Where You Left Me

Dearest Carter,

In the grand scheme of things life is a story. Your story. It is just the tale of you living day to day, and the characters involved in it, a plot at some point, with a beginning a middle and an end. But it’s just a story, and like all stories, it comes to an end. And the characters in it fall in and out, and just because a person leaves you does not necessarily make them a bad person, it just means that their part in your story is over. And now, your part in my story is over, by all means. Because you have left me, but not because you are a bad person, but because you are dead, though my story, does not continue on without you. In fact, my story is centered around you, and you are the true star, rather than me. And you are gone but you do not stray from my story, for here I am, three months after you have left, and still I am all about you.

So in the end, you have left my story, but you have not ceased to exist within it. And my story existed before you, but it was nothing compared to what it was after I met you. And my story continues still without you, and the thought alone makes me want to weep a thousand tears to drown myself and drag me under in their pressure. But I will not, because now I must do what you could not, I must live on, tell my story, I must remember and forge, I must continue.

But for now I will not continue. And for now, because I want to I will spend my time writing to you letters that you will never see, and I will tell you a story that you already know, because you lived it too. But I will tell you it from my point of view, and I will tell you things that life made me too cowardly to speak. And I will do this not for you, but for me.

The day after I met you was one of the strangest days I have ever encountered in my lifespan. It started off normal, my dress was riding up my back and sticking to my tights until I tugged it harshly down and pulled my cardigan over it, my books fell out of my locker and I had to meticulously stack them up again in alphabetical order according to title. I was just slipping Lolita back into place when there was someone kicking the last of my books farther down the hall, and I grunted under my breath and scrambled to pick them up, finding one covered in a muddy footprint and I felt like crying, but I bit my tongue and held back the emotions and stacked the remaining books haphazardly back into the shelves before extracting my few textbooks from my book bag.

That was normal. So was the current of people pushing past me to my primary class, where I sat with twenty-three other students who cared much less about the class and much more about each other’s private parts and what they had—or hadn’t—been doing with them. This struck me as both odd and sad, because in the grand scheme of things, private parts played a very small role, where education was the foundation on which everything else was built. But it wasn’t as if I could convince any of my peers of this, thusly I found myself in the back row, squeezed between two girls with knotted braids and thick glasses that passed notes behind my back and seemed friendly enough, if they hadn’t been so immersed in their own world.

Nothing out of place, really. And this continued on until just before sixth period. And I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about yesterday in the library, secretly, because I had tried to find you in the school somewhere all day and in vain, because you were nowhere to be seen. And I was starting to think I had imagined the whole encounter in a really sick, twisted part of my brain when my books went scattering to the ground again and I bent once more to pick them up and try to line up their spines in the very least while trying to stack them into the far reaches of my locker, which was absolutely crowded with novels of every kind. My skirt was caught in-between two text books, and I was forced to yank it free which sent me stumbling a few steps backward into the current of people, who knocked against me every which way before I scrambled forward again and gripped the metal edge of my locker with my fingers so tightly the skin turned an alarming shade of white. The locker next to mine closed, it’s owner stalked away.

And then things became strange, in that moment, before the last period of the day when my skirt was wrinkled from my tugs, and my books were heavy in my arms, and my locker was a disaster of novels that had been dumped there and left to rot. Things, when I was starting to forget the previous day, when I was starting to wind down and shut inward on myself. You were always keen on timing, for you would wait until the very last second possible to accomplish something successfully. And it was true of you even when I wasn’t aware of it, which makes it all the odder, that you had a story before me that I might never know all the details of.

But then, I shut my locker, and swept my hair from my forehead with my free arm and glanced down the hallway to see you, and you were seeing me, and barreling towards me. Your plaid shirt was open over your black undershirt, your jeans were ripped at the knee and your sneakers were beaten and dirty under the torn hems of your pants. Your hair stuck up on one side, like you had slept in it, your books were held carelessly in one hand that was swinging at your sides and your eyes were on mine and for all of the world they would not be removed from that spot. So I sat still, because the power of your eyes turned upon me was not something I had been expecting or ready for, and it shocked me into a sort of immobile state, where I let your eyes watch mine as you approached quickly through the throng, who did not push and shove you and instead let you go as you might, which was the most alarming thing I had yet to witness inside the school walls.

“Hi,” You said when you were only a foot from me and you had come to a stop. Your toes were pointed at mine in their sneakers, and I pretended my leg had an itch underneath my tights and I ducked my head so that I could offer my soul some relief from the magnifying glass that was your eyes.

“Hi,” I repeated dumbly, and I stood up again slowly to where you had been trying in vain to press down the side of your hair that stood on end. “What are you doing here?” I blurted next, and my books grew heavy in my arms so I shoved them between my hipbone and my locker, shoving with all my might so that their sides dug into my skin but offered my skinny arms some relief.

“What do you mean?” You asked, furrowing your brow at me like you were confused by my question, which I thought was fair and relatively simple.

“Why are you here, at my locker, before sixth period?” I asked, and I could not meet your gaze directly so I focused my sights on the corner of your right eye.

“Because yesterday at the library you were honest with me in a kind of strange way, and because I wanted to talk to you today,” you said, and then again with the honesty that hit me so hard in the chest it was like an actual blow to my soul.

“I’m not really sure what the appropriate response would be here,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders, and you started at where they moved in a way that made me feel like they were bare.

“Do you ever talk to anyone?” You asked, shifted your weight so you were leaning against the locker which would normally annoy me but instead you looked rather weary and hopeless, so I thought better of it.

“Of course I talk to people, I do have friends, you know,” I said, feeling slightly defensive and turning red at the tops of my cheeks.

“You don’t act like it,” you said, gifting me with a small smile of yours.

“You don’t act like someone who is aware of things called manners, but I don’t point that out to you, do I?” I said, because your honesty made me brave in a way that no one else could, and because I felt like being honest was what you wanted, and it made sense for me to say these things to you.

“Touché,” you said, grinned a little and stood straight up, gestured at the books in my hands and motioned down the hallway. “Are you coming?” you asked.

“My class is the other direction,” I said, and felt immensely sad, because for a second I could picture us walking down the hall together, not as a couple exactly, but as friends, or acquaintances, and people wouldn’t push or shove me because you would be there and you would make path for me which I would follow, and while no one would pay attention to me, they might notice me for a second when they weren’t too busy noticing you.

“Oh,” you said, and faltered for a second, “well then, it was certainly nice speaking to you.”

“I’m not sure if I can say the same thing, but it was nice to see you again,” I said, and you disarmed me with a smile to which I graced you with a grin of my own and you were off, down the hallway and the people moved for you and I was moving in the other direction where people shoved me, and already I was trying to memorize our conversation, and the way your hands moved and your eyes lit up and the way you leaned like you were a weary old man at the end of his life.

And then, I slid into sixth hour where a friend of mine, Alexi, was and she was waiting for me with a seat next to her, painting her nails at her desk which I had always been too afraid to do, and she offered me some of the navy paint, which I declined, and she sighed and tucked her hair with her dry hand and got to work on her long, beautiful nails that looked nothing like my short ones, bit to the quick like some nervous maniac. Which in all honesty, maybe I was, maybe I still am, because I’m looking at them now—my hands, that is—and they’re still bloody and short with jagged nails that look good neither painted nor bear.

But Alexi was there, and her brilliant red, and fake, hair was chopped short and close to her hair and she painted her nails and muttered to me and made me smile, and I muttered back and I didn’t say anything of you, even though I wanted to desperately. But instead I clung onto it, like it was a secret that would disappear once shared, or become something not as exciting, change. And so I didn’t tell her a word of you, though I was filled with words just for you, and I wanted to say them and sing them and write them all. I wanted to carve them into trees and maybe draw your face if I ever in this life learned to draw. That would be the first thing I would do, I would cast your face to paper like I am casting our story to it, in ink so that it will not fade over the years, and I will never be able to capture your brilliance in pen and paper, but I will spend years trying to make it beautiful.

And when class was over and done, and Alexi stood up and kissed the top of my head and sped out of class with her now-dry nails, I collected my books slowly and started for my locker, where none fell this time, and I gathered my belongings in my backpack and clung to my keys in my hand and started towards the library, waiting for school to empty and the parking lot to clear. And though I find this embarrassing to admit, I took one deep breath before I entered the library because in a slightly crazy and hopeful part of my brain I wanted with all of my might for you to be found somewhere in there among the stacks and stacks of books, where you might start another conversation with me and I would be truthful and I would say things confidently and you would ask me things that others usually don’t and I would wonder out loud about you and you would grace me with smiles and I would grace you with books and I could see it all so clearly in my head that I was almost unaware of what was reality and what was illusion.

But, as it turns out, you were not there that day. Of course you know that already. In fact, you already know that it was another three days before I saw your face again, which was disheartening and depressing, not that I would ever dare tell you that to your face. And then, when I went into the library and I was alone, I found it so pressingly silent and lonely in a way that I hadn’t before that I left after only ten minutes and found myself in front of my open locker, staring at the organized books and wondering whether or not I liked them better than real people. And then I left while the parking lot was not yet empty and was stuck waiting in the line of angry and young drives to arrive home, where they would do other young and angry things, and I would read and do my homework and become well-adjusted if not possibly anti-social.

And then I would paint my nails that night in the safety of my own home, and when they did not look half as good as Alexi’s always did, I sighed, removed the polish and climbed into bed with bear nails and a fickle heart.

Yours,
Eliza.