Hidden gifts

I have very few things that Charley wrote to me over the years. He wasn't a writer, didn't write mushy things in cards or letters, and we didn't email each other much once we got back together when I was 25.

But back in the first phase of our relationship, from 1994 to 1997--before the advent of cell phones and free long-distance phone calls and always-on Internet connections--we actually wrote letters and cards to each other a lot. We'd dated for 3 1/2 years, from the spring of our junior year of high school until the fall of our junior year in college, and we attended the same college; by sometime during our freshman year of college, we planned to get married after we graduated. But for two summers during college we lived in different cities, and we wrote letters to each other constantly. (Embarrassingly, I found the stack of the letters I wrote him, from the summer after our freshman year of college, in a box of his things after he died. Good gawd, it was mortifying to read my words as an almost nineteen-year-old twit. Yeeeesh….[Shudder.] I'm still embarrassed by them, and I haven't looked at them except the one time I found them four or five years ago.)

So once upon a time, there would have been a number of things that Charley wrote and that I could have held onto after he died. (That they weren't terribly interesting--probably largely boring, factual rehashings of things he'd been doing--and had little emotional weight would have been irrelevant to me as a brand-new widow. They still would have been something.)

But we broke up several months into our junior year of college. I'd been miserable at my new college (I'd transferred that fall to a college 45 minutes away from the one Charley and I had attended, for a specific degree program that our college didn't offer), and I hadn't been happy in our relationship for four or five months, if not almost a year longer. I tried breaking it off in September when school started, but I was so miserable and unhappy that I ran back to him every weekend. By Thanksgiving, though, I couldn't do it to myself anymore, and I broke it off for good. But then the jerk, Mr. Charles Himself, had the audacity to turn around and start dating his best female friend--a girl I'd had some issues and concerns about for quite a while--two weeks after we broke up. Sure, sure, I was the one who always wanted to break up, who'd wanted to end our relationship (while he would have been perfectly happy dating me all along), but it felt like a huge betrayal that he could start dating someone--much less her--so quickly. "But I can't be alone," I remember him lamenting to me the last time I saw him at his apartment around Thanksgiving in 1997. I never would have imagined that "can't be alone" would have translated to her quite so quickly.

And I was seriously pissed at him--and seriously hurt, too…a hurt and anger that only grew and deepened as time went on. So on New Year's Eve, a month or so after we broke up and two or three weeks after he'd started dating Her, I thought it was particularly fitting to torch all the letters he'd written me over the years, all the cards, all the notes we wrote each other in high school (including the ones right when we started dating and professed our mutual crushes on each other), all the poetry I'd written and given him (I didn't let anyone read what I wrote in those days, so that I'd allowed him was a High Honor…and one I was symbolically rescinding annihilating). It was highly satisfying.

And I never regretted burning them, even after he died. They were relics of a former relationship, one that rightfully ended and that had little bearing on the relationship we formed as older, wiser adults.

But still…there's almost nothing substantive that Charley ever wrote to me. Yet a few minutes ago, I found an unexpected gem.

I was hunting for a CD with files from essays and papers I'd written in college, because I wanted to find the Word file for a specific piece I wrote in an Autobiographical Writing class I took for fun (long before I was an English writing major) my sophomore year. And I didn't find the essay I was looking for, but I found something else: an email thread between Charley and I my last year in college, about two years after we broke up.

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Oct. 28, 1999

Hi there, just wanted to drop you a quick line before I went to bed. We are kind of settled into our new place. There hasn't been much unpacking, just the vitals so far. We are just so tired after work that we don't want to face the inevitable. Hopefully, we will get most out of boxes this weekend, although I wouldnt' hold my breath.

Please don't take this the wrong way, I am not trying to hit on you or

anything, but I really miss you. I know that the feeling is not mutual,

since your life is so hectic and you are around so many people, but I never get to see anyone anymore so I have lots of time to think about the people that I don't see anymore. And you are always on the top of my list. I would love to just sit next to you and talk to you all night long, bore you to sleep. I have been feeling terrible since a shitty day at work, so I will just pass these thoughts off to that. Am I allowed to do that? :)

Now for the pertinent information, my new phone number and address:

1234 Xxxx Yyyyy Zzzzz Blvd SW

North Bend, WA 98045

425-xxx-xxxx

Isn't that just about the longest address? Oh well, the place is worth it.

Didn't you say something about needing a microwave? I bought a brand new one when we moved to Fed. Way and now we don't need it. I would be happy to let you use it for the school year. And it's a way to allow me to see you. I want you to come up here to see the place. Are you doing anything next weekend (Nov. 6-7)? If not, come on up and see us. You can have a relaxing weekend of laying around and maybe getting some homework done. We can be your mountain retreat!

Again, don't take this the wrong way, I love you. And I miss you. I will

talk to you soon!

Charles

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When he wrote me the email, he was still dating the friend he'd started dating right after we broke up. They'd been dating for almost two years at that point, had been living together for over a year, and had just moved into a new apartment. I didn't have much contact with Charley by then for many reasons, although some of it was because his girlfriend didn't like us being friends. 

And I wrote him back after his email in 1998, but I'm not going to embarrass myself by posting it here. ;o) I printed it out and I'll tuck it in a journal or something for Anna to read someday, if she so chooses, but I'm going to happily leave it private and unpublished on my blog. =)

But finding his email was particularly well-timed today. For various reasons, I'd been reminded over the last few days about several things from late in high school or early in college (which was why I wanted to find an electronic copy of my essay from that time period). I was hearing words in my head, echoes of demons, that I hadn't heard in ten or fifteen years, and I didn't much like finding them alive and present again.

And his email isn't exactly the answer to the voices I was trying to quell, but it's so sweet to hear his words to me again, after all these years. No, he's not exactly reaching out from the grave to tell me exactly what I want or need to hear right now…but his email is a sweet whisper all the same.

I love you, and I miss you too, Charley.