“Why does your last sentence sound like you think this is goodbye?”
It pushes her over the edge, that line. In a letter full of lines and words just lying in wait to squeeze the tears out of her, that’s the one that actually manages it. He just, he sounds so hesitant and small and fearful, and he’s joked about her leaving before, but this is him actually saying it, actually asking, actually thinking she might, and hearing that from him is worse than when he called himself a jackass in the letter before.
She learned after the first one of these recordings to take them somewhere private to listen to them, because she’d listened to the first one in the middle of Cuppa Joe’s, which had been a mistake. Now she waits until she gets home, until she can close herself in her room and curl up on her bed and cry into her pillow with no one the wiser.
He talks about Emma so much, and it’s like a knife in her heart every time, but it’s even worse when he says things that she could swear sound like he’s — like he could —
But then he brings it back to Emma every time, and she beats herself up for being so naive and pathetic as to actually think —
Why does your last sentence sound like you think this is goodbye?
Maybe because there’s some part of her, buried deep inside her brain — the selfish, reptilian part that cares the most about her well being and survival and non-brokenness — that knows it probably should be?
The minute that thought even becomes half formed, the very instant it floats into even a semblance of being, she reacts violently against it. She cringes so hard it’s practically a spasm, and she wants nothing more than to recoil away from the most horrifying thought that’s ever touched her, but she can’t, because the thought is hers. It’s a part of her. Which makes it all the more horrifying. Say goodbye to Alex? She’d rather die.
It’s the violence of her reaction that clues her into the fact that this is probably not just a crush anymore. Actually, she’s pretty sure this hasn’t been a crush for ages, but since she was only just able to recognize her feelings for what they are a week and a half ago, she can’t be sure.
She starts the CD over and listens to it again, then again and again and again, each time winding her tighter and tighter, until there’s no other recourse, she has to do something, and the fifth time she hears him ask, in a voice so small and desperate that she can’t bear it, Why does your last sentence sound like you think this is goodbye?, she is at her desk, pen to paper, before she can even remember getting there.
The words bloom onto the page, she can hardly move her hand fast enough to keep up, but she’s not thinking about legibility. All she cares about are the words pouring out of her, words she desperately wishes she was brave enough and selfish enough to let him see.
Alex,
Do you honestly think I could ever say goodbye to you? Do you honestly think I could do that and be left standing? That the act of saying goodbye to you wouldn’t rob me of so much that I would crumble to dust? You are everything to me, and I am not a girl who says things like that.
Do you know why I don’t want to meet in person? Why I’m so freaking scared to meet in person? Because I know that the minute I see you, all of this is going to be all over my face, no hiding it, and while you’ve missed a lot in my last couple of letters, there’s no way you’ll miss that. I won’t be able to hide it, and you’ll see it, and you’ll know, and I will ruin everything.
I can’t stand there and listen to you tell me that you’re sorry, but your heart belongs to Emma, Alex. I can’t do it. I can’t stomach the pity in your eyes, and I can’t watch what we have fall to pieces.
But it’s falling to pieces anyway, isn’t it? I’m tearing it down with me. You’re too perceptive. You haven’t figured out what’s wrong, but you know that something is, and you just keep pushing, and I am inches away from telling you everything, because in my attempt to hide this, to put distance between it and us, I’ve somehow given you the impression that I’m about to walk away. Like I could ever do that. Like the thought isn’t utterly anathema to my very soul.
I learned that word from Mom, anathema. It means abhorrent, but it’s more than that, it’s something that is so counter to what you believe, so opposite to what you are, that the very idea is the height of unimaginable. It’s something so foreign, so alien, that the very act of thinking it feels wrong.
Leaving you, saying goodbye to you, is anathema to me. Do you understand? I couldn’t do it. I know it’s pathetic, being so hopelessly in love with you, but that’s
When she realizes exactly what she’s written, her pen jumps of the paper, jerking away, leaving a long blot across the words. Her breath is tight in her chest but she is so tired of crying over this.
It’s never felt like this before. Granted, her experience in the world of romance isn’t exactly the deepest or broadest, but she’s had these kinds of feelings before, she’s dated guys before, she’s felt passion and desire and wanting before. She dated Dylan for six months, and every moment of that relationship had been solid, from the day it started to the day it ended.
But this is different. This consumes her.
This is bad.
Swiftly, she picks up the paper and crumples into a ball, throwing the traitorous words as far from her as she can manage.
God, she might have sent that! What is wrong with her?
She has to do something. She has to, because this can’t continue. She needs to focus, she needs to think.
She gets up and retrieves the crumpled ball of paper from the floor by her closet. Taking deep breaths, she smooths it as best she can, then takes her scissors and cuts the page into long, even strips. She breathes as deeply and calmly as she can, and while she thinks, she folds the strips nimbly into origami stars.
You are supposed to make a wish while you fold these, is the idle thought that surfaces. That’s what Aine had told her two years.
How do I get my wish to come true? Zoe had asked.
When you fold a thousand stars, you get your wish.
I thought that was cranes.
Which of us is native to Japan and the ancient art of paper folding, and which of us cannot even get a paper star to pop out without crushing it?
Remembering the conversation brings a smile to her face. She misses Aine. Aine’s solution to this problem would have been simple: fold a thousand stars (or a thousand cranes or a thousand jumping frogs — it didn’t seem to matter) and wish for him. In the two plus years since Aine had taught her to fold stars, Zoe had made well over a thousand, but she’d never gotten clarification from her friend on whether or not your thousand-star wish had to be the same as the wish you’d made inside each star.
But Aine hadn’t taught her to fold these stars for the sake of making wishes. She’d taught Zoe to give her hands something to do besides tear her nails and cuticles to shreds over the situation with Gavin. And it had worked, and even after that unpleasantness was firmly in the past, Zoe had kept folding stars.
Now she does it whenever her hands are idle and she has access to some paper. Her room is overflowing with them. Dozens (her best ones, folded out of scrapbook paper, not the ones folded out of scraps from her notebook) are threaded together and hung from her ceiling; hundreds more are collected in clear jars or decorative boxes or just strewn across the top of her dresser.
And now these will be added to the collection. She likes the way the crumpled paper makes them look. She should start trying that on purpose, and then there will be even less about these few stars that will make them stand out. That other letter she wrote Alex but would never send is here, too, folded into pieces and scattered about her room, though in that case, it was to hide and lend beauty to ugly thoughts as much as to fold unsettling ones away.
She is calmer by the time she finishes, and she knows what she has to do. She pulls a fresh sheet of paper toward her, new words gathering in her head.
She needs to stop stalling. She writes the date and his name at the top of the page, hesitates just another moment, closes her eyes against new tears, and then starts to write. She forms each sentence carefully in her mind before putting it on the page, because she has to do this carefully. She has to get it right.
The first line of an Emily Dickinson poem is worming through her head: Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.
He knows something’s wrong. He’s figured out that it has to do with heartbreak. He just thinks she’s heartbroken over Kevin. So, why not let him think that? Why not tell him exactly what she’s struggling with, exactly what she’s feeling, leave the who of it vague, and let him fill in the blanks as he will?
There’s a guy, she writes, hating herself with every word. And I like him. A lot.
Every word of the letter she writes him is true. And the whole thing is a lie. And it’s easy. She hates how easy it is to write this letter, to lie to him, to purposefully mislead him. And she hates that her justification is It’s all true, because that just makes it worse. That proves that she knows exactly what she’s doing.
She finishes with an irony that he won’t ever get, an irony that stabs her in the gut, and then the deed is done. Ink from some of the earlier words has stained the side of her hand, and she rubs at the marks absently, some back, detached corner of her mind identifying with Lady Macbeth as she does.
She almost tears this page into strips to fold into stars, too, but she stops herself. This is what she has to give him. He can’t hate her for the lie if he never finds out about it, and if he does, well, then he’ll hate her for more than the lie, so it all works out. Somehow.
She folds the letter and sticks it in an envelope and doesn’t cry, and when she takes it to Cuppa Joe’s, she manages to achieve subdued rather than despondent, so that’s a step in the right direction.
Joanna still notices, though. “Hey, Zoe, are you all right?” she asks as she hands over the raspberry steamer. “You’ve seemed pretty down the last week.” Zoe tries to smile.
“Yeah, I–” She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want to lie, but the truth, as always, is far too massively complicated for a conversation across a coffee counter. “My stepmother is dying,” she says softly. She’s getting awfully good at this, the statements that are technically true and not true at all at the same time.
“I’m so sorry,” Joanna says, and Zoe shrugs.
“I’m just trying to get through it,” she says. Joanna nods.
“Hang in there, okay? Does Alex know?”
Zoe wants to laugh at the absurdity of that question (not that Joanna has any idea how absurd it is, though it strange that Joanna asks her about Alex, but she can’t think about that now), but she’s afraid if she laughs, she’ll start crying, so she just says, “Yeah. Alex knows.”
“Good,” Joanna says with supportive conviction, and Zoe’s not sure why she cares so much, but she’s strangely glad that she does.
“Thanks,” she says, and heads out.
Back home, she lies listlessly on her bed, trying not to think about Alex, trying not to imagine him reading the letter she just left, but it’s a losing battle. Finally, ignoring the mountain of homework waiting on her desk, she turns on her side and hits play on her CD player. She closes her eyes as Alex’s voice fills the room again, torturing herself as she waits for the sucker punch she now knows by heart.
Why does your last sentence sound like you think this is goodbye?