A Letter to Almost

Should I start with the birds? The seagulls that are really just gulls or so you’d remind me the last time we met? Or the Rufous that flitted around your yard this summer while you gardened and I played with the stray orange cat? How do you track something with so many beginnings?

Maybe here, at your front door last winter when I almost got snowed in, secretly hoped I did. Or long before — nineteen and naïve, but desperate for something real. Sometimes, you don’t realize you’re tied to someone until it’s too late. My rude awakening was our last day on campus when you left class without saying goodbye.

I forgot to tell you — there’s a street on the way to Vancouver with your name. Every time it passed, I wanted to go back to your place. (You remember how there was never enough time and always so much to say?)

Perhaps it starts on Easter at Seaside when you taught me how to fly a kite, and I helped you look for antique porcelain in town. Or New Year’s Eve when you messaged me, and I realized I wanted a different life. The first time you moved, I tried to stay in touch. The last time I moved, I was afraid to.

I wonder if you still cherish the orchid I gave to you on Valentine’s Day when we were both trying to forget someone else. Or does it remind you too much of the afternoon in your car when I said everything but, “I love you?” I’m sorry.

It might start after, when you sent me a picture of the beach and told me you weren’t ready. Friends? Later and always, my heart dropped at the beat of a song that reminds me only of you. I tried to forget that word the last time you rode to my place and we sat by the fire, talked about life, loss, and the birds.

How do you define something with so many beginnings? It seems every time we meet, we’re complete strangers — lifetimes spent within the distance. Remember when distance was all we had, but we still talked every morning, and night, and in between?

Sometimes, it starts the evening of the blizzard when we couldn’t sleep but also on Tuesday when we ate tacos at the coast, my jeans soaked from the shallows. Remember how we’d laugh about the awkward girl who couldn’t get over you? Remember when I became the awkward girl?

I think, mostly, it starts with a letter I wrote when you were in Roseburg — “To my almost lover, who might have been or could be more…” It haunts me how easily I loved you.

Sometimes, I think of calling. Eventually, I will. We’ll start again, share stories of our travels. I’ll try to forget when we were buried in the forest of the Pacific Northwest and you said you wanted to see the world but couldn’t take me. And, maybe, you’ve forgotten about how I promised to wait but didn’t, spirited away to Texas by someone you’ve never met.

I’m radio silent. It’s not just to you. Maybe that’s how it starts, the way it always has, with a message, trying in some way to reconnect about plants and the Jays who eat them. But it will always end up in the grief we shared while we were picking up the pieces of our lives. How do you define something that always ends?

I think, maybe, there’s more to us than birds and broken hearts because everything about our story feels unfinished.