8. Zachary #2
I sit on the floor and I read.
Good luck with your meeting today. You’re going to be brilliant, because you always are. -J
Saw this bookmark and thought of you. The blue matches your eyes when you’re thinking hard about something.
Happy Tuesday. That’s it. That’s the whole note. Just happy Tuesday.
The forecast says snow. Drive like you have someone waiting for you. You do.
You looked tired last night. Whatever it is, you don’t have to carry it alone. (You’ll carry it alone anyway. But the offer stands. It always stands.)
The offer stood for six years.
I never once picked it up.
The notes blur as my eyes fill with something I don’t have the right to feel.
And then - because my brain is apparently determined to torture me - I remember.
Years ago. The cottage in Maine, back when we still went there together.
Juliette in the kitchen at midnight, wearing one of my shirts and nothing else, making tea because she couldn’t sleep.
The way she turned when she heard me on the stairs and smiled like I was exactly what she’d been hoping for.
Come here, she said, and I did, and she tasted like chamomile and honey and everything I’d ever wanted.
I pressed her against the counter because I couldn’t not touch her, and she laughed into my mouth, and she said we should go upstairs and I said we should stay right here and she said someone’s feeling bold and I said-
I said something. I don’t remember what. Something that made her laugh again, that made her pull me closer, that made her whisper then stop talking and prove it.
The memory hits me like a punch. Not just the wanting - though fuck, the wanting is still there, still immediate, still capable of making my hands shake - but the ease of it. The way we used to be. The version of us that existed before I let my silence convince her I didn’t care.
I loved her.
I love her. Present tense. Active verb. The kind of love that makes you want to drive to Maine at 4 AM with a box of old notes and a prayer.
I should have told her.
I should have told her every day. I should have tattooed it on my forehead or hired a skywriter or learned to make coffee foam stars so I could leave her messages the way she left them for me.
Instead I kept a drawer.
I pull out my phone. Her voicemail is still full - I’ve left too many messages, apparently, which is a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself think - but I can still text.
I kept everything.
I wait. The message delivers. The typing bubble doesn’t appear.
Every note. Every bookmark. Every photograph of the coffee cup stars. I kept all of it.
Nothing.
I should have told you. I should have told you I was keeping them, that they mattered, that reading them was the best part of my day. I should have said something, anything, instead of filing your love in a drawer and closing it.
Still nothing.
I’m an idiot. You probably already knew that. But I’m an idiot who loves you, and I have six years of evidence I need to show you, and I’m driving to Maine in the morning whether you want me there or not.
The typing bubble appears. Disappears. Appears again.
Then, finally: Don’t.
One word. Six letters. The end of everything.
I stare at my phone for a long time. Then I put it down, and I pick up another note, and I keep reading.
The sun comes up somewhere between I love the way you laugh at your own jokes and Thank you for being mine.
I don’t sleep. I don’t call anyone else. I just sit on the closet floor with the drawer in my lap, learning what it feels like to be loved by Juliette Holland.
At six, my phone lights up. Marcy.
Did you sleep?
Adjacent to it.
You have the Thayer board call at nine.
I look at the drawer. At six years of paper. At the wallet note sitting on top where I put it, the oldest artifact in the collection, soft at the folds as cloth.
Cancel it, I type.
The pause is long enough that I picture her at her kitchen table, coffee stopped halfway. Then:
Canceling everything. About time.
Now we’re both honest.
I look at her bookmark one more time.
Then I start packing the box.
Packing them is worse than reading them.
My hands keep stopping on nothing - a note about tea, a bookmark she cut by hand - and my body keeps finishing thoughts my brain won’t allow.
Her mouth. The counter. The sound she makes when she stops arguing mid-sentence.
Six years of not letting myself look at my own wife, and now that she’s gone the looking won’t stop.
Great timing. Really. Impeccable.
I pack faster.
The wallet note goes in last, on top, where it rode all those years - This one’s better if you read the last chapter first. I read it once more before it goes in.
Then the photographs. There’s a series I took of the coffee cups, anniversary stars across six years, foam constellations she never knew I recorded - one per year, taken on my phone at the kitchen counter before I drank them, because some part of me was archiving a marriage the rest of me couldn’t discuss.
Six stars. Six springs of evidence that a man knew exactly what he had.
I tape the box shut, and I write her name on it, and I don’t know yet whether I’m sending it or serving it, but either way it’s going where the truth goes: to Maine.