Dearest Tiffany,
I was deeply moved that you wrote your letter to me, and I was able to make arrangements to write back. I regret that I will not be able to tell you about where I am now. It seems that there are certain rules about how much we can say, and it is very hard to explain things. It seems to me it would be better for you to ask you to trust that it is a good place. The fact that you would write to me is a good sign that you are already on the way there.
I feel that, if this correspondence is to continue, it would be best if you did not say too much about Pat, especially the details of your physical relationship. Again, rules. That said, I am very happy for you, and for him, and especially for your coming little one. Believe me when I say you will all make each other very happy, more than I could have.
The most important thing I want you to know is that when we come over here, we do not forget, or stop caring. The only thing we lose is the things that stop people from seeing things clearly over there. There is no more anger or hate over here. We can still be sad, but it's only a good kind of sadness. When you blame yourself for what you did or didn't do on that day, that is the bad kind of sadness, and I wish nothing more than to see you free of it. The good sadness is how you feel when you wish something had happened differently, but at the same time you know it really couldn't have and wouldn't have made a difference. That is what we have over here, and that is how I feel about the day I died.
What happened that day wasn't about what happened that morning. It was about what had been happening for weeks, and months, and years. You wouldn't have said what you did if we hadn't already had problems, and I wouldn't have did what I did if you hadn't said a lot that I already knew. I was sorry even then for leaving without saying something, but I could see even then that the only good thing to do was go to work and give you time to think, the way I always did when we had trouble. If I had had any better ideas, then maybe we would not have had the problems we did. Then again, maybe you would have gotten sick of me and walked out by our first anniversary. Even over here, you can never be sure what could have been.
I am sorry that the memory of my friends keeping you out of my room has caused you pain. Please do not hold it against them. If you had seen me then, you would not have seen the man you married. I couldn't talk, I could hardly move, I could hardly think, but when Jonny said, "Tiffy's coming!" I did enough for everyone to know what to do. After that morning, I could not let my pain add to yours.
Since I'm bending the rules as it is, I can't promise I can keep writing to you. Please wait to write again until you are sure it will help you. If I am able to write back, wait to read it.
With more love than you can know,
Tommy
PS. I always knew you hated it when we called you "Tiffy". Please don't start trying to fool me now.
Tiffany thrust the letter in Pat's face. "You wrote this, didn't you?" she accused.
"No I didn't," Pat said, averting his eyes. "It's typed."
"What did you do, talk to Tommy's old buddies at the station?" Tiffany continued. Pat responded by closing his eyes and humming. "Don't play dumb with me, I know how you write letters, and by the way, you su-" She took one more look at the letter. "You didn't write this. There's no way you could write this."
"I wouldn't know," Pat said as he walked away. "I haven't read it."
An after note: This chapter reflects a lot of my personal philosophy and approach to writing and characters. I have always especially been attracted to the idea that people, for better or worse, don't really change with their situations, but only show themselves by how they react, which is certainly a very different outlook from Pat's. If this seems a bit darker, the rest of the story (which I have finished and plan to "lock down" at this point) pushes things a lot further. I also have to admit, for all my griping about whether the SLP movie takes mental illness seriously enough, that I enjoyed writing it that way. I suppose there are a lot of things that I don't mind being open or even laughing about because it feels close enough to me.