He Wrote (#2, Dear Maggie)

Dear Maggie.

He wrote. He wrote with a confidence only possible in a wretched victim of love. The desk lamp beside him glowed dimly, casting a warm light onto the letter in front of the boy. He didn’t pause; he simply wrote. He didn’t need to pause; this was not a dissertation with footnotes or citations. There was no need for a first draft.
“Love,” he thought. “Love needs no editor.”
This was his unbridled emotion moving from within himself to the page. The pen scratched across the paper furiously, unable to match the speed of the boy’s affection. He watched with an inescapable smile as finally his hand finished the last sentence, at last catching up with his thoughts.
The smile grew as he carefully sealed and sent the letter.
“Such careful attention. Such painstaking intricacies. The wonders of an art form forgotten by my generation. How chivalrous I am,” he thought as he walked out of the post office. “An expression of my most pure, fiery Love not sent to an imaginary inbox, not limited to 160 characters and not read with advertisements framing a sickly glowing screen. How noble I am in my Love."


How cliché this must sound from my young lips. Seventeen and in Love.

She groaned as she pulled up to the house. Her older brother had left his Vespa blocking the entrance to the driveway.
“Mark!” she said, storming into the house. “I swear to god I’m gonna push that thing off a fucking cliff if you keep blocking the garage like this!” She only heard an obnoxious chortle come from the computer room.
She didn’t have time to fight; she was already going to be late for her afterschool job at Market Basket. She scrambled around in the kitchen before grabbing her uniform-apron off the counter and heading back to her still running ‘97 Taurus. Maggie failed to notice the envelope waiting for her beside the sink. It was for the best though. Love was far from her mind at the moment.


It hard for me to believe, as I’m sure it is for you, that we met only three and exactly three months ago, for your place in my life and in my heart burns with the brilliance of a lifelong Love.

Time had been his second greatest enemy. He stared at his digital wristwatch.
“Oh my watch, how your ticking curses me so,” he lamented to himself. “Your wretched infallibility was the single greatest hindrance in my pursuit. If only I’d known how I would come to feel, how I could have used those precious moments I wasted on others.”
He adjusted the settings, changing the month from September to October to November and so on until he reached June. He let out a soft sigh and briefly felt the pain of lost time-
“Friendships are plentifully, learnedness cheap. Love is the only state of being worth chasing in this life.”
-until hope seized him once again.
“But Love is undeniable when found. The months of the past will be forgotten in the bliss of the soon-to-be.”
He checked the post the next day, still smiling after finding the mailbox empty.


The last time we spoke was regrettable. I know this and I apologize for any emotional alarms I might have raised in most rushed of explanations. I feel that I might re-approach the subject with more careful diction and a renewed Love beating in my soul.

“Why does like every creeper buy his groceries between 3:15 and 5:45 at this Market Basket and choose checkout aisle 6 every time?” Maggie asked her friend Sasha as a surly old man hobbled his way out of the automatic doors with a snort.
Sasha walked with her to the break room and said, “Because they know you have a thing for graying, possibly pedophilic older gentlemen.”
“Okay, I have one sex dream about Mr. Carlson and suddenly I’m you think I’ve got some freaky fetish! It was just a weird dream that I had after eating three Cheesy Gordita Crunches! Seriously, that’s the last time I tell you anything.”
“C’mon, Maggie you know I’m just messing around. Everyone knows you already want to jump Brian’s bones.”
“Oh my god,” she said in exasperated pleasure. “I got a text from him last Tuesday. Like, highlight of my year.”
“Well you’d better hope he starts asking you about more than just your Bio work before Carlson decides to drop by.”
Sasha burst into laughter as she sprinted into the break room and quickly shut the door, narrowly avoiding the wrath of her friend who was right behind her, laughing with fists clenched.


I know it must seem so queer, so out of place in today’s society to hear those words spoken so truly after such a short time, but nothing could be truer. I Love you.

Everything was secondary to him now. His classes and lectures melted away to the daydreams of a response that he just knew would arrive today.
“Today is that day,” he thought to himself, drifting away from the quiz that lay on the desk in front of him. His smile wider than the day before. “Surely six days is long enough for the letter to be delivered, read, cherished and responded to.”
He turned his attention to the paper in front of him, but it went unread. It was not what was important.
He walked past his closed mailbox when he got home and went straight to his bed. He let the tension build, like Christmas mornings of years past before bursting through the front door and throwing open the aluminum tube. He was greeted with only his father’s monthly bank statement. His omnipresent smile flickered for just a moment before he turned and went back to the house, back to his room and back to his bed.
“Another day” he lamented to the ceiling. “Another day before my Love is kindled to the heights it’s destined to reach. Oh but for one more day, how my fire burns me.”


You. Purest of souls, kind in spirit, lovely in countenance, sensual in body. My Love sparked the moment that I saw you step into that blessed room, light as the holy air that surrounded you and beautiful as the stained glass that served as your backdrop.

Maggie sighed with relief as she stepped out of the shower, wrapping herself in a well-worn towel. There was nothing that relaxed her more than a hot shower. As she wiped the fogged mirror clean she sighed again, this time out of frustration. For the past fourteen years she had been plagued with Hermione Granger hair, thick and bushy and out of control only during the times that she needed it neat.
She tried in vain to straighten it, but just wasn’t going to happen today. She was too tired and gave up, wrapping it into an oversized bun before heading to her room. She changed and started texting Sasha while pulling out her Pre-Calc textbook.
ugh i hate you and your perfect red hair. i swear god wanted me to look like the bride of fucking frankenstien. what pages do we have for Johnson?
She remembered the assignment before she got a response and started working. Her brother and father were watching the Pistons’ game a little too loud, but she was too busy to stop and tell them to turn it down. She was going to be up late finishing tomorrow’s lab anyway. The letter, despite being brought to her room earlier, went unnoticed for the moment.


I Love you. How unstoppable and powerful those words are. Love is not chance, nor work, nor fodder for prayer. Love is destiny. And destiny is inevitable.

With each passing day his despair grew and grew. But so did his fixated affection. He reasoned that as each day passed, if her response did not arrive then it only increased the chances that tomorrow would be the fateful day. But time began to wear on the boy as each day his smile faded and his sigh echoed in the empty chamber of his mailbox.
“Destiny” he repeated aloud, trying to reassure himself. “This Love in my heart would not have ignited for naught. There is no god that cruel.”
He thought of Maggie and tried in vain to regain the smile that had slowly drifted from his life. The rest of the day he spent working on an unfinished art project from the summer, carefully slicing the edges of a charcoal drawing.


I know your feelings are not the same as mine now, but it’s just because I haven’t explained my Love correctly. I haven’t yet done my Love justice. I need you to know: I can make you happy. I will make you happy. I would and I will do anything to make you happy, because that is what you deserve. There’s no one else in the world who can make that promise. There are no other kids our age who have the feelings I have for you. There’s no one who Loves you as I do. Be with me. -Chris

“Oh god” she said, slouching as she finished the letter. She’s hoped this wouldn’t happen. She sighed and reread it.
I Love you
She already had tried to let him down easy once this month. “I guess I didn’t let him down far enough,” she thought. She didn’t have time to write a letter, it was past one already and she needed to proof read that lab. She picked up her phone and began typing.


Chris I just opened your letter. its really sweet but i just dont feel that way about you. Youre a great guy but i just cant see it happening. Im sorry.

It was getting late but he knew he wouldn’t sleep anyway. He continued cropping his sketches, hands now dusted by charcoal.
“She must have read it by now” he thought. “There’s no way she couldn’t have. How can she not see that I could make her happy? I’m the only one that she should be with. No one else feels like I feel. No one else can know the pain that I endure to prove my Love for her. How can she not see? How can I make her see? There's only-"
His phone suddenly sounded and flashed. He jumped, knocking the blade toward his other hand, cutting him slightly from the bottom of his index finger to the center of his palm. He drew a sharp breath and stared at his hand as the line slowly flooded red. He looked to his phone and saw Maggie blinking on the screen. He picked it and began to read. One drop of blood fell to the paper.
Chris...

He Wrote (#1, Inspiration)

He wrote. Well, really, he typed. His words hadn't taken on enough life to be considered writing, for now it was just typing. And also: who in that day and age, still wrote by hand?

She did. That was one of the things that made her different. That lost feeling of doing something by hand, putting the extra effort and creating unique in the process, that feeling that makes hipsters buy film cameras and makes nervous men cook dinner themselves on first dates, she didn't need to artificially project that feeling to the world, she embodied it. He loved her for that. He loved, so he wrote. He wrote to her.

His fingers were not nimble though. They stuttered and stumbled their way across the keys until they paused and hovered above the home row, waiting on further intsruction. Inspiration. That's what writers lack when they can't seem to write right, right? Inspiration, he thought to himself.

It had just been so long since they had last seen each other. In the interim he had found it increasingly difficult to mentally recreate the experiences they'd shared that summer. Despite this, his love had only grown and he felt he needed to prove it. It goes without saying, as the saying goes, but this was he began to write in the first place. But he hadn't really begun to write yet. It was still just typing. He needed inspiration.

When was the last time he felt that emotional and physical, overwhelming, rush of blood to both heads, rush of love that had come to define their lives when together? When he read her words. Her hand-written-not-typed words. Words she had written to him.

He found the letters. He found the words. Her idiosyncratic handwriting made his thoughtful choice of 14 point Century Gothic seem cold. He found the passage.

"... to be raw in front of eachother - imperfect and basic and messed up and beautiful. I want you to see me naked with my face in the stream of the shower, with everything wrong and everything right in plain view. tell me..."

Perfection. He felt it again, but instead of turning to a box of tissues or the phone as an outlet, he put his emotions into words and wrote to her. He wanted to give her all that her words had given him. He had found his inspiration. His fingers stirred and struck the keys.

He wrote.