmost tower of books was pulled sharply away by your tanned hand. At first, I jumped so high that my thighs slammed against the underside of the table and sent my tallest tower of books toppling over and onto the ground. Some of them opening and their pages smack against the industrial-grade carpet, and my hands flew to my chest as if to protect myself from something when I finally followed the hand up the arm and to the face.

It took me awhile to place your face with the name, for surely I had been over a year since I last heard it. I was certain though, that it was you, more certain than I usually was. And it was you, Carter, looking down at me, Eliza, and I thought I was going to pass out on the spot.

You were so beautiful. I don’t think I will ever recover from your beauty, in the end. And the worst part is that you no longer knew that you were beautiful, but you just assumed that you weren’t, and it hurt because being around someone beautiful like you made me feel awfully ugly. Your skin was tan, but that was only because I would later learn you like to sit out on the grass and find shapes in the clouds. Your eyes were like wide pools next to sand, clear and calm, pools of water that gather together, and the outer rims where so darkly brown that it was startling. Your hair was golden like honey, rather than white like ice, and you were tall and lanky with the broadest shoulders and the friendly point on your chin and your shirt had a small hole at the hem.

“I think you’re supposed to be quiet in a library,” You said to me, half amused, half curious. And your eyes were smiling and so was your mouth and I felt my stomach twist in a way that was almost painful. I tugged on the end of my braid and shoved the sleeves of my cardigan over my hands, and finally I looked up to meet your eyes.

“It’s usually just me here, so it’s never really been much of a problem,” I said, and I wasn’t sure why I told you the truth or that I spend most of my free time in the school library. You didn’t look at all surprised, or disgusted or amused anymore though, instead you looked curious, tender in a way that I hadn’t been expecting from you.

“I guess I’m sorry for intruding in your territory then,” you said, and then he took a step back as if you meant to walk away but before you could take another step, I did that stupid thing again where I opened my mouth and told you exactly what I was thinking.

“It’s not really my territory,” I said, flushing, “and you’re welcome to stay if you want, I mean it sometimes gets kind of lonely here.”

I have no idea, to this day, why on earth I told you that. I could be beaten with a brick for hours and still never know. And at the moment I wanted to crawl under the table and die from embarrassment, but instead you smiled in a kind way, and dragged out the chair in front of your legs and for all intensive purposes, fell into it and never took your eyes off of mine.

“When I first saw you I thought you were going to be a snob or something who shooed me away because I wasn’t as smart as you,” you said seriously, and still never moved your eyes, and it was shocking to be here these things and saying these things. Like standing in front of a crowd completely naked, down to the bone, just for all your secrets and privates to hang out there and be judged. Instead it didn’t feel as dangerous though, it was like you had draped some blanket over my shoulders to keep me warm and still bare, and you were naked too.

“I thought you were going to be an asshole,” I said, because as long as you were being honest I was sure as hell going to be honest, too.

“Who says I’m not?” you asked, and your eyebrows quirked up at the edges like you were sharing some juicy secret with me. And it felt like you were. I wanted to lean it and soak it all up, take it all in, because in all of my life no one this beautiful has ever looked into my eyes and been honest about it, and no one that beautiful has ever wanted to sit across from me and quirk their eyebrows. It was like jumping into a lake you thought was going to be ice and surprised in finding it was warm like bath water.

“I’m always too quick to judge I guess,” I said, shrugged, because I didn’t know what else you wanted me or expected me to do. But I do know that I was torn between wanting to drag my towers back around me and create a fortress that only death itself could penetrate and wanting to shove all the towers down to the ground and smile at you and have you smile at me.

“You read a lot?” you asked, and it was more sarcastic than an actual question so instead of answering you I just shrugged and dipped my head, because I felt both slightly ashamed and slightly proud.

“I see you around school a lot, you know. You always have a book with you, no matter what. And as far as I can see you never actually speak to anyone,” he said, and this startled me so much that it was like an actual fright. A madman jumping out of your closet and armed with a knife dripping with the blood of your family.

Then it made me sad. Sad for reasons I didn’t know, alone, to his eyes. I looked completely and utterly alone.

“I’m not always alone, and I do speak to people. I’m speaking to you now,” I said, which is a stupid and cliché thing to say but I said it anyway and wanted to jam my foot so far up my own ass that my children would feel it someday if I ever had any.

“I can see that,” you said, reached out your armed and plucked a book from the top of the nearest stack, this one was Ivanhoe which I read first when I was in fourth grade, but I didn’t tell you that because you had never heard of it.

“Do you mind if I read here?” you asked, and looked at me seriously, as if my answer was really going to have an effect on you. Like you wanted me to be honest and truthful, like I had been previously, like I knew somehow you always liked things to be. Black and white. Simple and clean. A line down the middle that split good from bad and the truth was like a light over all of that, illuminating the shadows and forcing them to speak for their actions, highlighting the white and giving it the praise it deserved.

I guess, maybe, that’s why I found you so appealing. My whole life had been gray. Not bad, not good, some sort of wish-wash between the two. When all you have is this boring gray, even black and white seems awfully interesting. Or maybe the interest is not in the colors, but the contrast between the two, like there could really always be one answer and one answer only. I think, in that moment I could see it all. Living black and white, living honestly instead of stepping around the truth. I could see the beauty in it, and it was so intoxicatingly different than anything I had ever seen before that I think I would’ve followed you into either side, black or white.

But you weren’t waiting for me to follow you. You were giving me the lead, and it was beautiful and scary and exhilarating all at one time. I wanted to climb onto the table and spread my wings and just fly and fly and fly over everything forever. That’s what being allowed to lead feels like. It feels like an entire world of every possibility ever, and it’s like looking down and realizing that no, you haven’t been falling. Quite the opposite really, in fact, all this time I have never been falling. I haven’t even been flying. I’ve just been floating. Waiting around, stuck, and never moving.

Maybe that’s why that when you looked me in the eyes and into my soul and lit up the black and the white, I said yes. Maybe if you had never let me lead we would’ve never gotten this far at all.

Yours,
Eliza.