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Moving out was supposed to be a painless process. Baran’s (now-ex) husband was off for the weekend, seeing family with their son, so she had the time and space to actually collect her things from his house and bring them to her storage unit. She expected it to be fairly easy. After all, things had never fully clicked with her ex; even with him fathering their son, she knew she never truly loved him.
For the most part, it was easy. She combed through their shared spaces, pulling out her books, photos, things she’d had before meeting him, things she’d bought for herself during their rocky relationship. She put them in boxes that would sit alone in the dark until she had a new place pinned down, somewhere closer to her new hospital job in Pittsburgh.
At the moment, she was poking through her and her ex’s record collection and sorting her albums out from his. Most of the sleeves were dusty. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d even listened to a record. Before she’d had her son, that was for sure.
One of them caught her eye, buried near the back. She hadn’t bought this one, but it was a gift.
From you.
You’d said it was your favorite album from your favorite band, and when Baran had mentioned that she had a record player, you brought it over. She’d enjoyed the music so much that you had insisted she keep the record. You apparently had the exact same album on CD and cassette, so Baran finally relented and let you leave without it. It had somehow stayed with her when she moved in with her husband.
A unique feeling of grief and nostalgia gripped her heart as she slid the album out from the rest. In the motions she took to shake the dust off, something slipped out from the sleeve and landed on the ground. It was an age-worn piece of paper.
She stared at it on the ground. She knew exactly what it was, and she knew that if she picked it up and read it, her own handwriting would be staring back at her. With trembling hands, she bent down to grab it off of the floor. But she hesitated in opening it.
Maybe she was feeling somewhat masochistic, but she turned to the unused record player by the TV stand. She gingerly took the record out of its sleeve and the protective plastic and set it to play. The moment the first few piano notes started playing, she could feel tears forming in the corners of her eyes.
Baran set the sleeve down on the coffee table and the note on top, then moved to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine, merlot. She leaned against the kitchen counter with both hands propping herself up and stared into the glass at the dark red liquid within. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on her breathing.
How many pieces of you had you left with her without her realizing? There were the physical ones, yes. The record, a necklace she couldn’t bear to put around her neck anymore, one of her Lululemon jackets was a gift from you.
But there were the other pieces, too. The ones she couldn’t hold. For example, she never drank merlot before she met you. She had made fun of you for pronouncing the word ‘caramel’ a certain way, only to end up saying it exactly the way you did. You wrote your ‘E’s like a backwards 3 and somehow that had wormed its way into her handwriting. Things she didn’t notice until you were gone.
She forced herself to grab the wine glass and headed back to the couch. She took a deep drink from the wine and then sat it down on a coaster. As the first song on the album ended and the second one kicked on, she grabbed the piece of paper and opened it up.
It was a letter, unsent, addressed to you. Written a long time ago. Baran had placed it in that record sleeve and intended to give it all back to you. Look how that had worked out.
I think a lot about what you mean to me. I have planned my life out meticulously from the moment my brain matured enough to start planning for the future. I always wanted to be a doctor, so in elementary school I had already selected the school of medicine I intended to attend and studied meticulously ever since to make it there.
I did not plan to meet you. But as many philosophers and poets point out, it is the unexpected that makes life worth living. You pulled me from routine, you showed me who I could be outside of studying, outside of work. It was like spending my life in the rain and you parted the clouds.
It may be embarrassing to admit, but I fear you’ve turned me into a poet…
All that to say, you’ve become an incontrovertible part of my life. When I think about my plans, I want to include you. I look forward to your texts, to your calls. Drinking used to be a solution to a problem, but with you, it was a way to see the deeper parts of each other. You have carved out a spot in my life, sized just for you. I don’t ever want to let it go.
You’ve called me brave, and strong, and not afraid to speak my mind, which is not true. Because I’ve struggled for a long time to tell you how I feel. How I really feel. Hence this letter, because I can set it all down in ink and then let it sit and pass it on when I’m ready.
I imagine us dancing in the living room to a slow song. I imagine late nights where you don’t sleep on my couch and you come to my room and I get to hold you close. Whenever we sit and watch a movie on one of our couches, I imagine holding your hand and leaning against you. I imagine us hosting dinner parties, or going to a bar to actually listen to the live music only to end up getting intimate in the bathrooms. I’ve been stalking the lineups for the local concert halls so that when your favorite band headlines, I can buy us tickets.
You’ve unlocked a part of me that I hadn’t known was there. It took me a while to identify it, but I know that it can only be love. In its rawest, truest form, I care about you so much that it hurts sometimes. I’m terrified that you’ll leave me, travel on your path without me, that we go our separate ways never to cross again. It’s almost certainly going to happen if I don’t give you this letter.
I want to frame this as an admission of my feelings only. If you don’t feel the same, I understand. You can ignore the letter, tear it up, burn it, whatever you need to do. (An old stain from a teardrop had landed right there, years ago. Another new one joined it.) Please don’t worry about breaking my heart. I am very, very aware of the position I’m putting you in by writing this letter. That’s part of why I’ve been so hesitant in telling you. But I have to, or it will tear me apart.
There’s nothing more I want than to tell you I love you, and to hear you say it back.
Baran.
When she finished reading it, she crumpled the letter and dropped her head down to meet her hands. More tears flooded the paper. The music wrapped around her chest and squeezed, tight. Your favorite song from that album had just started playing and somehow that made it that much worse.
There were so many things you had wanted to do. You had wanted a kitten. You wanted to attend a dance class and a cooking class and a pottery class and Baran had wanted to do all that with you and now she couldn’t, not without thinking of you. Even years later, she wanted you to meet her son. To show you the life she’d built in Pennsylvania.
How funny, because that’s where you said you were from. And Baran hadn’t even planned it. She had moved to Pennsylvania because of her husband. Another piece of you that haunted her. It was such a big state, running into you was almost an impossibility. That was even if you had moved back home. How fucked up was it that when you left, Baran never even knew where you were going. Not really.
Another thing you had wanted to do was travel the world. Instead of giving you your record back with the outpouring of her soul, Baran had hugged you goodbye because you had left so abruptly she didn’t have time to process until you were gone and it was too late.
It would have been easier if Baran had known how you felt about her. If you would say that you loved her back or if you would throw the letter away. The uncertainty, the what-ifs, tore her apart day after day even when she didn’t even think about it. Maybe that was why her and her husband were destined for divorce. He could never fit into the space you’d carved into Baran’s life, because it was made for you, only you.
The album came to a soft end by the time the tears ended. The silence felt empty. Baran’s heart felt hollow after the intense outpouring of emotions in the living room that she had never really lived in.
What she wouldn’t give to hear you walk in. Sit next to her. Hug her.
Tell her you loved her.
The letter was ruined. Ripped and tear-soaked. But she folded it up and put it back in the album sleeve. Following that was the record, which she placed in a box along with the other records and sealed it up. She layered other albums on top so that when she pulled them out, she wouldn’t see yours and start crying again. Or worse, feel tempted to listen to it again and then start crying again.
She finished the wine and went on packing with an air of melancholy that hadn’t been there before.
Life went on, as it always did. She packed up the parts of her that were once yours to share and brought them with her as she lived.
That was love, in its rawest, truest form. Wasn't it?