A Feeling That Feels Like Love.

An excerpt from The Long Way Home.

Dear ******,

It was your birthday yesterday. I was wondering how it went? I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while, actually. Your birthday seemed like a good excuse, though it’s one I haven’t used. None of my excuses to write to you ever feel good enough, and so I never use them.

Maybe when we turn twenty-four.

I remember buying you a cake on your birthday last year, though I can’t remember which cake you picked out from the grocery store. I just remember watching you eat it as we sat under a tree, our toes stuck into a river, watching boats full of tourists drift by in afternoon silence.

Love is such a strange and fickle thing. It’s hard to know if you really feel it. Sometimes it seems like feeling an emotion isn’t enough to know you feel it. Last summer, though, I certainly felt something for you.

Life moves so quickly, ******. It scares me pretty bad. I wonder how fast this year’s gone by for you? I can’t believe it’s already been twelve months since the last time I saw you. It blinked itself away. Maybe it would’ve passed slower if I had reached out sooner.

Do you want me to write to you? All those long nights of watching your eyes reflect Summer’s stars, and I still don’t know what was happening behind them. Do you know that we never asked for each others’ last names? There were so many things I never asked you. It’s as if the braver I act, the more afraid I become. I so wanted you to believe I was brave, and now I’ll never know your name. I don’t even know if you want me to write to you.

There’s even more I didn’t tell you. I never told you that you were the first girl in two years. I never told you that you were the first friend I had made two thousand miles away from home. That you were the only person willing to give me conversation in the last four months. I never told you how much I loved your old-fashioned dresses, your slow, even voice, and the paintings you poured so much love into. I never told you why I was in Seattle. I never told you that I wanted to stay.

You didn’t know I had nowhere to stay. That in the five months I lived in Seattle, I hadn’t slept in a bed once. You didn’t know that I was slowly bankrupting myself on our dates, that the reason we spent each day laying at the parks scattered throughout your hometown was that I had nowhere else to take you. You didn’t know that when I bought you that birthday cake, I had to buy it on credit. You never noticed how I always parked my car so far away, so that you would never see that it was the only thing I had. You never knew that all those times we watched each others’ eyes after the sunset, that I was fighting with shyness to tell you the truth. And you didn’t know that when I told you I was leaving, that I hoped you would ask me to stay.

******, that sweet, painful word, the girl who was never mine. You never knew that the day I ended things with you, that everything ended for me.

Four weeks. That was all the time I got with you. What a cruel, cruel world. Everything it gives, it takes away.

You are the prettiest girl I have ever kissed, and the sweetest soul I have ever held. I hope you are well. And I hope that if I ever choose to write to you, that you won’t begrudge my selfishness.

To a feeling that feels like love,
- Charlie Jean.