Forgive Me, Stranger

Forgive Me, Stranger

With that final dot at the end, I finished what I had never planned on writing down. A secret that I thought I would never tell him, the man I feel so alone without. Even now, just writing his name across the top of the page sent an ache of loneliness throughout my chest. I missed him already and I have only been away from him for a month. But I would soon be alone completely. If I mailed this letter to him, I knew that he would hate me for the rest of our lives. But I couldn’t lie; I could hold it in. That was why I had finally grown the courage to write this all down. And that was why, as I emotionally grabbed an envelope, I wrote his name as neatly as I could on the letters corner. It needed to reach its destination. I couldn’t take the secret.

     As I licked the foul sticky part and closed it shut, I realized that this was going to be the end of us. With this knowledge in this small envelope, he would finally know the secret that has been eating away at my heart for the last four months. This envelope would unfortunately bear why we were never meant to be. And it was all my fault.

     I grabbed my keys, gripping the letter tighter to my chest as I left my house. I could feel the tears as they trailed a slight line from my eyes to my chin. Getting in my beat up old car, I placed the letter on the passenger’s seat and looked at it once; trying to gain the courage to do what should have been done four months ago. I whipped away a tear mark that I hadn’t realized had fallen on the letter before turning to the road.

     I had to do this.

     He deserved the truth.

     He was too wonderful to lie to like this.

     I felt the deep routed shame that surged momentarily through my system and sat in silence as I let it happen. I deserved to be regretful. I deserved the sharp pain that ran through me when I thought of the memory. But now was not the time to think once more about four months ago. Instead, I was supposed to come clean. I drove to the post office hazardously but was lucky enough to not get into a car crash. When I entered the lot, I parked my car at a desperate angle and flung my door open.

     No regret. I shouldn’t regret to tell him my decision. I looked down at the letter in my hands once more and saw my emotional marks that formed words. Slight ridges of despair from where my pen had gouged its way across the parchment. I trailed my finger lightly over the letters and knew that this as officially the point of no return. I needed to do this, I reminded myself once more.

     For him, the wonderful man that he is.

     In one last motion, I bent my head and kissed his name lightly. Closing my eyes as to not watch the beginning of my life crumble, I opened the latch and tossed the letter in blind. The latch banged closed and my eyes opened to two empty hands. That was it. My life was going to rip apart at the seams from this point forwards. I just made the first move and now I could never return to the blissful ignorance ever again.

     I don’t know how long I stood there looking at my now empty hands but when a voice cleared behind me I jumped, covering my tear filled eyes with my nimble and shaking fingers. I didn’t look at the man that cleared his voice but I could tell it was a man due to the deep timbre of the sound. For as moment, I was stuck in a different place, a small world where He was the one who cleared his voice behind me. He cleared it to tell me to stop talking. He was always doing that. But I couldn’t help it, I tended to ramble when I was happy and he made me completely happy.

     Then why had I done it four months ago?

     The answer was that I had no idea. Naiveté, innocence, confusion? They all seemed plausible. Jealously, hurt, more confusion? But at the end of the day, it does not matter why I did it. For what I did, there would be no reason at all to justify what I had done. By the time I made it back to my beat up car, the clouds had rolled in. The fall in North Carolina was always cloudy in the late afternoon. But, the air was also thick and damp, a sure sign of rain to come. I couldn’t find it in my pain raked body to move though. I knew that I shouldn’t drive while this distracted, especially when it was raining. Slowly, I pushed my head from off of the steering wheel and gripped it tightly, stopping my hands from their tremble.