It has not been a great few days for Zoe. On the 4th, Kevin’s grandfather passed away, and his aunt unceremoniously kicked him out, disowned him, and refused to help with the funeral because the house and the majority of the inheritance had gone to Kevin and not to her. This afternoon, Lissa revealed to Zoe that she doesn’t want to be present when her mother dies, and Thom made it clear he wanted to continue their awful, awkward, anger-inducing conversation. And the last Zoe heard from Alex, he was cutting a letter short to go on a date with someone she can’t stand, and promising to tell her all about it.
No, it has not been a great few days.
With everything going on, the monumental and the should-be-inconsequential, Zoe’s feeling stretched pretty tight, like the smallest bit of unexpected pressure could snap her in two. She’s trying desperately to stave off that feeling, because it’s not going to be productive for anyone, but honestly, starting her letter to Alex is the only thing that got her through yesterday.
Not that she had much to say to Alex. She feels like she has less and less to say every time she sits down, between his letters getting shorter and her feelings still constantly trying to work themselves onto the page.
It was the latter that prompted her to bring up the former, and she’s still kicking herself over that. She’d crossed it out, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to start a new page or really make the comments illegible, because that dumb, awful, stupid, lovesick part of her wanted him to read it, because that part of her is a pathetic ninny.
Alex said there would be more from him, so she stops by Cuppa Joe’s on her way home from the HCC Thursday night, just to see. She’s hoping to see Andi or Eddie behind the counter, someone who might help cheer her up, but because her luck sucks, it’s Benji taking orders, and his face turns black for half a second when he sees her. Benji has been like that since the beginning of March, actually, very short and snippy with her, like she’s done him a personal wrong. For the life of her, she has no idea what it is, especially since, like, two weeks ago, he was all politeness, enthusiastically so.
God, was he trying to flirt with me or something, and I totally missed it and shut him down rudely without realizing it? With her luck, that’s probably exactly what she did.
Nevertheless, he takes her order with professional cordiality, and when he hands her the drink, he also slides not one but two CDs across the counter to her. “From Alex,” he says, unnecessarily.
Her eyes light up, and she immediately tries to quash it, because if Benji had been trying to ask her out in February, she doesn’t want to make things worse now by showing obvious interest in another guy (she also doesn’t want anything suspicious making it back to Alex — she’s bad enough about that herself).
She gives Benji a heartfelt “Thank you!” and a few dollars in the tip jar. She thinks about trying to make some sort of generic apology, too, but she honestly doesn’t know what she did, so the apology probably wouldn’t be well received.
She heads straight home, briefly acknowledges her parents, and makes a beeline for her computer, pulling out the CDs. Her homework is almost done, everything finished at the HCC but the typing of Mr. Zephran’s essay due tomorrow, so she has time for a letter. Especially given how short they’ve been recently, a voice chimes in her head, but she pushes the thought away with a squirm of guilt.
The CDs aren’t labeled, and she has no idea if she’s supposed to listen to them in a particular order or not. Because they’re not labeled, it probably doesn’t matter, and she figures if she starts one and is monumentally confused, she can pull it out and start with the other, so she picks one at random and loads it into her computer.
“March 6th, late. Okay, Zoe,” Alex says, in a brisk, business-like tone that makes her smile. “I sent Emma home after dinner, so from now until I fall asleep, I am all yours.” She can’t stop the grin that takes over her face, or the blush that accompanies it. She shouldn’t have made a fuss, she really shouldn’t have, but . . .
“I’d say we can do whatever you want, but… you’re not here to make requests, so… I’m kind of making this up as I go, and you don’t have to listen to all of it. I’m sure it’s going to be long. But you were right, I am being a shitty friend, just because I have to do it all in one shot. I need to find more time for you, and so I am going to do that.”
He sounds nervous, somehow, and also self-deprecating, and that eats at her, because that’s her fault. And he’s wrong, he wasn’t being a shitty friend, he was just trying to be a good friend to two people, and she was being too needy and clingy and should never have brought it up.
“It’s about 8 pm right now,” he says then, “and I usually turn the light out at 10, so that means I’m yours for two hours. Think you can manage to listen to two whole hours of me?”
As his words register, tears actually come to her eyes. Two hours? He recorded a two hour letter for her? God, he’s amazing. How many people, how many friends, would respond to her irrational neediness with something like this?
Then her face falls. Two hours. With a sigh, she hits pause. She doesn’t want to, but she does have that Sociology essay to finish. She really ought to shower and actually finish her homework before she listens to this wonderful, amazing, completely undeserved two-hour letter.
Forty minutes later, her work is done, her teeth are brushed, and she’s changed into pajamas. Alex’s CD is in her computer, and she’s curled up with her notebook on the bed so she can take notes as she listens, since her usual method of replying probably isn’t going to work with something this long.
She jots down a couple of things she knows she wants to say while the beginning plays through again, but when she reaches the point she left off before, her pen stills as she lets his words wash over her.
“I guess I’ll just pretend that you’re here, and talk to you that way? You certainly don’t have to respond to all of it, that would take way too long. But, you know, since you feel kind of deprived, I figure this one can last you for a while.”
“So yeah. Um, tonight went pretty well. Sorry. That’s probably not– I just, that’s –” He falters, and she frowns, and her stomach aches a little as she tries to prepare herself for what she knows is about to follow. “We just got back. Emma actually took me out somewhere semi-fancy.”
Yeah, Alex, she thinks, go ahead. Tell me about your date with the girl I feel like you’ve been neglecting me to spend time with. Great move.
She knows that’s not fair, she knows that’s petty and irrational, but she can’t help thinking it. She doesn’t take any notes on this part. She closes her eyes and tries to listen to the cadence of his voice, rather than his individual words, and hopes that this part won’t take up too much of the two hours.
Past-Alex is (thankfully) obliging. He barely touches on the events of the date he doesn’t seem to realize was a date (Boys, she thinks with a tiny roll of her eyes), and reassures her that from here on out, Emma will be sent home after dinner, so Zoe can have his evenings. She hates that she feels a little victorious, hearing that. She does her best to dismiss Emma from her mind as Alex continues to talk.
Five minutes in on his answer to her desert island question, Zoe comes to the conclusion that she needs to entice Alex into rambling more often, because it’s kind of a glorious thing. It’s not that she doesn’t admire his taciturn nature — she’s actually jealous of it sometimes, of his ability to so concisely say what he thinks. She has her own sort of mastery over the English language, but it is much more verbose than his.
But listening to him like this, where he’s purposefully just letting himself talk without any sort of filter . . . it reminds her of the first letter when he really gave up his anonymity. That had felt like such a . . . not a victory, really. But a turning point. Something she had done, even if she hadn’t been entirely sure what, had convinced him to take a step further with her, and this feels, somehow, like the same thing. As had been established, Alex isn’t much of a sharer, and he doesn’t seem to be a big talker, but he set aside two hours to talk to her, because he knew it would make her feel better, and that means something, even if it isn’t exactly what she wants it to mean.
He started out sounding stiff and nervous, but the longer he talks, the more at ease he sounds. She finds herself laughing out loud, shaking her head at the things he says, commenting on them out loud even as she writes comments in her notebook. It feels like he’s here, with her, and that makes it easy.
She loves that he’s comfortable enough to tease her, and she especially loves hearing it out loud. So when he calls her the fictional character he’d most like to be real, she arches one indignant eyebrow at the computer screen, but really, she can’t keep from grinning. When she thinks back to paranoid, skeptical Alex from the beginning of this project . . . Well, she could never have predicted this outcome, but she wouldn’t change it for the world.
When he gets to his constellation story, he starts telling her one of the most beautiful fables she’s ever heard, about a fox who fell in love with a swan who was being hunted for her beauty. Try as he might, the fox couldn’t save her, but he couldn’t bear for her to be lost forever, so he found a way to win her soul a place in the heavens.
“Are you just making this up as you go?” she asks out loud at one point. “Because it’s not like you have a way to make notes, so you must be. God, I hate you.” She sits in quiet astonishment for the rest of the story, blown away by the beauty of his words, marveling at his ability to create a story. More than ever, she wants to read his poetry, the stuff he works on, because if he can do this with prose, off the top of his head . . . She’s actually tearing up by the end of it, which . . . she’s tired of being this emotional all the time, but at least this time, she feels like the story has earned that emotional response, unlike a lot of the other things in her life right now.
He challenges her at the end of it to write a story of her own, involving a bird, a pocket watch, and a ceiling fan, which, “Geez, Alex,” she mutters with a smile. “Could you set me up for failure any more surely after that beautiful display of storytelling?” But she jots down the required elements and puts off thinking about that until it’s actually time to write.
At the hour mark, he puts in her CD, so she pauses the recording to grab her iPod and pull up her playlists. Skimming down to the Zs, she finds the one she wants quickly — Zoe’s Mindset February 2017 (with minor adjustments for Alex) — and starts it so she can listen along.
She smiles practically as a reflex as the opening bars to “Here Comes the Sun” play. She loves this song. It always cheers her up, and hearing it now, imagining Alex hearing it as the introduction to the music she loves, she’s reassured that yes, this was the perfect opening song.
She takes her playlists very seriously, but this one had been especially hard to put together. She’d told him there wasn’t a theme, and there wasn’t, really, but there kind of was. This was an introduction to her. She’d pulled the songs off her Most Listened To playlist for the past month or so, hoping that whatever she’d listened to in the first half of February would offset the incredibly depressing self-pity music she’d listened to in the last half. She’d made a few adjustments, removing the worst of the pining songs and limiting herself to two Sara Bareilles and two Beatles songs, and trying to cover a wide range of genres and time periods. Listening to it now, she is happy with the playlist as a whole. It’s solid.
(Though she cringes a little when “If I Could Tell Her” starts to play — how the hell had that made it past her pining filter? Awesome musical or not, that really should have been replaced with some Marie Digby or Rachel Platten? She cringes, too, through “Out On the Town.” The beat and melody might be good, but those lyrics are . . . not.)
It’s the highlight of the night so far when “Cabinet Battle #1” starts to play and he raps along with Jefferson. “I love Hamilton,” he says over the dialogue break between the two verses. “I’m really excited this is on here.”
“Good,” she says out loud with a laugh. “Because we might not be able to be friends otherwise.”
She flushes with pleasure when he says, “This is awesome, Zoe. It’s almost like you’re here listening with me, you know?” And she laughs out loud at, “If it weren’t late, I would be having a dance party around the room right now, completely embarrassing myself. You’ll have to imagine that, cause it’s still kind of hard to get up and down.”
Somehow, though she tries very hard, she can’t quite manage the picture. Even alone, in the privacy of his bedroom, Alex doesn’t seem like a wild and crazy dancer. But maybe that’s just another one of those things hiding beneath the surface.
At one point, he says, “You’re a real oldies fan, aren’t you?” which makes her sit up straight.
“What?” she asks Alex on the recording. “Okay, there are, like, four oldies songs on there, if you count “Rainbow Connection,” which I don’t, because the Muppets are not constrained by era.”
She writes down her snark as he continues, “Beatles, sure, respect, chica, but Neil Diamond?”
“Beatles are classic rock, sir,” she corrects him with an affected air of pretension. “Not oldies. Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Bill Withers.” She counts them off on her fingers. “Three. Now, I will concede that they are all pretty close together on the playlist, so it seems like there are more than there are, but that is the only concession I will make.” In her head, he responds with more snark.
His CD goes silent for a bit when the music is done, and she glances at the clock on her bedside table. It’s been almost two hours, so he’s probably more or less finished. But then he laughs, clearly in response to something going through his own head.
“Okay,” he says, the grin clear in his voice. “So, my school almost got evacuated today. Chris Rodriguez, who has the worst impulse control of anyone I’ve ever met, turned on the gas line at a lab table in Chem and was this close to lighting a striker in front of it. I have never seen anyone move so fast in my life as my Chem teacher. I swear she vaulted a lab table.”
He continues telling her about his day and his classes, and she doesn’t know how much longer this is going to last, so she stops worrying about notes and just lays back and closes her eyes and listens to him, letting the sound of his voice wrap around her.
The next thing she knows, she’s jerking awake, dazed and disoriented as Joe in her doorway says, slightly concerned, “Zoe, do you have a boy in your bedroom?”
She can understand the question, because there is a boy’s voice filling her room, but she’s almost positive there isn’t a boy in here.
Then the boy’s voice says chica, and she remembers. Alex’s letter. The two-hour CD that she’s gonna guess ended up being longer than two hours. Fumbling for her laptop, she hits the pause button.
“Sorry,” she says, groggy. “That was Alex.”
“Penpal Alex?” Joe asks.
“Yeah. That was his last letter. He broke his wrist, so he records them on a CD. I fell asleep in the middle of it.” She shakes her head to try and clear away the fog.
“Well, yeah, Zo,” Joe says. “That’s what happens when you start things at two in the morning.”
“What? It’s what time?” Zoe stares at Joe, then focuses on the time display on her clock. 2:11.
“Two,” Joe repeats with something like amusement. “I’m just getting home from my shift.” Zoe looks to the iTunes timebar that she somehow didn’t pay attention to before. The “listened to” side reads 5:16:16. The “time left” side says 38:29. “Maybe look at a clock next time, my girl,” Joe says, teasing.
“I looked at a clock this time,” she informs him. “My clock said 9:05 when I started.” Joe blinks while Zoe tries to get her sleep-fogged brain to do math.
“Your penpal recorded you a five hour letter?” he asks. Zoe can’t hide the smile that grows on her face at that.
“Yeah,” she says, more to herself than to him. Then, realizing how much of a sap she must look like, she shakes her head. “Um, it’s a long story,” she tells him.
“Yeah, at least five hours long,” Joe says with a wink that makes Zoe blush, even though it shouldn’t. “Well, kick your penpal out from under your bed, turn out the light, and get some sleep, okay? You have school in the morning.”
She smiles. “Yeah. Goodnight, Joe.”
“Night, hon.”
But when he closes the door, she doesn’t go back to sleep. She turns down the volume on her computer, curls up on her side, and presses play again. She feels like she has an obligation to hear him through to the end.
He’s in the middle of a story she didn’t hear the beginning of, but she hardly cares. It’s enough to just hear his voice, and God, she’s pathetic. But right now, she hardly cares about that, either.
He finishes his story, and there’s another long silence, and she almost drops off again, and then he says, very softly, his voice a little rough and hoarse, “Oh. I, uh, I found that poem you were talking about a while ago. The Shel Silverstein one. ‘I’m writing this poem from inside a lion’? Except it’s ‘these lines,’ actually. ‘I’m writing these lines from inside a lion and it’s rather dark in here. So please excuse the handwriting, which may not be too clear. But this afternoon by the lion’s cage, I’m afraid I got too near. Now I’m writing these poems from inside a lion, and it’s rather dark in here.’”
She’s pretty sure she could listen to him recite poetry all day and all night. His voice goes a little different, somehow, like the words are worth more, so they have to be carefully handed out. Even a silly little kid’s poem, he treats with a kind of . . . reverence, almost. She wonders if he recites his own poems in the same voice. She hopes so.
“That was never one of his that I really hung onto, you know?” he says then. “So I did have to look it up. My favorites I still know all by heart. Like . . . like the dreamer poem. ‘If you are a dreamer, come in.’ Oh! And the ‘listen to the mustn’ts’ one. ‘Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never-haves, then listen close to me. Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.’ I always loved those. Dios, I’d forgotten I knew so many of these.”
He trails off, and there’s a long pause. “Of course,” he finally says, “I’m making it sound like I was some philosophical, old-soul little kid, with these examples. I also really liked ‘There’s a polar bear in our Frigidare. He likes it ‘cause it’s cold in there,’ so . . .” He laughs a little. “But that’s why I like Shel Silverstein, you know? Because he writes both, he writes the silly stuff, and the big-idea stuff, and he writes both of them for kids, and I think that’s important.”
Another long pause. “My mom used to read poems to me, before bed, actually. That’s how I learned most of these. But . . . but my favorite . . . it’s a Spanish poem, and I like it better in Spanish, it’s by Pablo Neruda . . . te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras, secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma . . . that’s from the beginning, but the end is the best. Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde, te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo: así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera, sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres, tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía, tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.”
Zoe closes her eyes as he recites the Spanish. He’s never done this for her before, and it feels incredibly intimate, somehow, even without knowing what the words mean. She fights against that for a minute, since she knows, she knows she has no right to give into that, but then she thinks, screw it. It’s 3am, and she’s alone in her room, and she can give into it if she wants. So she does.
“It’s, uh . . . it’s a love poem — I mean, it’s Neruda, so of course it is, but . . . Don’t ask me why Mom was reading Spanish love poetry to a five-year-old, but, uh . . . well actually, she always said it didn’t have to be romantic love. And even without . . . even with no one to . . . attach it to . . . it’s a beautiful idea. Something to strive for, I guess.”
Another long pause, then, “Dios, I wish I could write like Neruda. ‘Así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera —‘I love you because I know no other way than this.’ Such a great line. Even translated, that’s a great line.”
A single tear leaks out of the corner of her eye and drips down her nose. She wishes he was saying that to her for real, and not just reciting a line he wished he had written.
The line resonates in a central, core part of her. I love you because I know no other way than this. Clearly, she needs to seek out some Pablo Neruda.
He goes back to the silly poems then, Shel Silverstein and Ogden Nash, and then he falls silent again for a long, long time, the longest yet. When the words finally come, it’s like he’s coming out of a fog or a trance, coming back to himself, to awareness.
“Zoe?” he asks, like he isn’t sure she’s still there. “Dios Zoe, it’s almost 2 am. That’s… madre de dios, six hours.” He sounds stunned, like he didn’t know he had that in him. “You’re probably not still even listening to this. I barely even made sense for most of it, I don’t know why you would be.”
Because I will never, never have enough of you, she thinks helplessly but doesn’t say out loud.
“But… I had fun. It was kind of nice pretending you were here. I almost… I wish…” Her heart pounds in her throat each time he trails off, hoping against hope that he might fill in the end of that sentence with the words she wants most to hear from him. But when he finishes his thought, it’s to say, “I hope you’re okay with it,” and she tries not to be disappointed, since there’s no reason to believe he’d have said anything else.
And then, “I’d kind of like to do it again…”
And finally, finally, the CD whirs to a stop, and it’s over. A few more tears have made their way onto Zoe’s pillow, but she smiles at the last line. “I hope you do,” she whispers.