epilogue.

I met him weeks before I knew him. He thought I was tough, and I thought he was boring. We were both mistaken.

There is no where tidy to start when two people come together from different angles. One with a clean slate, and one with a terribly dirtied beginning. It was like pretend from the get-go. We were trying to fit two pieces from different puzzles together. I tended to saw off the stubborn corners, and he let me do it.

We would write each other letters, pretending to be future modern essayists. We created a world around us—afraid that if we played out our true characters, we would run out of things to talk about. I was the scorned heroine, and he did his best to put on the part of the hopeless romantic. I would ask, “Can I tell you a story, Rick?” And he would query, “Has it got a wild finish?” My practiced reply was always, “I don't know the finish yet.”

He was never my white knight. He would say the right things at the wrong times. Eventually, whenever he opened his mouth to speak, I would feel the undeniable urge to heave, or to run, or to sleep. In time I made a rule that before either of us took a turn in conversation, that we had to provide a handwritten outline as to not offend. In the end, we spent more time scribbling and blotting out words than we ever did creating them.

The night that did us in was in late August. He refused to sleep with the window open, and I—as I did since I was young—needed to feel the promise of the midnight air to reassure me to sleep. He said he was afraid of what memories would be blown in with the wind. I felt as if I were to die, trapped in his quiet room.

The next day he promised to never speak again, and I wove him a dream catcher to hang above his bed.

We never attempted to find each other after that.

I cannot say that he saved me from myself, or even that he saved me from a worse fate in those days. By vanishing he saved me from the idea of him—petrified my faith in what he could have been to me.

That's all I could have asked of him, I suppose.