I take the book Atlas bought me and put it in the closet with all my journals. Then I pick up the one that’s filled with memories of him. And I know it’s finally time to read the last entry I wrote. Then I can close the book for good.
Dear Ellen,
Most of the time I’m thankful you don’t know I exist and that I’ve never really mailed you any of these things I write to you.
But sometimes, especially tonight, I wish you did. I just need someone to talk to about everything I’m feeling. It’s been six months since I’ve seen Atlas and I honestly don’t know where he is or how he’s doing. So much has happened since the last letter I wrote to you, when Atlas moved to Boston. I thought it was the last time I’d see him for a while, but it wasn’t.
I saw him again after he left, several weeks later. It was my sixteenth birthday and when he showed up, it became the absolute best day of my life.
And then the absolute worst.
It had been exactly forty-two days since Atlas left for Boston. I counted every day like it would help somehow. I was so depressed, Ellen. I still am. People say that teenagers don’t know how to love like an adult. Part of me believes that, but I’m not an adult and so I have nothing to compare it to. But I do believe it’s probably different. I’m sure there’s more substance in the love between two adults than there is between two teenagers. There’s probably more maturity, more respect, more responsibility. But no matter how different the substance of a love might be at different ages in a person’s life, I know that love still has to weigh the same. You feel that weight on your shoulders and in your stomach and on your heart no matter how old you are. And my feelings for Atlas are very heavy. Every night I cry myself to sleep and I whisper, “Just keep swimming.” But it gets really hard to swim when you feel like you’re anchored in the water.
Now that I think about it, I’ve probably been experiencing the stages of grief in a sense. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was deep in the depression stage the night of my sixteenth birthday. My mother had tried to make the day a good one. She bought me gardening supplies, made my favorite cake, and the two of us went to dinner together. But by the time I had crawled into bed that night, I couldn’t shake the sadness.
I was crying when I heard the tap on my window. At first, I thought it had started raining. But then I heard his voice. I jumped up and ran to the window, my heart in hysterics. He was standing there in the dark, smiling at me. I raised the window and helped him inside and he took me in his arms and held me there for so long while I cried.
He smelled so good. I could tell when I hugged him that he’d put on some much-needed weight in just the six weeks since I’d last seen him. He pulled back and wiped the tears off my cheeks. “Why are you crying, Lily?”
I was embarrassed that I was crying. I cried a lot that month—probably more than any other month of my life. It was probably just the hormones of being a teenage girl, mixed with the stress of how my father treated my mother, and then having to say goodbye to Atlas.
I grabbed a shirt from the floor and dried my eyes, then we sat down on the bed. He pulled me against his chest and leaned against my headboard.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“It’s your birthday,” he said. “And you’re still my favorite person. And I’ve missed you.”
It was probably no later than ten o’clock when he got there, but we talked so much, I remember it was after midnight the next time I looked at the clock. I can’t even remember what all we talked about, but I do remember how I felt. He seemed so happy and there was a light in his eyes that I’d never seen there before. Like he’d finally found his home.
He said he wanted to tell me something and his voice grew serious. He readjusted me so that I was straddling his lap, because he wanted me to look him in the eyes when he told me. I was thinking maybe he was about to tell me he had a girlfriend or that he was leaving even sooner for the military. But what he said next shocked me.
He said the first night he went to that old house, he wasn’t there because he needed a place to stay.
He went there to kill himself.
My hands went up to my mouth because I had no idea things had gotten that bad for him. So bad that he didn’t even want to live anymore.
“I hope you never know what it’s like to feel that lonely, Lily,” he said.
He went on to tell me that the first night he was at that house, he was sitting in the living room floor with a razor blade to his wrist. Right when he was about to use it, my bedroom light went on. “You were standing there like an angel, backlit by the light of heaven,” he said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”
He watched me walk around my bedroom for a while. Watched me lie on the bed and write in my journal. And he put down the razor blade because he said it’d been a month since life had given him any sort of feeling at all, and looking at me gave him a little bit of feeling. Enough to not be numb enough to end things that night.
Then a day or two later is when I took him the food and set it on his back porch. I guess you already know the rest of that story.
“You saved my life, Lily,” he said to me. “And you weren’t even trying.”
He leaned forward and kissed that spot between my shoulder and my neck that he always kisses. I liked that he did it again. I don’t like much about my body, but that spot on my collarbone has become my favorite part of me.
He took my hands in his and told me he was leaving sooner than he planned for the military, but that he couldn’t leave without telling me thank you. He told me he’d be gone for four years and that the last thing he wanted for me was to be a sixteen-year-old girl not living my life because of a boyfriend I never got to see or hear from.