A/N: This one's a little short, as is the next, so I'm going to post them both today. Thanks, as always, for reading. Happy Tuesday! xo
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March 19, 2013 – Word Prompt: Discipline. Plot Generator—Idea Completion: A picture is worth a thousand words.
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It takes all of the self-discipline I possess not to call her as soon as I know for sure my letter has been delivered. When my phone rings nine days after I mail it, I'm elbow-deep in a box of dusty books, and the thought that it might be Bella doesn't occur to me until I see her name on the glowing screen.
"Hi," I say, wiping my hands on my jeans.
"I got your letter." No hello, and a tiny coil of fear curls its way around my heart.
You pushed, it says, tightening around the suddenly-pounding organ. You pushed when you promised you wouldn't, and it's going to cost you.
"Oh." A coward's response. How fitting.
"Edward…" She trails off, and I wonder what goodbye will sound like when she says it aloud. I lean against the wall for support, my shoulder blades pressing into the cold plaster, waiting. Finally, I hear a soft sigh. "Thank you. It was…a good letter."
Good letter. Not goodbye. Not yet.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I…" She trails off, and I force myself to straighten. To stand like a man instead of slumping like a boy.
"What?"
"I like that we're…being honest with each other."
"Me too."
"It's almost like…"
"Like when we were friends."
Another audible breath. "Yeah. Like when we were friends."
"Yeah." When she doesn't deposit any more words into the silence between us, I offer some of my own. "Hey, Bella?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you think maybe…that's what happened? Where it went wrong?"
"What?"
"Loving each other. Maybe…it broke because we stopped being honest."
Silence for a while, but I can hear her breathing, and it doesn't fill me with anxious dread the way it once did. If anything, I'm coming to find her wordless company almost as comforting as her words. "Maybe." I lapse into a silence of my own, and finally she speaks again. "Or maybe we just…grew differently."
I flash back to my father's words. "Maybe."
"Maybe that was what was supposed to happen. If you hadn't gone to Chicago, you might not have been an All-American, and if I hadn't come to California, I might never have published anything."
"I'd have traded All-American for the chance to never have hurt you." She has no answer for that. She doesn't reciprocate, say she'd trade her success for never having lost me, and I'm surprised to realize I don't want her to.
Finally: "Alice sent me a picture of the wedding. It looked…nice."
"It was. Was it the one with the sunset?"
"Yeah."
It's the same photo I have on my shelf, but I remember the second one my mother sent with it: three perfectly-matched pairs, plus one. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but that one only painted one: alone. It was in panoramic Technicolor, but it was a solitary, single word all the same.
. . .
I'm a freshman again, low man on the totem pole in a strange city 2,000 miles from home, and the distance is a relief as well as its own sweet ache. I don't see Bella's ghost in the passenger seat of my car, standing beside my locker door, sitting next to me on the sofa. But I also don't see Bella, and the absence of her makes my mind run amok with wondering. Is she dating anyone? Is she still hurting? Does she still hate me? Is she applying to colleges? Has she written anything new? Does she miss me the way I miss her: with a sharp ache that never seems to dull, the kind of ever-present sadness that wakes me in the middle of the night with the same sense of foreboding as a 3 a.m. phone call?
My roommate is another baseball recruit, and I return to our room more times than I care to count the first semester to see an athletic sock dangling from the door handle. When he asks why I never hook up despite the presence of a few girls who have made their interest rather apparent, I don't know how to explain my borderline visceral aversion to casual sex. Instead, I shrug and make something up about wanting to focus on school and baseball. I'm the freshman monk with the playboy roommate, and I find myself spending more nights in the library study lounge than anywhere else.
And despite a lifetime of memories of Bella, the one that I can't stop seeing when I close my eyes is of her, illuminated by headlights, posture hunched as tears slick silver over her cheeks.
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