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Then after suddenly announcing my retirement—without really giving a reason—that fan mail had turned to hate mail in the blink of an eye.
But the letter my publicist sent me didn’t have any hate in it at all.
I carried that letter around with me everywhere I went, and when I got down or felt discouraged, I’d read it to remind myself that my life wasn’t as bad as it could be.
Pausing in the middle of the letter I was writing, I pulled it out and started at the beginning—admiring the way my name was spelled in pretty cursive writing.
Rome,
I know that you’re probably not going to read this, but I had to try.
Everyone hates that you left the game…I applaud you.
Though it hurts that you won’t be out there playing anymore, I know that you had to have had an important reason for leaving. Probably something much bigger than the excuse that your publicist gave about a recurring injury that everyone—including someone like me who only watches football when you’re playing—knows you’ve played through before.
Anyway, long story short, I wanted to tell you about me.
I wanted you to know that despite cutting your career short, you gave me hope just knowing that there were kind men out there. You changed the way that I thought about life.
You made me believe.
When I was twelve, my father beat the absolute crap out of me because I dared to look at a boy. I suffered a fractured orbital socket and a dislocated jaw, along with a new understanding when it came to boys.
They were no good—not my father, and not any of those boys who I had crushes on.
At age sixteen, I got pregnant. At seventeen, I delivered my baby stillborn.
At seventeen, two days after I delivered my baby, I was thrown out of my house and forced to move into a halfway house for teens until my eighteenth birthday.
At age eighteen, I graduated from high school, joined the army, and then was medically discharged a year into my service because I’d suffered pelvic stress fractures after a male officer threw me off an obstacle course climb.
At nineteen, I was back home and forced to work for my parents because I had no experience doing anything but cleaning, and they offered for me to move in with them to recuperate as long as I agreed to work for them for three years.
During year two of my indentured servitude to my parents, I met a man who I thought was my everything.
When I was twenty, my brother went to jail for killing the man that killed his partner—he’s a police officer. His partner also happened to be his girlfriend whom he couldn’t bring around our parents because they’re so freakin’ biased in their opinions about what they would consider proper women for their sons—and white American girls weren’t it.
At twenty-three, two years after meeting the man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with, I left him at the altar and tried to run.
I got far enough away that nobody would hear me scream, but not far enough to escape him. Needless to say, he showed me what he thought about me running away, and I realized that I’d almost married my father reincarnated.
While he was beating me, you were on the screen.
Your face, and those eyes, were all I could see, and I was staring at you while he kicked me repeatedly in the head, stomach, and ribs—anywhere he could get to.
You got me through, and you didn’t even know it.
After…well, after I was healthy once again, I continued to watch your career. Your eyes haunted my dreams, waking and asleep. I realized, the more I watched interviews and saw you playing the game, that you were one of the good ones. A man with eyes so gentle looking would never treat a woman poorly.
You got me through my all-time low, and then you got me through some highs.
I just wanted you to know that you impacted my life.
Regards,
RP’s Biggest Fan
The letter still made my heart ache whenever I read it.
I hadn’t been able to stop myself from writing her back.
Surprisingly, she’d written me back, too.
And that was how the weird pen pal relationship that we now had started.
She knew my hopes and dreams, my fears. Everything there was to know, she knew it.
I hadn’t spared a single detail from her. I wanted her to know that she wasn’t the only one out there with a shitty life.
“Daddy?”
I looked down at my son, whose head was resting on my thigh. We were vegging out on the couch, and I had a pad and pencil resting on the arm of the couch.
“Yeah, buddy?” I asked.
“Is Uncle Tyler coming over tomorrow?” he questioned.
I felt my stomach warm. “Yeah, he said he was. He’s bringing Reagan, too. They’re going to sit with you for a couple of hours while I go get groceries.”
