[A/N: Second in a series of vignettes]

Swarthmore. Fall 2005.

Chicks made no sense. Strike that, women made no sense. Seth had learned from experience that his female classmates did not take kindly to being called "chicks." Damn liberal-artsy Easterners. But then, that was the point, wasn't it? Explore new places, meet new people, learn new ways to piss off girls? Whoops, another dangerous word. Best to move on quickly, back on track, back to the topic, which was... what again? Oh, yeah – chicks not making sense. Seth had expected the East Coast crowd to better appreciate his quirky-emo-geeksexy charms than the kids back home, but apparently dorky was dorky no matter the time zones. Which he still didn't get, by the way. Sure, he got the whole Earth spinning, different parts illuminated at different times, today in New York is tomorrow in Tokyo, scientific crap – I mean, he did get into Swarthmore, and not because Caleb built them a library or anything – but why couldn't Philly and Berkeley watch the Simpsons at the same time? How were he and Ryan supposed to do that brotherly bonding thing? Sure, he could TiVo the Eastern Standard Time, and then wait for the Pacific Standard Time to call Ryan and watch together, but you could never trust Ryan to be free these days, what with all this "studying" he claimed was involved in going to college. So technically it wasn't really the time zones holding up the bonding thing, but... Again with the off-topic. Focus. Chicks. Lack of sense. Making him crazy. Right. So Monday, he'd met this cute girl in the laundry room. Maybe it was the detergent fumes, but he was pretty sure Laurie was falling fast for the funny. Google-stalking revealed she'd won some painting competitions in high school, so he thought he'd impress her by inviting her to an exhibition at the campus museum. Seth Cohen: Sensitive Art Lover. So smooth. And yet so single – what was with that? One of the artist's abstract collages hung in his parents' living room, and he'd regaled Laurie with tales of how the random shapes seemed to become eyes under certain lighting, and whenever he and Summer would make out on the couch she'd become convinced they were being watched, which was really a very Summer thing to think, because Summer always expected everyone to pay attention to her, but not in that self-centered kind of way, just, you know, she liked to feel appreciated, which is totally normal when you consider how little attention she got from her parents –

Ah. Shit. Yeah, that was probably why Laurie wandered away "to get a drink" and never came back. Another thing Seth had learned about girls – sorry, women – is that they didn't like hearing stories about your girlfriend. Again with the slippage – EX-girlfriend. Very much ex. This-is-for-our-own-good ex. Seventeen-year-olds-shouldn't-pretend-they-can-make-forever-commitments ex. Go-off-and-be-your-own-person ex. That all made sense intellectually, but it turns out it's not actually that simple to forget about the girl you loved from afar for a decade and from blissful nearness for over a year. Go figure. This had to stop, though. If the whole point was to free themselves to grow up, thinking about Summer every hour of the day was probably counterproductive.

Glancing around the room to make sure his roommate Keith wasn't around, Seth pulled a battered Vans box from under his bed. Only Seth would have kept the box from his first-ever pair of Vans, and only Seth would now consider it an appropriately sacred Summer Box. It contained the only reminders he'd allowed himself to bring East – a few pictures, some ticket stubs, an amusingly raunchy note passed in English class, and that damned pen. "I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen," Seth mumbled to himself, channeling Lloyd Dobbler. Summer loved that movie. A week before he left for college, Summer had turned up at Seth's door, the first time he'd seen her since the awful night of the breakup, and handed him a pen. Not even some fancy gold-nibbed fountain pen, or even a nice smooth trackball, just one of those old-skool four-color Bic pens. The ones that totally fascinated him all through grade school, when he'd take them apart and switch the inks around to confuse people and then turn the barrels into spitball-shooters so accurate he'd once hit Luke square in the nose after watching him taunt Summer for bringing her My Little Ponies to school – okay, so maybe it wasn't a totally random present. Maybe he was supposed to appreciate that she remembered, or appreciate that she saw him as her Lloyd, or whatever, but it was still just a dumb pen. And now, of course, it was irrevocably Summer's Pen. Only to be used for writing about Summer or to Summer. He did a lot of that, actually, it's just that none of the letters made it out of the room. The Vans box contained at least a dozen of them, neatly tucked into dated envelopes and sealed, never to be read, secret outpourings of Seth's struggle to move on.

Seth reached for a clean sheet of paper and began to write. He hardly ever wrote longhand anymore, but somehow it just felt right on this occasion.

Summer,

I can't do this anymore. I pretend I've moved on, I pretend I'm all cool and over you and ready for whatever life throws at me next, but the truth is, I'm waiting. Waiting for this breakup to be over, waiting for the distance to disappear, waiting to be all grown up so I can say things like "Marry me" and not sound like a fool. I can't wait, though. If I wait, that says I assume we're meant to be, and if I just assume that, how can I possibly let myself live and grow up and actually find out what or who is meant for me? I have to let you go. I knew that from the start, I just didn't understand what it really meant. It's not just saying we're breaking up, saying we're going to date other people, saying we won't see each other for years... it's actually letting go of all the hopes and dreams and plans. It means accepting that you might fall in love, really in love, forever in love, with someone else. It means accepting that we might one day look at each other and feel nothing at all.

I can't do any of that if every time I hit a bump in the Get Over Summer road I pull out this box and allow myself to wallow in the memories and pour my heart out to you in these stupid letters. It's so fake. I'm not writing to you, I'm writing to this image of  you in my head and sometimes I wonder how much of that image is just my own invention. Even if it isn't invention, it's still based on the old Summer, the one I knew in high school. Who knows who you are now, who you'll be in a year, five years, ten years? And that's the whole point – to find out who we become without knowing who the other is becoming.

So, I'm saying goodbye. Really goodbye. I loved you, probably more than I ever managed to express, but now it's time to close that book and put it away instead of obsessively re-reading it, wondering when the sequel will come out. No more waiting.

Seth

Seth folded up the letter, sealed it, and dated it. October 28th, 2005. For good measure, he tucked Captain Oats into the box along with the letter and the pen, then shoved the box far under his bed. Enough of this pathetic whiny writing – he was starting to sound like one of those fanfics Marissa wrote, with long sappy monologues from Dawson about Joey being his sooooouuuuulmaaaaaaaaaate, blah blah boringcakes. Not that Seth saw himself as a Dawson, of course. He was totally a Pacey, because chicks dig the sexy way more than the whiny, and this adorkable loser was about to take Swarthmore by storm. Just as soon as he stopped referencing stupid teen soap operas, of course, because ewww, that was so Summer, and Seth was so over her. Officially.