Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Tommy,
Your mom mentioned at church that we shouldn’t call you that anymore.
“He’s a soldier now,” she said. “You should be more serious.”
So naturally, I call you Tommy as often as possible—just never in front of her.
You left in August, and somehow it’s still August inside me.
School started last month, the leaves are turning, the grocery store already has Halloween decorations in the windows . . . and yet everything feels like the wrong month. Like time decided to pause on the day you boarded that bus.
You wrote that the days blur together over there.
They do here too, but for different reasons.
Every day feels like waiting. Doing what they expect of me at school, at home, pretending the world hasn’t tilted.
I nod through conversations that don’t matter, and underneath it all is this quiet hum of when the mail truck will come?
I stand at the window every afternoon. Our road is so dull the neighbors could use it as a sedative, but I watch it like it’s the most important stretch of pavement on earth.
This week, Mrs. Patrick gave me an extra orange. She said I looked “pale with too many thoughts.”
I told her it was school and the long bus ride.
She gave me a look like she knew I wasn’t telling the truth, but was too kind to make me say more.
I can’t talk about you with most people.
Dad would lose his mind if he knew I was writing to a boy he didn’t approve of—much less one who left for the war.
Mom would say I’m too young and “too dramatic.” The girls at school only talk about the fair or whose brother has a car.
They don’t know what it’s like to freeze in front of the radio when they read names.
But my sisters know.
I told them everything.
We sit on the roof sometimes after everyone’s asleep. I tell them what you write. Not all of it—don’t worry—but enough. I tell them how you miss the hill behind our house. How the food is awful, and how the air clings to you. How you pretend the stars look the same there.
You asked for boring things.
So here they are: The washing machine broke again.
Mom made meatloaf and burned the edges.
I got a B+ on my history paper.
Mr. Keene said my handwriting is “expressive,” which I’m sure is his polite way of saying he can’t read a word of it.
The kids at church keep asking when I’m going to sing solo again. I told them the last time was an accident. They didn’t believe me.
Sometimes when I sing, I pretend you’re here in the last row, arms crossed, trying to look unimpressed, though I always knew better.
I imagine you leaning against the wall outside afterward, waiting with that look on your face—like being in that small patch of sunlight near the door was enough if I was walking toward you.
That’s what I hold onto when the days stretch and the nights won’t end.
But there are other moments too—the ones I don’t tell people about. Nights when the radio goes quiet and I realize I’m gripping the hem of my shirt so hard my fingers ache.
Mornings when I wake up and forget, just for a second, that you’re not a short walk away.
Afternoons when someone laughs down the hall at school and it sounds almost like you and me, we have to step into the stairwell to breathe again.
I keep replaying the last night on the hill.
The way you kissed me like you were memorizing the shape of something you were afraid to lose. The way you said you’d come back before the ink on your draft papers dried.
I know you were trying to make me laugh.
I laughed anyway, even though my throat felt strange.
Some nights I lie awake and trace the promises we made into the air beside me—every word you whispered, every plan we stitched together like two kids pretending we already knew what the world would hand us.
I don’t know if this is what love is supposed to feel like.
I only know that it’s yours.
Come back to me.
I’m not finished loving you either.
Always,
Lina