The Promised Letter

Elizabeth,

I promised you my story, and I want you to know that I wrote it only for your eyes. You shared with me something tremendously personal, and I am most thankful. I admire people willing to share stories of their most precious moments, and I'm honored to be the one with whom you shared yours.

I haven't told anyone my story, ever. This will be the only time I tell it, and then from time to time when I recall it, I will know that one other person in this world knows the details of it, too. I suppose it's the reason we chose to communicate with anonymity.

I was nine when I met Cathy, and though it was just fourth grade, I knew I'd met the girl who I'd want more than anything else in my life. Decades later, I still sigh before sleeping, knowing that my child-self couldn't have been more correct. I remember inventing excuses to talk with her, like the day I found out what her favorite gum was so I could bring in packs of it the next day. When other guys spoke of girls as if they were pig-tailed diseases, I dreamed of Cathy, of holding her hand, walking with her in a dream sequence from a fairy tale someone forgot to write. In early September of my ninth year, I knew I loved her.

I was not an outgoing kid growing up, but the genesis of my "hopeful" romantic nature came from finding ways to get close to her. Amid the jeers of classmates, my burgeoning friendship with her labeled me a "sissy." Fortunately, my best friend, Rick, never jumped on that bandwagon. In all those childhood and adolescent years, he was the only person I could talk to, and except for a little jealousy that she might be my best friend instead of him, he always understood. He was my support system through my dreadful teenage years, a go-to when my stepdad was on a bender and had no qualms in taking his failures out on me. The day he hit me hard enough to send my two front teeth clean through my lower lip, I went to stay at Rick’s. I was twelve. I feel certain it was the security of food that made me gain sixty pounds before high school, and Rick was both my Godsend and my curse: long blonde hair and bright blue eyes, charismatic, a track star, of course, with all-American Brad Pitt looks. I was amazed how we remained goofy best friends for those years. My eyes, half a life later, still well up thinking about what his friendship was to me.

I stayed away from Cathy in school, so unsure of myself. My thoughts of her still had those moments of hand holding, but it was increasingly a bittersweet fantasy. I knew I’d never achieve that moment, believing that I’d never deserve it. As high school progressed, things got worse. My dad moved away, my stepdad's abuse became psychological as well as physical, and I became estranged from my mom. When other kids were going out on dates, to movies, to ball games, to dances, I stayed in my room, writing sad poetry, wondering why I lived. Junior year, Rick wasn't in my home room at school. I was in solitary. It was the loneliest year of my life. Before I turned seventeen, I took my stepdad’s shotgun, listened to Don McLean's "Vincent" repeatedly in my darkened room, tears streaming, leaning over the barrel, praying to God to help me end the loneliness and the sheer sadness. The song always ended before I could.

When I received my diploma, I looked out at the masses of people busy not noticing that I existed, and I told myself, "I survived all of you damned bastards.” My mom and stepdad were absent, of course. There or not, none of the bastards saw my tears, and none of them knew how motivated I became to turn my life around. I would become the best me I could and make the best effort to earn Cathy's attention.

I started running and began to study weightlifting. I bought barbells, kept a workout journal, and after work, I would lift long after my neighborhood slept. I ran more. I ate like a mouse. I did crunches and sit-ups in my sleep. Then I bought heavier weights and I lifted six nights a week, at three in the morning, or whenever I heard my stomach growl. I ran. I biked. I lifted more. I was eighteen years old when I lost eighty-seven pounds, and I did it in under four months. My belt size went from 44 inches to 27. My arms went from 13 inches of flab and bone to 19 inches of hard muscle. Doctors told me that what I did was impossible. I looked at myself in the mirror on my nineteenth birthday, and I saw a body that I had thought was unachievable, with one difference. The body looking back at me from the mirror was stronger than the one I’d imagined.

I began taking college courses as part of my self-improvement movement, and quickly noticed, while studying in the library, that I was suddenly a popular resource for college girls. I’d be studying and they would come sit at my table and begin asking me questions, and before long, I would be invited to parties (parties? What the hell were parties?). It was flattering, and I was genuinely happy that I now understood what self-confidence felt like. I knew that it was time to call Cathy and see if she’d like to have coffee.

My circumstances were changing, but unfortunately, my luck wasn’t. Cathy was now seeing someone. I'd always wondered how a breathtakingly beautiful, sweet, and wonderful girl could have gone into her twentieth year without having had a serious relationship, but as fate would have it, she began her first just as I was emerging from my shell. And it took three more weeks for me to learn that the guy Cathy was seeing was Rick.

One Friday night I decided to go see a movie – yet another step out of my shell – and I remember with an almost diabolical clarity the disillusionment of seeing Rick and Cathy sitting mere rows in front of me, leaning on each other and kissing, feeding each other popcorn. I listened to them softly conversing, my heart in my shoes. When the movie ended, I remained seated and watched them leave together. They didn’t notice me. They might not have recognized me had they seen me.

I called Rick the next day. He was thrilled to hear from me, but the nervous tone in his voice was evident. I caught him up on all of the changes in my life: school, my transformation, and the fact that my stepfather was now terrified of me. I asked him how things were with him, and I waited to see what he’d say. I felt good, at first, making him sweat, but as he spoke, I could tell he was genuinely trying to figure out how to tell me about he and Cathy. Finally, he got to the words, “Danny, I need to tell you something,” and when he mentioned that disclaimer – that I might hate his guts forever after – I told him that I already knew, and that he and Cathy had missed a really good post-credits scene. I’ll never know for sure, but I think he cried when I informed him. Things were fine between he and I afterwards.

Strangely, the three of us began going places together, a trio of wacky, vivacious kids. My life, though my heart still ached inside when Cathy was near, was happy. I was having fun being myself, and now and then there would be a moment when my eyes caught Cathy's –and I could see something there for which I'd always dreamt. The only thing I could do was smile and fantasize that in some alternate universe of existence, she and I were walking and holding hands.

When Rick told me of their engagement, I was happy for them. I had lost all religion years before, but still my eyes looked heavenward to ask – to paraphrase Vedder – why her star couldn't shine in my sky. I helped them through many of the wedding plans, some of them just Cathy and myself, and we would talk and laugh nonstop for hours. I loved spending that time with her. I could open the car door for her, take her coat, buy her lunch. We grew close, and I knew that I could open up and tell her how I had always felt. But I didn't. I fought off every urge, and I felt guilty if I'd let a glance go on even an instant too long. Any time that spark jumped between us, I had a pang of desire and simultaneous heartbreak that transcended all other emotion. I loved her. If only I had done something, anything differently years before.

I was planning Rick’s bachelor party when the best part of my life came to an end. I was on the phone with a girl from college -- a stripper by profession -- when the second line clicked. It was Daryl, a friend of ours who I was going to call as soon as he and Rick returned from tux fittings. His voice sounded breathless and confused. "Danny," he stammered. "You… listen, get Rick's parents, and get Cathy.” I was almost amused, like he was going to give me a punchline without telling the joke, but his voice became that of someone I didn't recognize. My soul sickened, then told me with a hot, violent wave of adrenaline that something was wrong. I could see my emotion pour off of the flesh on my arms in rippled waves.

I'll not burden you with minutia. I can’t. He breathed on his own for two days after the accident. He never woke or spoke again. He probably had no idea what had happened, but that he lived for nearly three days afterward has both haunted me and made me proud of how tough my best friend was. He was changing a flat tire. A ninety year old man cut across three lanes of traffic to exit the highway, but instead rammed the front driver's side of Rick's car. Rick was changing the front passenger's tire. He had no chance. My best friend wouldn't ever be there again.

The outpouring of prayers, the flowers, the services came and went. In the weeks following, Cathy was impossible to reach. I always understood that. Once or twice, I walked the three miles to the cemetery and sat where Rick rests, and I got stupidly drunk and stagger home, vomiting in view of oncoming traffic. About nine weeks later, I had to let it go. I re-entered life, a cold-eyed man with stone on his shoulders. I tried calling Cathy, even tried going over her house to visit. It was the following spring when I finally saw her again, so many years ago, and it was the last time I would ever see her or hear her voice.

Daryl called me to tell me she was leaving, to Omaha, Nebraska of all places. She had been hired by an insurance company and wanted to get as far away from the northeastern coast of Massachusetts as she could. She was going to catch a bus from Manchester, he told me, and when. I sat in my room for hours after talking to Daryl, but I’d aged years. She was going to leave the next day, and I couldn't bring myself to call her or go see her. I wept, staring at the ceiling, listening to thunder outside my window.

There was a hell of a storm coming.

The next day I woke, showered, and got dressed. It was pouring out, a tropical depression clinging to the New England coastline. I knew I was going to the bus station a tenth of a second after Daryl had told me, but I kept my mind in self-suspense mode as long as I could. I got in my pick-up and drove up to Manchester through the storm on an almost barren highway, arriving two hours before her bus was to leave. I waited for her in the far corner of the empty lot. She arrived about twenty minutes later in a cab, and through a blur of rain and windshield wipers, I saw her struggle to open her umbrella. She carried only a small bag.

I waited until she walked into the terminal and dashed to the sliding glass vestibule doors. They opened before me, and she stood only a few feet away. She noticed me, and we both smiled. I walked to her and we embraced. We didn't move or speak for perhaps five minutes. We rocked back and forth slowly, softly. I felt secure for the first time in ages, and I felt a smile for the first time in as long.

"Daryl told me…" I whispered, my face still buried in her long blonde hair.

"I knew he would," she replied, and a titter of glee shivered through me from the tone of her voice, a warm, purring feeling. I deeply inhaled the smell of strawberry shampoo in her rain-dampened hair, and I felt a slight giggle from her in response to the tickle I caused. I pulled back to look at her. My right hand moved impulsively to touch her cheek and stroke back a rogue strand of her hair. I watched my hand do this, calmly amazed that it was happening. These few simple moments of gentle expression were what I had waited fifteen years for. I was touching her face, her hair, and I found her eyes, glistening and smiling back at mine. I was oblivious to the presence of my tears cascading down my unshaven face.

She was leaving. I only had a few moments like this to spend, looking into her eyes. I wondered if the girl I'd spent half my allowance on watermelon Bubble Yum to impress a decade and a half before could possibly know what it meant for me to smell her hair. I couldn't contain myself, and the emotion caused my chest to slowly heave. The moment was powerful beyond my will to express, and she saw that.

She put her hands to my face, and I covered them with mine, then kissed them. The expression on her face changed from a soft smile to a something more serious, and I could feel her emotions in the same maelstrom as mine. Then we smiled again.

"You know, I’ve waited for a moment like this with you for my whole life," I whispered. Her eyes gleamed, listening, wanting me to say what I was saying. "I also knew that it would probably never come. Now it’s here, and I'll appreciate it every day for the rest of my life now."

"Rick told me..." she responded, "that at the prom, you imagined I was your date.”

“I didn’t have one,” I admitted. She knew.

“He told me that you guys drove out to Hampton beach afterward, and you talked about all the stuff we would have done had you taken me to the prom that night."

I smiled in pain. Rick and I drove to the edge of the beach, lay on the hood of his 1970 Buick Riviera, looking up at the stars and talking. Then I remembered; he had a date that night, an absolutely stunning girl who was a sophomore at UNH, but he dropped her off early because he wanted to hang out with me. He did this because, as it always was in my real life world, I was alone, and he wanted to know I was okay.

"I'm sure he didn't tell you everything."

"He told me everything important."

All the years of heaviness, that burden of silence, was evaporating. She knew. Of course she did. It was a moment that at any other time in my life would have simply passed by, and in shyness I would have changed the subject, but instead my eyes locked into hers, and I saw the beauty of reality.

"Since I was a boy, young enough where I had no right or context to dream the things I dreamt,” – I wondered where my words were even coming from – “I imagined what it might feel like if you felt the same about me.”

She tilted her head slightly, her brow wrinkling slightly. “Then why didn’t you ask me to the prom?”

I swallowed hard. “Because I was me,” I began, struggling, “and if you’d said ‘no,’ I wouldn’t been able to dream about anything ever again.”

“Did you ever take into consideration that I might have said ‘yes?’”

“I did,” I admitted. “But I was me…”

“So ask me now,” she begged.

I looked about the waiting room, empty chairs, dim lights, silent aside from the driving rain against the floor-to-ceiling windows. “But now you're leaving. It'd haunt me ‘til my final day if I didn't tell you now what I felt."

Cathy’s shoulders slumped, her eyes saddening. “I swear on my soul, I wanted you to ask me,” she paused, “and my answer was already yes.”

I knew exactly what was going to happen next. She was going to give me a quick kiss on the cheek, and hug me, and I was going to be embarrassed. Because I was me.

Cathy stretched up and pulled my head into hers, and her lips met mine. They took my lips demandingly and with meaning, and they stole my breath as well. My naivety found me completely stunned – I was tasting her lips, her mouth – and I floated. All those years of sadness – suddenly – I would re-live them a dozen times over just for this solitary moment.

When the kiss was slowly parted, her next glance revealed even more. Cathy took my hand and grabbed her bag. "Let's go." she said.

She's staying? I thought to myself. I've made her stay! She knew that I was going to see her here, and that's why she only packed this little bag!

The sliding doors parted and we jogged out to my truck through tempestuous sheets of rain. We got into the vehicle pouring wet, and we were laughing just as heavily. We closed the doors and looked at each other. She was even more breathtaking like this, her long, wet hair and her blouse soaked through.

We leaned against the cloth seats. "Where to, miss?" I asked. I was so happy she was staying, I wanted to drive away from that station instantly.

She whispered back to me as she slid across the bench seat of the truck. "Right here... right here is fine." She grabbed my collar and kissed me again, even deeper than before, and her fingers clutched my hair. The soft gasps in her breathing were audible over the throbbing of the rain. There was a fever in her kisses, and she moved closer, rapidly unbuttoning my shirt.

I was naive, all right. I had no idea what was happening until that moment. She peeled aside the shirt from my chest with her palms, and I swear it… I saw fireworks. We giggled, struggling to remove our clothes, bumping into the rearview mirror and the steering wheel along the way. I can picture her, naked and smiling, eyes bright, all amid a backdrop of cascading rain blanketing my windshield.

It was the most perfect moments of my life. It is etched in my mind with more brilliance than any photograph. I can still smell her strawberry shampoo, and I can still imagine the sweetness of her skin. So literally a concept by which we are all ruled, time lost its meaning. And there was music. That moment, I am convinced, was so powerful that an invisible thread of time was sewn and binds my soul to that stormy day in the cabin of that truck. It connects me forever, tangibly, to the place where my love and my happiness met.

For several minutes, we caught our breath, embraced, rocking back and forth, and I ran my fingers through her hair. I can still feel the echoes of her voice amid the pounding of the rain. The timethread, through all these years, has remained.

And I remember the sound of her voice when she told me that she was still going to get on the bus.

We sat in the terminal, leaning on each other and softly talking, until the bus pulled in an hour later. It was my last hour with her. The discussion that took place in that time was one that covered fifteen years of things we'd never told each other and needed to be said. She explained to me every reason why she was leaving. Memories can be bliss, memories can be painful. I knew that then, and I know that now.

I've already written too much, so I'll end this now. Cathy asked me to "just let (her) go." Maybe some years would go by and we could reconnect, she told me. But I had a feeling it would be forever, and the years have passed. I have no idea where she is, and I gave my word that I'd respect her wishes. Perhaps she felt that she'd betrayed Rick by being with me, just that one time. I don't know. When the bus finally arrived at the Manchester station, I took her hand and walked her to the door. I realized during that short walk that, finally, I was walking with her and holding her hand like I'd always imagined. It was the only thing I'd ever really wanted.

The last time I looked into her eyes was as she stepped on that bus, and the last words we ever said to each other were simple. "I love you, Cathy," I said, and she replied, "I love you too." A quick kiss, and she stepped inside an otherwise vacant Concord Trailways bus. Unable to see through the tinted windows, I stood and stared as it rolled forward to the stoplight. It stayed for half a minute, directional rhythmically blinking, and then turned right, over the Queen City Bridge, toward I-93. I walked to my truck through a blitzkrieg of rain and watched as it disappeared into the grayness of storm. I miss her so terribly, and I will until the day I'm gone. I know I'll never see her again.

I promised you my story, and re-living those days, that day, those years, has been difficult. I’m tired. I want you to know that I've tried to be as accurate as possible, and I hope it is exactly as it was, though years have passed. I want you to know that it is all true. You shared with me the story of how you lost your virginity, and I have told you the story of how I lost mine.

I will say goodbye to you now and keep my side of the promise that we will not contact each other again. Thank you for listening and sharing with me. I hope your life will be a long, happy one, and I hope that in some way, my story has moved you.

Danny