Where You Left Me

Dearest Carter,

I was sealing up my last letter to you when my mother stormed into my room, her hair standing up and apron stained. She glanced at the envelope and saw the address on it, saw my messy scrawl and nearly fainted. She threw her hands up and spit in my direction before she started crying like she always does. I think my mom would cry at any given moment, I think that she could probably cry forever, because that’s what it feels like she’s been doing. Crying forever and ever.

I moved back in with her after you. The apartment was too empty, too full of you. Your clothes and smell and your places, and so I left and showed up on my doorstep with my bags and my broken heart and my mother took me back in, so I guess I can’t say anything bad about her. And then it was her creeping around me for months and months until she suddenly became angry at everything I did, always yelling and throwing things and then bursting into tears and apologize profusely.

And this time she spit at me and cried out, “You can’t keep doing this!” And when she yells like that you can hear some of the Old Italian accent that she has tried so hard to hide all these years. “If you keep letting yourself focus on all of these sad things you are never going to move on! You can never get better when you look at the past, and I know it hurts right now, I know it feels like the end of the world, but you can’t let your sadness become your life. You can’t give up on everything else because he’s gone. You have to move on Eliza, you have to.”

And then she wiped her eyes and stormed out of my room without apologizing, I waited for a few minutes for her to come back and say that she was sorry, but she never did. And then I realized that maybe she wasn’t sorry for saying those things, and that maybe she felt they needed to be said. But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that I’m trying to get better, that I have this whole story on my chest that I won’t be able to tell our children, I have this whole life I’ve lived that is now just dead and gone because everything used to be about you. And she doesn’t know that I can’t lose you like this, I can’t just move on without telling you these things, and she’ll never know because she was never part of this, but I have to do this Carter, I have to. And I have to get this story off my chest, I have to make it real, and I can’t tell anyone because they won’t believe me, but you will, because you were there for every second of it. This is your story and my story, this is us. It’s so hard to let you go, it’s the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to do, and I don’t think I can do it.

I won’t do it. I just won’t. I’ll sit here forever and write you a million letters and you’ll never get them, but I don’t care, I don’t care. This is my story, this has to be about me for once instead of everything being about you, there’s no more you for this to be about.

And then it was three days after the day you didn’t show up at the library. And I read too much and was far too upset for this to be normal. And my friends teased me at lunch and Alexi lent me this polish that would stop me from biting my nails and it was working because it tasted like chili peppers and burned the roof of my mouth sharply. I went back to the library without you, because it was still my place, and I made mountains of books and read the first pages of all the ones I thought looked interesting before I decided. And it was three days later and I was halfway through the first page of Emma for the third time when there you where, sliding over a tower of books and sitting down across from me like you owned the library, and that you’ve been here every day of your goddamn life.

“Hi,” you said to me, and I finished my sentence before I glanced up to see you there in a white turtle neck and you had your class ring on your middle finger, which I thought was funny but I didn’t say that to you.

“Hello,” I said coolly and dropped the book on the table before reaching and grabbing another book at random that did not look interesting at all, but I wasn’t about to put it back and try searching for another one with you there staring at me like you hadn’t in three days, so I opened to the first chapter and began to read, and it was just about as boring as the cover suggested. You were sitting there quietly, leaning across the table like you were waiting for me, and your eyes were so sharp and blue compared to the crisp of your sweater, so I sighed and slammed the book closed and leaned forward on my elbows, the holes in my plaid shirt let the cool table touch my bare skin in places and I wanted to shiver and jerk away, but I couldn’t with you looking at me. You still though, said nothing.

“What do you want?” I finally succumbed to the question, sighed and pushed a hand through my hair.

“I wanted to say hi,” you said, and smiled a little so that the corner of your right eye crinkled a bit.

“I think we already covered that,” I pointed out, and I sounded like a bitch even to myself, but you caught me so off-guard and made me feel so naked that I couldn’t help but be a little snappy, even if I knew it was wrong and that I’d probably scare you off again, which made me sad inexplicably.

“So I’m not allowed to sit here?” you asked, your eyebrow quirked and I wanted to just look at you forever, which I tried to do until you left me three months ago to go to a place where I could never look at you again.

I sighed through my nose and pushed my hair back again, “You can sit wherever you want, I guess.”

“Well then I want to sit here,” you said, leaned back and crossed your thick arms across your chest and never once took your eyes off of me and where I was.

“Why?” I asked you and furrowed my brow. I couldn’t help it really, you made me want to ask all these questions, like you were a book with blank pages that I needed to fill with a fantastic story, and you were just sitting there in front of me and it was so tempting.

You were quiet though for a second, and then when you smiled again that was a wickedness about it that made me want to squirm in my chair, “Because I like the view.”

And my breath caught halfway up my throat so for a second I thought I had managed to strangle myself and I was going to die right there in front of you. But instead I glanced over my shoulder to make sure that a waterfall of a model hadn’t appeared out of thin air, and there was just the stacks and stacks of books before the shelves and nothing else, nothing new, nothing to ponder or wonder at and my cheeks started to turn an embarrassing shade of red.

“It doesn’t seem like much of a view,” I muttered dryly and put my nose back to my book and tried to hunch on myself so that maybe I could disappear entirely.

“I beg to differ,” you said and smiled, leaned forward so that your face was level with mine and your blue eyes were so intense that I thought I was going to pass out and your breath was in my face and you were so beautiful but it was all moving too fast, so fast and I realized that I needed to breath.

So I pushed back my chair and I stood up, knocking over a smaller pile of books with my elbow and gathering my things without another word and I strode out of the library, but of course you already know this. You also know that the next morning before first period as I was shoving my newest books into the corners of my locker that you slid up next to me and nearly knocked me over because you skid over The Old Man and the Sea which in my opinion is a really horrible book, but I’ve read it thousands of times and I still have the copy that you stepped on somewhere in my vast collection.

“You left pretty quickly yesterday,” you said to me and I was still trying not to laugh at the fact you had almost fallen in front of me, because people like you didn’t fall in front of people like me.

“I know,” I said, and I couldn’t meet your face because my copy of The Great Gatsby was not going to fit into my locker if I didn’t push with both hands so I tucked my text books into my hips and shoved them against my locker and grasped the edges of the books and pushed with all of the might my skinny arms had until Gatsby was tucked safely somewhere between Pride and Prejudice and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

“So why did you leave like that?” you asked, and leaned against the locker next to mine while I gathered my text books while trying not to let them fall.

“Like what?” I asked, playing dumb, because you were embarrassing me and I wanted to crawl into my stuffed locker and just become some sort of book, albeit the most boring book I have ever read.

“Quickly, without saying goodbye,” you said, leaned closer so that your face was level with mine again and it made me upset because I couldn’t bear looking at you.

“I wanted to,” I stated, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world, as if you were an idiot for not figuring that out earlier.

“I know that,” you said, sounding exasperated and frustrated. “But why did you want to leave like that.”

I slammed my locker door closed, whirled on your face and conjured up every last ounce of confidence that I owned to spit out the next sentence, “Listen Carter, I don’t even really know you. And I’m sure you’re a great, nice guy but I just am not really sure what you’re playing at and I’m not sure that I want to be a part of it,” I said not unkindly and felt the corner of my mouth turn down.

You looked a little flustered for a moment, and it was like you were about to blush before you cleared your throat, “Well, it would seem we have reached an impasse,” you said, and smiled a little like nothing in the world phased you. Like in some way you were secretly proud of me for being so black and white like you were, for speaking my mind for commenting. And I wanted my knees to give out so that I could just sink to the ground and pretend none of this was happening, but instead you smiled at me and pushed off the locker and into the throng of people who parted for you, and I was alone once again.

That afternoon in class, Alexi was busy painting a design of some sort on her nails while I watched her in a state of wonder and the teacher lectured us about something that I was sure I could learn just as well from reading a book. In a moment of weakness, I had told Alexi everything about you, because I had seen you across the commons at lunch and I wanted to run up to you and to run away, and I was still fretting about the way we had left things at the lockers and what that would mean for the library and your intense looks and the way you complimented me and I had stormed out and you were black and white and I was gray.

And then she had looked at me with a sort of blank look, her thick mouth open to form an ‘o’ and her nail polish drying on her fingers before she could put on a second coat. “Carter Wells has been meeting you in the library, telling you that he wants to fuck you senseless?” she said, with as much eloquence that she had ever had.

“He never said anything about wanting to fuck me,” I sighed, and blushed at the tips of my ears.

“I’m translating, baby,” she said smirked and hit my arm playfully, “Jump on that man. He is tasty.”

“Oh my God I can’t believe you are actually saying these words,” I said, buried my face in my hands and laughed at her, or maybe with her.

“I speak the truth, because you know I’m right and that you want to do him just as badly as he wants to do you,” she said and gave me a stern look like she was talking with me about something serious.

“I don’t know why I bother talking to you sometimes,” I grumbled and crossed my arms sharply.

“Because you know without me you’d be lost, I say what everyone is thinking and no one is brave enough to say,” she said and laughed at me. Then the teacher cut us off with a sharp glance, and honestly I can’t even remember his name, or what we learned any day. All I remember is Alexi and I laughing in the back row as she painted her nails and I was envious.

Then, the bell rang and she jetted off as I gathered my things slowly, with purpose and stormed off to the library without stopping to gather my things first, and my stomach felt like it was going to fall out the soles of my feet and my palms were sweating, my pulse racing, as if you’d show up in the library butt-naked and waiting for me. As I shoved open the door though, I found it once again peaceful and quiet, and as I weaved my way towards the mountains of books no one ever bothered to put away, I found it once again empty. And I sighed and pretended I was not in the least disappointed before shoving my things on a table and taking a seat beneath a castle of novels that were calling to me.

Then there was your familiar hand, shoving away a tower of books and you were staring at me with those same blue eyes and the same smile on your face, only this time it looked slightly hesitant.

And I swear to God, I fell in love with you right that second. I swear to God.

Yours,
Eliza.