A Letter To No One

(a short story.)

♡♡♡

   The way your memories can change over time has always messed with my head, perhaps more literally than I would like. The past can be twisted by my own thoughts, and I will never be able to tell. All it takes is a few years, and the truth is gone forever.
   The Now is the only thing that is objective, that is real. Now, I sit on the swing on my front porch, with a popsicle in one hand and a glass of lemonade in the other. I woke up with my head aching and my throat burning, so I came out here to do as my mother, not a doctor but twice as qualified to care for me, had instructed. Fresh air for your head, something cold for your throat; that’s what she said. It’s what I think she said.
   It’s almost childlike, if popsicles and lemonade can be equated to childhood. Except I am thirty-five, it’s half past two in the morning, and I have them for the wrong reasons.
   Those things are objective.
   The swing creaks as I push it into motion. The soft rocking sloshes my lemonade. I turn my eyes to the sky. I can see stars where the clouds are not, but the street lamps are brighter. I take a bite of my popsicle. It is cold on my teeth.
   On nights like this, I think about things: life, love, God, the future, as well as the more mundane. Tonight, the stars seem romantic, shimmering and smiling, and my thoughts settle on the topic of love.
   Who matters to me? Who’s name brings a smile to my face and makes my heart flutter? In thirty-five years, it’s been a lot of people. I take another sip of my lemonade.
   As my thoughts dart between all of my former loves in reverse order, I remember names, faces, and emotions. Some of them are happy memories, some are hurt, loss, and disappointment. When I reach the first, I stop, and I am met with an air of mystery as chilly as the night air. I like to dwell on the memory of my first love. I cannot say if it is healthy or not.
   In my half-sleep daze, I can’t remember a name. How much has my brain changed? The past will always be the past, but I can never know how much is true.
   I set the popsicle down --I don’t like popsicles, anyway-- and I take out a pen and notebook. I keep them in my pajama pocket for sleepless nights. Most of the pages are already filled with my thoughts and ideas, written down to be re-read in the morning when my head is clear. I flip to a page with clean, blank lines, and begin my entry.
   “Dear someone,” I write in messy script. I consider leaving the name blank, but what is to say that there even is one? I can’t see you. You are not objective.
   I write, “once upon a time, I loved you.” Like the beginning of a fairy tale.

   “I don’t remember when I met you, but I remember those months where I saw you every day. Countless times re-living them has both burned them into my memory and weathered them away like water on a rock. Our conversations are the outside, the loose soil worn away. The core that remains is the way I fell in love with you every day. It’s the way that, every night, I would stop on my way home to buy you posters for movies I had never seen, but you wore the names of on your shirts. It’s the way your eyes sparkled green --or were they blue?-- when you looked at me.”

   The pages of the notebook are small, and I have already filled one with my letter. The paper rustles as I flip to the next one and begin writing again.

   “The day I finally had the courage to tell you, a little vein of gold in the rock, I gathered the posters in a plastic grocery bag. I can’t remember where I meant to tell you, but when I got there you were nowhere to be found. So I sat and waited, holding the posters in the plastic bag tight to my chest. I sat for hours and watched the clouds move across the sky, but you never came.
   “I asked the people who walked by if they had seen you. They had never seen you or heard your name. The rock wall where I sat pressed red marks into my legs. I kept asking, and I kept waiting.
   “When the sun went down, I trudged back home, my heart broken by the bag of posters I was still holding. I put them away, teary-eyed and frustrated. They’re still in my closet, wrapped in plastic, waiting for the day I see you again. Then I will give them to you and tell you, ‘I loved you once. Did you love me?’”

   I lift my pen to think and take a sip of lemonade. The melting popsicle runs close to my leg, but I pay it no attention. I take a deep breath of the cold night air, then put my pen back down to finish writing.

   “I haven’t seen you since that day. You may be nothing more than a ghost now, or maybe you were a ghost then. All I know is that I was a child with a crushed heart.
   "Since then, I have found love and lost it countless times. Such are the ways of people. Now I share my bed with someone I love every night, and maybe I won’t lose this love. Only time can tell. Someday, time will wear the rock of this memory away to a nugget.
   "Dear no one, were you real, or simply the imagination of a lonely child?
Love, someone.”

   I sign my name at the bottom of the letter and drain the last few drops from my glass. The ache in my throat has subsided enough for me to feel sleepy again, so I go back inside, where the air is stuffier and warmer, but the floor is cool.
   I tuck myself back into my now-cold blankets and roll over to face the person beside me. It is a familiar sight: the way light from the street outside casts shadows over his sleeping face, the curve of his nose, the way his hair falls on his forehead. That I can remember.
   How much of tonight will I remember in the morning? Or will it disappear, too, just like the memories of no one, leaving behind only the love letter and the empty glass on my bedroom floor?
   I suppose I will never know.

♡♡♡ 

Surprisingly, the inspiration for this story was found in Golden Days by Panic! at the Disco. I wrote it in an afternoon.

What do you think of it?