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“Psychi mou,” she probed gently, rubbing her hands up and down my arms. “Why don’t you go to him?”
I heaved in a shuddering breath and bowed my head. I spoke through the tightness in my throat. “I can’t, Yiayia. Every time I try to buy the ticket, I feel like-” My voice broke. I swallowed hard and continued in a whisper. “I feel like I’m having a heart attack.”
“Moro mou,” she murmured, stroking my dark hair back from my face. “The world is yours, poulaki mou. O ti theleis, whatever you want, is yours! Don’t be afraid, moro mou. Life is happening to everybody. Go to him.”
I loved my yiayia’s mishmash of Greek and broken English. Her accent and Greek endearments comforted me.
I dropped my chin to my chest. “I can’t, Yiayia. I just can’t.”
Silence and worry shrouded her face before she suddenly clapped her hands together. “Okay! That’s okay, koritzi mou,” she said decisively.
She wiped the last of the tears from my face with her work-roughened hands.
“You go to talking doctor, yes? Do it for Yiayia. And Yiayia will light the candles at the church.” Her words revealed the depth of her concern. Greeks didn’t go for counselling; they went to church.
I nodded, and her face lost a fraction of its tightness. “Bravo, koritzaki mou. Vander is a nice, Greek boy and I want to see you pregnant before I die.”
I barked out a laugh. “Yiayia!”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Ech, I’m old lady now. As mother, I dreamed of seeing my grandchildren. Now, I’m old and greedy.” She nodded, a twinkle in her dark eyes. “I want to see my great-grandchildren.”
Vander
I spent the summer in a quasi-zombie state, and I failed three courses the next semester. Barely squeaking by the grade cut-off to get into the fourth year of my program, I finally started to wake up. Friends pulled at me to go out with them, counselled me to give up on Ruby, and encouraged me to move on to someone new.
I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
She hadn’t contacted me, not once, but I could not bring myself to move on.
Not for months.
When I finally did go out on a few dates, I didn’t allow anything to go up on social media. This told me like nothing else could that I hadn’t yet given up hope. Occasionally Ruby liked my posts on social media, so I knew she, too, still occasionally checked in.
The morning I woke up to find a picture of myself, with my arm around my latest date, pinned on the Facebook page of a mutual friend of mine and Ruby’s, Ruby shut down all her social media. I could no longer go online to see her sweet face.
My heart broke with the loss, and for what she must have thought.
Part of which was correct.
Wracked with guilt, overwhelmed anew with the sorrow of her loss, and angered beyond reason that I’d been exposed and had lost contact with her entirely, I immediately broke it off with the girl. Furious with myself for giving into the temptation of loneliness, I called Ruby, several times, hoping to explain, but she never answered.
Three days later, I received a padded envelope in the mail with Ruby’s return address on it. My heart thudded in my chest as I carried it into my sterile rented room and opened it with shaking hands. My cross spilled out into my palm. I opened the envelope further to find a jagged piece of lined paper, ripped from a note pad, with the last words she spoke to me scribbled across it, the letters watermarked with her tears.
I tucked that scrap of paper into my wallet before my own tears made it worse and scribbled off my own note.
I prayed she would be safe and find her way back to me.
The next day I bought a padded envelope of my own. I kissed my cross, whispered my prayer, and mailed it back to her with my own jagged scrap of paper tucked inside.
I’ll always love you, Ruby-mine.
I’m always here for you.
Don’t forget about me.
