Dear Jaime

Dear Jaime: Hurting

This book is dedicated to every single person who has ever needed a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on. This is for the ones who are on a journey to figuring out how to live life fearlessly, who love to laugh, and who live to love. 

Dear Jaime: Hurting

 "We are all broken, that's how the light gets in." - Ernest Hemingway

Dear Jaime,

 

            I never thought I’d be one of those pathetic weepers who get stood up at the altar, dress and all, on my wedding day. But that’s exactly what happened. He broke his word, and now I’m so hurt. How do I move on?

          Hurting.

            I read the four little sentences over and over again. I felt nauseous. I didn’t know whether the nausea was a result of the four drinks I’d had at the bar across the street before coming in, or whether it was the utter stupidity of the problem that was literally staring me in the face. Either way, I would rather have been puking into a public restroom toilet than doing what I’d promised my baby sister I’d do – her job.

            I exhaled, puffing my cheeks out as the gust of air hit the computer screen in front of me. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. The beginning of a headache brewed in the back of my brain. The fluorescent light flickered above my head.

I was so, so bad at these things.

Take my complete lack of compassion and couple it with the inability to put my feelings into words, and voila – I now found myself an advice columnist, perhaps the one occupation I loathed more than a shrink.

            Dully, I asked myself, for the thousandth time, how I had gotten here. How had I, the smart sister, the always-calm and always-rational Jenna Lakes, found myself in the office chair of the mysterious columnist known to millions of people as Jaime? How had I fallen so low from so high?

Granted, my previous job at a legal firm hadn’t been exactly thrilling, but at least it had been realistic. And it had required an actual degree. And brains. But this? An advice columnist? Me? A terrible, terrible idea. Clearly, I had jumped into this way too quickly. What had I been thinking?

Answer: I hadn’t been thinking. At least, not very clearly. My baby sister had asked me to cover her column months ago, while she was on her honeymoon touring the Caribbean or Bahamas or wherever it was that she and Chuck had flown off to together. And I had said yes, for two reasons. The first, was that it immediately had gotten her to stop talking about Chuck and dolphins and beaches and Chuck.

            The second reason, was that I had been looking for a job without much success, – thanks a bunch, economy – and I’d desperately needed the money. The single faint glimmer of positivity I saw from where I was sitting right now, was that this job paid a ridiculously large amount of money for a relatively small amount of work.

All I had to do was write one response a day for the next three months, until my sister returned from her honeymoon, at which point she would free me and the remnants of my soul by reclaiming her position at the paper as the most widely-read advice columnist in the country.

            No matter how many times it happened, I still was never prepared for the sharpness of the pain I always felt when thinking about my sister on her honeymoon. I brought a rather shaky hand up to my chest, and rubbed at the area where my heart was beating a war-beat beneath my ribcage.