Love Letters

Love Letters (Part 40)

‘Oh.’ I said pathetically.

‘Yeah, and what hurts the most is that she’s so happy about her engagement with this new guy. It’s like we were never together, she didn’t even break up with me first. I heard about her engagement on the grapevine.’ He gave small laugh. ‘Is this weird? I mean, we barely know each other. Am I talking too much?’

I shook my head, ‘sometimes it’s better to tell a stranger your truths. They’re less likely to judge.’

‘So what’re your truths?’ He asked politely.

I ignored his question, because I already knew what his answer would be. He would tell me to tell Tyler how I felt, and I knew I should’ve said it too but I wasn’t ready.

‘So are you going to fight for your love?’  I asked, challenging him.

‘Fight for what love? She’s clearly happier now, what do I fight against, her new found happiness? If she’d stayed with me, I’d have fought till the death, as cheesy as that sounds, but when there’s no ‘us against the world’ there’s no fight left in me.’

‘That’s… defeatist.’ I smiled, willing him to reconsider.

‘I’m no optimist to hope for anything better. So what’s your story? He doesn’t know you’re alive, he loves someone else, or is he already a part of your past?’

‘None of the above.’

‘So you just haven’t told him you love him?’

I tried not to let him know he was right but sometimes silences are louder than words.

‘So I’m right. You haven’t told him you love him yet.’ He tapped his chin with the tip of his fingers and I noted a chunky silver ring on one finger. I liked rings on guys, it was just my thing. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but I won’t say it. You know what you’ve got to do, don’t let your story end up like mine.’

He gave a quick wave and turned the corner, disappearing into a group of tourists before I could say goodbye.

That’s when I knew that Sam was a friend worth keeping.

A few days on I wrote to Tyler and he’d replied telling me to declare my love, I refused so he refused to reply to me. It had been almost two weeks since I’d heard from him, so I wrote to him again.

Dear Tyler,

Tyler, please. You don’t understand. My friends are having a rough patch with their own relationships, I can’t even think about my own at such a time. Let things die down first, and then I’ll do it. I will, I honestly will. Please, just write back.

I’ll wait for forever,

Jem.

But he didn’t reply, not a week later, not two weeks later and three weeks later I was fed up of waiting.

Dear Tyler,

Stop being so stubborn.

Jem.

He replied.

I tore the envelope open like a savage animal and promised to savour every word he wrote. But I was baffled by what I found, an empty sheet of paper. Except it wasn’t entirely empty, in the top left hand corner of the page was a small full stop, ‘.’ And that was all that was written on the sheet of paper, no matter how many times I flipped the page over, that’s all I found.

A full stop wasn’t something you could savour really. But he wasn’t the only one who was fed up, I was too. I was fed up of him pushing me to do something I wasn’t ready to do, and forcing me to say something I wasn’t sure I felt, so I ignored him right back.