Stained Glass Souls (Wattys 2014, Collector's Dream Award Winner)

Charliegh: Regrets for Randall

(Charliegh: unedited0

Dear Randall,

I wanted to write a sonnet for you. It was going to be my first sonnet indifferent of first forevers & last hopes & people who wore paper emotions and masquerade masks.

The very first time you met me, you asked me about them. For days afterwards, as I struggled to recall your face – the slick hair, the knobby knees, the unsteady smile – I could always remember your curiosity. My writing fascinated you.

And you want to know something, Randall? I’m glad you enjoyed it. I am sincerely glad that it brought you a small measure of joy, as you tried to peek through the drawn shades of my life through the scribbled musings.

I suppose that everyone who writes had experienced this phenomenon.

Those on the inside, who understand where and why they have placed illusions, shadow them from the world. They are at once beautiful and intensely personal, and sharing these works can be one of the most painstaking experiences of their lives. And those on the inside, those like you, pry too much. They place too much meaning in an abstract sentence, and not enough value in the raw emotion that lingers behind the surface of the words.

I, like the rest, am afraid of spilling my secrets. So no matter how many times you pleaded, bumping my elbows and knees and giving me half-melted smiles, I could not bear to share them with you.

Today, I was going to work up the courage. If I could not share my heart with you, after you had so clearly given me the depths of yours, then I would be a sad, cynical excuse for a human being. I would become exactly what was expected of me, after everything had fallen apart.

So I sat at my window and stared down Main Street. I kept wishing that I would see you walking around the corner, backpack wrapped about your skinny shoulders. Not because I missed you (although I do). Because you are familiar, and maybe when I was lacking words, you could fill the spaces with the uneven constellations of your thoughts.

But I discovered that I cannot bleed ink anymore. I cannot reopen the demons of my past or the imaginings of my future. It doesn’t seem right, someone – I feel that I am betraying you, by exposing your glorious life and death to the world.

Perhaps I am not a true writer. Or perhaps I am merely human; afraid of condemnation, inherently sinful. Weighed down by societal expectations, the very ones you used to lecture me about.

But I did determine that if I could not share my secrets with the world, I could share them with the one boy who can, in some twisted way, understand how everything fell together and apart for us. He doesn’t know much about love. He doesn’t know much about anything except lust, and I bear full witness of that.

But he is, I think, one of the few people I have met that understands pain. Not just the general knowledge of it, but the nuances of it. The underside of losing someone, and subsequently losing yourself.

His name is Nolan Endell. He is the boy who will be joining you within the confines of my mind – probably dour-faced, and still leering. He always scared me, and I suppose that he will be equipped to do so inside of my nightmares.

But I have you to hold the balance. And, Randall, if I do not remember that wonderful, tragic things about you and your place in this life, then I will go insane.

Did you know that it hurts? Losing myself. It is a visceral pain, one that tears my insides to shreds and my emotions to paper cuts. When I am feeling something, it always comes with a sting.  

Yet. That isn’t why I wrote this, Randall. Not to tell you about my insomnia or my twitching hands, or how, when I scream in my sleep, I no longer wake up everyone in the apartment.

This is what I was trying to say, before I started talking about myself: I didn’t love you. And I feel that I owe it to you to admit that. If I can’t be honest with myself, what will happen?

I lost you, though. I might not have loved you, but I lost you in the worst possible way. That settles the score, I guess.

You want to know something weird? I regret not loving you. But I cannot change it. I’m sorry for that. I spent so much time lying, to the one person left who knew what sincere love meant. You held the key to the kind of “first forever” that I will not ever be able to capture upon paper.

That’s why I can’t write you a sonnet. I can’t do you justice. And, as I said, exploiting you would feel too much like exploiting my memories of you.

I’m tucking this away into my jacket pocket. And tomorrow, I will drop it into the grave with Nolan. This time, you will both be at peace. Secrets safe. Wounds concealed.

These are the kind of wounds I don’t want to open. But I can’t forget that I have them, so I’ll bear the battle scars. The world can see those. They can speculate, and wonder, but they will never know the truth.

Because I am a writer. I tuck my bruises between the leaves of the pages, hoping that people will read the pretty words and overlook the broken girl beneath them.

And, as you have helped me realize, I am not a writer. I will carry my scars with me forever. Concealed, but still close to my heart. I am comfortable baring my soul, but only to this one, skinny slip of paper.

This is honesty. This is what I wanted love to look like – all messy and ragged and broken. Because I think that broken hearts are most beautiful when they have a couple knicks in them. There is nothing artificial about a battered, careworn kind of love. And that is the sonnet-worthy form, the kind that someone, someday, should write about.

Maybe it will be me.

I guess you’ll know when it happens. I’ll visit your tombstone and tell you, because the thought of keeping you inside of my head forever scares me. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, I promise that I will not leave you behind. Not completely.

On the days when I can’t breathe, and Redemption is stifling me, I will go to the cemetery. I will sit, cross-legged, between the two lone suicidal occupants. And I’ll talk.

Because, as you taught me, life is too short of a memory to be disregarded.

Goodbye, Randall. I love/lost you, and I’ll fold the paper on the crease of that.

                                                       Forever,

                                                          Charliegh.

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                                                         [The End]