The day you left was the day that part of my heart was locked away. I closed it up behind a door, waiting for you to return with the key that opened it, only you never did.
I don’t know where you are, or where you went. I can only imagine that you left after you read the letter that my father forced me to write. I wish I’d never written it. I wish I had been stronger and had been able to stand up to him. I have tried to forgive him over the years for what he did, but it is hard, and, I confess, I now believe I never will.
I feel tired, now. Even as I write this, my hands seem like they won’t be able to do this for much longer, and, if I don’t get to write this regular letter to you anymore, it will become impossible to live. So, I guess that this letter is a goodbye to you . . .
Abe, I have loved you since the first moment I saw you. I have loved you with the kind of love that I know now is rare, and almost impossible to find. I consider myself lucky to have ever loved like that, even if it was too brief. To love with such abandon and passion. To love with all my heart, mind, body, soul. To love so deeply that sometimes, when I looked at you, my heart felt like it was going to explode. To love so blindly, right from the first moment I saw you. By the time you walked me home and said goodbye to me, that day we first met, I was completely in love, and, only having known you for such a short amount of time, I didn’t know how I was going to live without you.
You were my everything. You still are.
You are the last person I will think of when I close my eyes for the final time. I will close them and I will imagine your face, not the way it was, but how it would be today. I bet you’ve gone grey, like me. I bet your face is lined with wrinkles. I bet your hair has migrated off your head to places you never thought you would have hair . . .
At that, I laughed a little, tears streaming down my cheeks. Mike gave a small chuckle, too.
I bet you walk bent over and your knees feel as bad as mine. I bet you have aches and pains all over that you never knew you would have. I bet all those things. I bet you look nothing like the boy I fell in love with . . . but I bet your eyes are still the same.
If I close my eyes, I can still see them. See them looking at me. See them as I painted them, so many times that I got to know each little corner of them. You always had a spark inside them, and I bet you still have that spark—well, I hope you do. I hope you never lost it and I hope that you had a good life, one filled with love and laughter, like I had . . . even though there was something always missing from it.
I love you. I always have. But now it’s time to say goodbye. Please know that I will love you until my last breath, and, who knows, maybe we will meet again in the place beyond this.
I hope we do. But, if we don’t, if those short moments I had with you in this life are all I will ever get, it’s enough for me. Because my memories of you and my love for you will sustain me for eternity, and for whatever comes after this.
You, me, forever.
We sat there quietly, staring at the letters. As if someone had pressed the mute button, there seemed to be no sound around us at all. The words contained within that letter had silenced us, they had silenced the entire world. They had stopped the breeze from blowing, the crickets from chirping. They had stopped everything. We slowly looked up at each other, eyes shining with tears. We didn’t need to communicate our feelings, because I knew I felt exactly like he did. There was no other way to feel. Finally, Mike broke the enduring silence.
“These are all the letters she wrote him, for seventy years.” He started picking them up and placing them into one single pile. I watched in amazement as the pile got higher and higher, until it tumbled back down.
“And he never got to read any of them,” I said, as my heart broke.
Mike looked at the fallen letters. I could see he was thinking, and then, as if propelled by something unseen, he jumped up. “We have to get these letters to him.”
I looked at him, and something exploded inside me. Recognition. “Yes!” I jumped up, too. “We need to find out who he is, where he is, if he’s still alive, and we need to get these to him. He needs to know how she felt about him, right to the very end. But how?” I asked.
Mike didn’t hesitate. “The town census and all the other old town records. They’re kept in our jail cell. We can go and look through them.”
I nodded. “We don’t have his surname.”
“It started with the letterE. We’ll just have to look through everything. Let’s wake Ash and Emelia up—this is a four-person job.” He grabbed as many letters as he could, and pushed even more into my arms, but there were still too many for us to take, so the rest we put back inside the cavity in the wall. We hurried back to the house, imbued with a sense of purpose.
A purpose . . .I wasn’t sure that was the word for this. Because this felt like the single most important task of my entire life. Finding Abe and taking these letters back to him felt like the most meaningful thing I’d ever done with my life. And, in that moment, it all kind of made sense. It all clicked in my head, like a key into a lock. The strange string of events that had led me here—the elevator, the letters, coming here, meeting Mike—it all made sense now. It was as if all of that had been the journey I needed to go on to get here. To be holding these letters in my hands and to be trying to take them back to the one person in the world that they had been meant for.
