Drawer Full of Words

He started showing up in my dreams nearly a year ago. It was small at first: he’d be the guy standing next to me in the elevator, waiting in front of me in line at the airport. He never actually figured into the story. And then suddenly, he did.

I don’t know what prompted me to dredge him up from the past. We dated in high school, years ago. He told me he loved me at a time when I knew I didn’t deserve to be loved. I never loved him back.

Then I was gone, and seven years passed. I was back in that town for one reason or another, looking at the foreignness that used to be home. And I saw him. Across the street, a few dozen feet away, sitting at a table outside with people I didn’t recognize. I ducked my head down and went inside the first store I saw, watching him safely through the window. Maybe I had loved him. Or at least loved the stillness in his eyes.

His face drifted up to the foreground of my dreams. He was the one I was going to see, the one who walked with me down darkened streets, the one I was laughing with when disaster struck. No longer just a fixture, he was the light.

I started to wonder: what had I done?

His memory lived in a place to which my mind was resistant to return. The life that held him was a life I denied ever living, even to those closest to me. I skimmed over the details when I talked about those years, giving only the truths people would want to believe. I couldn’t revise my story now. So I saw a shrink.

“I live a double life,” I said flatly when he asked why I had come to see him.

“Is that right?” he said, smirking slightly at what he thought was going to come next.

“I’m not a housewife screwing her pool boy, and I’m not some freak with forty-seven different personalities. Once upon a time, I was someone else entirely. And then I became this, by choice. Now that other person, that other life, is haunting me.”

He leaned closer, squinting just slightly and tilting his head to the side. “Go on.”

“I like my life, and I want to keep it as is. But suddenly my mind is flashing back to a time that I made a conscious decision to leave behind. There is someone from that life who has forced his way back into my head, and I want to know why so I can force him back out.”

“If this is a legal issue -- a stalking issue -- I have to recommend that you talk to the police.”

“He’s in my head, Doctor, not my bedroom closet.” He looked serious, searching to follow. “There is someone from that time, someone I haven’t thought about in years. And suddenly, he’s all over my mind. Little things spark memories of him. He’s in my dreams. I think I see him in places where I know he can’t possibly be.”

He leaned back into his chair, nodding. “Tell me the whole story.”

He took notes sporadically, pausing to jot down a word, a phrase. Raising his eyebrows, he would ask quick questions: “Where did you go the next morning?” or “Did you ever tell him?” I was painfully honest. Sighing when it was done, I let out the last of what I had been holding in. The timer began to ding, signalling the end of our hour. “You,” he said, hitting the stop button on the alarm and then looking straight at me, “are an extremely fucked up individual.” I gathered myself and stumbled out the door.

He left me for a week, maybe two, and then came back more intensely than before. At work one day, I went on the Internet and entered his name into a search engine, but only found a handful of references to a minor league baseball player who shared his name. I wanted to follow the signs, but wasn’t sure I’d received any. Walking into my apartment that night, I threw my junk mail into the trash, dropping a single yellow flier on the floor beside the garbage can. “Find anyone or anything!” it said in bold black print, “Online 411!” Minutes later, I had his address and phone number.

I drafted countless versions of the same letter, telling him the things I’d hidden from him, asking if the things I remembered were true. “Is that really what happened?” I wrote in each one. “Is this how you remember it?” No matter how many words I used, I never said it all. I just kept trying.

Frustrated, I mailed them all. Put every one of them in a box, with a note on the front. “The truth lies somewhere between all of these.”

The dreams grew foggy as I waited for a response. I would wake in the night, unsure of what I had just seen, but knowing it was important, something I had left out of the letters, something else that had to be said. In the morning I remembered nothing. And then one day it came. A postcard of the fountain that held a meaning only he would know. There was no return address, only a message written in small block print: “You can’t run forever. Eventually we all run out of breath.”

The next day my letters were returned unopened. “No longer at this address,” they said. “No forwarding address known.”