Twenty Short Letters No. 9 She was

From "Twenty Short Letters" # 9

She was the girl who caught you off guard wasn't she? Yes, unexpected. The kind of girl you fall in love with and never even know. It was unexplainable, why she loved you. She admired things about you no one had ever admired before. She loved you in ways you had never been loved before. She sparked a flame that had never burned before. But that doesn’t matter because you aren’t going to know her anyway.

She hid away for so long because she knew she wasn’t what you wanted. Yet when you knocked, she answered anyway. She welcomed you in, knowing you were only passing by, a shadow in her night.  She should have toppled your box of half-truths and plentiful maybes and slammed the door in your face but she didn’t. Instead, she held you for as long as you wanted to stay. And when you left, you quietly pulled the door closed behind you and she quietly dug her nails into the other side, clutching to all of nothing you left for her. 

Now she surrenders to the certainty that she will long for you each of her days because convincing herself that she won't is far too exhausting. She will wait forever for the impossible. She knows it's stupid and it breaks her but it's perhaps the noblest thing she'll ever do. She stands on the edge of her days and watches and waits for her feelings for you to wash in like waves, some days gently and other days like a storm, and each time she chooses you over the ocean.   In the spaces between the seconds, she dreams of you.  When the memories grip her in the twenty-fifth hour, on the eighth day, in the fifth season, she closes her eyes still searching for you, unfinished business, unanswered questions, a ghost.

Even now, after all this time, she'll tell you that you were her greatest hello, something she trusted would be forever, but she won't accept that you are the saddest goodbye she never got to say. She just waits for you to knock with an indecisive fist and tell her. Tell her what she meant, tell her about your dreams,  tell her that she's enough or tell her just how all together forgettable she is.