“And you know how I know that? Because a heart is the reason why a girl falls in love with a boy when she’s ten and stays in love with him for years even though she knows he can never be hers. Heart is the reason why a girl cries for that boy every night and yet smiles at a single glimpse of him. Heart is the reason why she writes secret love letters to him and why she sneaks out at night to see the boy she writes them for. Heart is the reason why a girl like me falls in doomed love with a clueless fucking guy like you. So no, your heart is not dead, Arrow. You might be The Blond Arrow but even you don’t have the power to kill it.”
By the time I finish, I feel like an age has passed.
I feel like we’ve lived a thousand years, and in that time, the snow has thickened.
Instead of disappearing, it’s sticking to the ground now. It’s sticking to the leaves, the grass, the earth.
It’s sticking to him.
The flakes are settling on his hair, on his eyelashes. They stay on the collar of his damp shirt. They wet the angle of his jaw, stick like droplets on his cheekbones and lips. I even see a few drops run down from his forehead and get into his eyes.
But instead of blinking, he keeps watching me. He keeps staring at me like he’s… still so riveted. And yet furious at the same time.
The boy I love.
So cold with the snow but so hot with all the things inside of him.
I wish I could do something about it. I wish I could do more for him.
But I can’t, can I?
I can’t save him if he’s unwilling to save himself. I can only love him.
Turns out though, he doesn’t want that either.
So this is it then.
This is all I can do.
With one last look at him, at his tall dark form, I take in a deep breath and turn around.
I take my love and leave like he told me to.
I trudge through the snow. The beautiful, hateful snow.
God, I hate it.
I hate everything about this stunning, gorgeous thing. So much so that somewhere between scaling the fence and getting inside the back door of the dorm building, I’ve started to cry again.
I’m not outright sobbing though.
Not yet.
I don’t know why. Maybe I need another push.
A bigger push. A more forceful push.
A push that will jar me back into reality that what just happened, really happened. I told him that I loved him and he told me to take my love and get lost.
I told him my biggest secret and he rejected me.
A few seconds later I get that, that last push that thaws this chill and numbness that I’m feeling, when I sneak back into my room, all wet and shivering, and stumble on something.
It’s one of my soccer cleats. The ones he bought for me.
I usually stick them under the bed, but somehow I must’ve forgotten to and so now I trip and stumble because of them.
And then, I just can’t stop crying into my pillow as the love bite he gave me throbs painfully on my neck.
I write you letters… I have shoeboxes full of them…
That’s the one thing echoing in my head as I ride back to my motel in the snow and tear through the door. I march over to my nightstand and snap it open.
And there they are.
Not the letters, no. Not the ones that she’s been writing to me for eight years. These are the ones she’s been leaving me these past weeks.
The ones I’m addicted to.
Every day I open my mailbox, that piece of shit junk that gets jammed and I have to shake it open, telling myself that I’m doing it because that’s what’s expected of me.
As a member of the faculty, I need to be apprised of what’s happening at St. Mary’s. The staff meetings, a memo about lunchroom cleanliness and all the bullshit that goes on at a high school.
But when I stick my hand in to collect those documents, the very first one that I open is her orange envelope.
I fold them over and put them in an orange envelope…
That’s what she said, right?
That she puts them in an envelope like these, the ones that I have scattered around the gray carpeted floor as my body crashes on my knees.
As I go to fish them out of those envelopes though, I realize my fingers are wet and snowy. So I wipe them on my pants. I wipe them on the sheets of my bed, dry them before I touch those notes.
Before I read what I’ve already read a thousand times.
A thousand fucking times.
I actually like to read them when she’s here. When she’s sleeping because I tired her out after sex.