I don't know how to say this or write this and I'm not even sure if you even want to talk to me ever again. I am so so sorry how I acted and I want you to know that I wish I could go back and take it all back. I know that doesn't mean a lot considering what i did but I hope you will find a way to forgive me. Because thinking that you are angry at me breaks my heart. So please write back and let me know that you don't hate me.
I am at the camp my parents sent me to. Everyone here is so nice but they find all kinds of ways to tell us how we should and shouldn't act. Some of the girls had troubles with drugs and some with drinking and others with getting pregnant. I think I am the only girl here because I like girls.
No that's not really true. I have to be honest if I am going to get a second chance with you, and I really really want a second chance! I don't like girls - that's not why I am here. I'm here because I love you. And I can't stop loving you even after everything I did and all the yelling. I can't stop. I think about you all the time, and I dream about you when I am asleep at night. I remember that look on your face when I blamed you for everything and I want so much to be able to see you smile at me one more time.
I don't dare dream of you forgiving me enough to kiss me again, to love me again, but part of me still hopes that we could be together. Please write back and tell me what is going on with you. Please please give me another chance.
I love you so much. I miss you. I want to be your girl.
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Well, sweet girl.
It is morning here, or almost, in the odd corner of the world where I have alighted. I read your note with sleepy eyes when it arrived and I spent a restless night wrestling faceless tormentors in dreams that left the smell of incense fading rapidly when I awoke. I brought my mug with me to the chair on the terrace and I am resting my feet on the cool stones to await the sun.
I heard from the school, too. Exile is not easily achieved these days. My laptop reaches out for wi-fi beams like a taproot seeking water. My telephone is turned off but the messages accrue. Even paper mail, the old slow medium our grandfathers relied upon to carry their love home from European battlefields, even paper mail is arriving. Not all of it. I don't get those shiny lingerie catalogs with the one girl who looks so achingly like you. But the official-looking envelopes are forwarded. That is where I read, in blocks of merciless legalese, that the school would no longer require my services.
It turns out to be a relief, in the end, to hear that shoe drop. It has swayed precariously over my head since All Hell Broke Loose. I confess that I scanned the text a second time, as we do, convincing ourselves halfway that we can draw different meanings from the words if we read more slowly or more carefully.
But that's wishful thinking, and I have set that behind me now, I hope. You and I made a life out of wishful thinking for those weeks - it was only weeks! - and reality was sure to come crashing down on us in the end.
The camp sounds harmless enough. It's something to be endured, like a math test or P.E. class with Mrs. Stock. Those places encourage a sort of asceticism, a poverty of diversions, that can be healing if you allow it to be. Their propaganda need not reach your true heart. Say what they wish to hear and you will soon be home; or, short of that, at least returned to the house you share with your family. Home - well, I do not know that you and I will find our way back, in this life, to the heart's home we furnished with sighs and kisses and sweet caresses.
The sun has risen now. It burns off the fog that rose from the river overnight. I think it will be hot today.
I do love you; never doubt it. From the day you walked into my class, so earnest and so lovely, I have loved you. It is not just that you were quicker and brighter than the rest, though your ability to see to the heart of a dense story or poem did catch my notice. It was the way you moved through life, serene and somehow oblivious to the waves of admiration that trailed in your wake. Your focus was inward, on qualities of the spirit, not on the shallow preoccupations of your peers. You are not like them. I could see it immediately. And I convinced myself that your old soul could somehow justify what the world would see - has inevitably come to see - as an unforgivable breach of trust.
In the weeks to come I must master the obscure and archaic system of rubber stamps and endless redundant documents that clog the wheels of this backward nation's banking system. Funds have already begun trickling here from stateside accounts I was only vaguely aware of. There is enough to make a life here in this unlikely place.
You will receive an envelope. Not at the camp, and not soon. And it will not arrive in the mail at your house. You may find it in your backpack after a dental appointment, or tucked into the pages of your English book in your locker. There are still among those close to you people whose secrets I keep, people I may call upon to discharge old debts by delivering an envelope.
You will find in the envelope a ticket. It is, assuredly, of the one-way variety. Pack your bags carefully, if you decide to use it, because there will be no returning for the favorite socks you left behind.
There is, across the river from here, a small house that interests me. The windows are large and the floors are glowing wood and a central stone fireplace promises warmth through this region's long winters. The grounds call out to me: a row of tomatoes here, a grape arbor, peppers and eggplant, perhaps some sunflowers.
The house is occupied by a feisty tomcat whose affections will not be easily won. I have hopes of convincing him to share his home.
We can put in a garden and learn the damnable local language and make a life here. If funds run low I can teach English. Young people are desperate to learn the language of commerce, of the Internet, in this backwater. Learning English is, for them, a step toward escaping the limited horizons of their ravaged homeland.
Funny. Language was always my escape, too. But it seems books ensnared us in the end.
The sun has risen fully. In a while I will walk to the bakery. I will point and pantomime and somehow make it clear which of the offerings I desire for my breakfast. The old women will laugh as I fumble with the declensions and modes of their bastard language. Yesterday, as I left, one of them added a word to her goodbye. I looked it up later. I think she called me "neighbor."
Watch for the envelope, sweet girl. And think hard about what you will do when it arrives.
Gwen
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