Notes: Out/In belongs to Remy Zero.
_____________________
I�ll wait
I�m fine here, I could wait
I�ll wait til you get here
Just be the star
I�ve always known you were�
They were there, in a carved wooden box by his desk at home, and every so often he would take them out and look at them. Not read them, for the words were irrelevant now, their meanings washed away by years of change and separation. But he would look at them, study the evolution of the gently sloping loops and swirls of years ago into the harsh and pointed scratches that had marked the passage of years, the loss of youth.
In a way, he missed those years.
He hadn�t meant to write the first letter. Her address had sat there on his desk, tucked under the base of his dim lamp, and he had looked at it every so often, tracing the letters idly with his finger as he talked on the phone, but he had never seriously considered using it. They had been exchanged sometime during that night, in a flash of desperation, a last grasp towards holding onto whatever it was that had passed between them. But he knew even that morning, watching her sail out of his life in the back of a cab into the dull Manhattan sunrise, that he would not write to her. She had left a phone number too, of the apartment she was staying at in New York, an apartment that belonged to a friend, or a cousin, or someone else equally irrelevant, but he knew that he would never call.
There was nothing left to say.
A month passed, and then two, and she was back in California. His eyes and mind strayed often to that scrap of paper that still fluttered in the early spring breeze on his desk, but by then it was too late. Too many days and weeks had passed, and she had forgotten him, he told himself. It was time to begin forgetting her.
And then one day he sat down at his desk and he began to write. It didn�t begin as a letter, not at first. In the beginning it was just writing, the mindless act of committing thoughts to paper, but soon the thoughts turned to her, and the writing shifted, and it was as effortless as talking to her, as simple and as utterly right as sitting in a darkened room whispering to each other in insignificant words and phrases. When he finished, he signed his name to the end, and added hers to the beginning, and didn�t reread it before he stuffed it into an envelope and dropped it into the mail slot.
There was a moment of panic as it fluttered from his fingers, but he pushed it away and went on with his life. A week passed, and another, and no reply arrived. He turned his thoughts to other things and tried to ignore the dull sting of rejection that began to gnaw at him as spring drifted irretrievably into summer. Her address was banished to a dark corner of his desk, and the memory of her was shoved unceremoniously to a similar corner of his mind.
Neither were discarded.
It was nearly three months later when the reply arrived, and he should have been surprised when he saw the familiar loops of her handwriting spelling out his name, but somehow he wasn�t. The words were as innocuous and useless as his had been, but he smiled as he read it, hearing her voice reading the words aloud as she committed them to paper. She wrote exactly as she talked, and it made him chuckle to imagine the expression on her face as she vented her frustration with her life onto the page, and by extension to him, all these many miles away.
He wrote back at once, feeling the need to keep the dialogue going, and her reply came much quicker this time, full of the sparkling wit he was beginning to expect from her. It struck him then, for the first time, the startling contrast between them, and the irony of their correspondence, and he immediately sat down to commit his amusement to paper. He could sense the laughter in her reply, when it arrived, and he had to chuckle at her admittedly accurate characterization of him.
�Most people have an inner child that�s just dying to get out. You,� she had informed him with a familiarity that he found oddly natural, �have an inner grumpy old man.� His answer to her had not been a letter at all, but a character sketch of her as a nosy old maiden aunt.
They gradually drifted into a comfortable routine, and for nearly two years, not a week passed without a letter to her or from her. Their lives went on without each other on separate coasts, as they studied and worked and fell in and out of love with transient individuals that seemed to cross their paths at alarming frequency, but she remained the only true constant in his life.
He didn�t notice the moment when she became an inevitability to him. Somewhere along the way, though, his mindset had shifted and she had stopped being a hypothetical, a maybe someday. Seeing her again became a matter of when, not if, and he discovered that for the first time in his life he was willing to wait patiently, as long as it took.
Then one day she changed.
It was probably not that abrupt, but to him, the difference occurred in the space of one letter. The pages that had just last week been filled with the promise of a brilliant future were suddenly overshadowed by discontent and restlessness. Change was the word that leapt from the lines of writing, and the need for it crept into every subsequent letter she wrote him.
Suddenly one morning, it was not a letter that arrived at his doorstep, but her.
Her cheeks were coldbitten and raw, and she was coated all over in a fine dusting of snow, but he was still struck by her beauty. It had faded in his mind as the years passed, but here she was in front of him, and it was undeniable. He reached for her bag, and led her in without a word, fighting the urge to fling a thousand questions in her direction at once. Her eyes darted around the tiny apartment, resting briefly on the tattered couch, the boxy old tv, the bare expressionless walls...anywhere but on him. He took her coat, and then retreated to the kitchen to pour her some coffee from the pot he had been heating for himself.
She was perched on the arm of the couch when he returned, looking inexplicably small, and she met his eyes for the first time as he handed her the steaming mug. �I had to leave,� she told him, and he opened his mouth to tell her that she didn�t have to explain herself to him, she never had to. But she wanted to talk, needed to, so he remained quiet and let her.
It wasn�t long before she was curled up at one end of the couch, her voice fading and her eyelids drooping as the weariness of her journey set in. She paused, and he took her empty mug into the kitchen to fill the silence. When he returned, she was fast asleep, head on the armrest, legs folded up impossibly beneath her. He pulled the blanket off the back of his armchair and draped it around her, reaching out a finger to brush back a lock of hair that had fallen over her eyes.
He retreated to the chair and settled into it, content for now to watch her sleep.
Part Three: It's Already Been Too Long