The Memory of You

By John Thomas

He literally bumped into her, his first love, in the public library. In a city of two million.  What  were the chances?  After the obligatory updates about mates, parents, and rambunctious children (he had two, Emma one), she casually asked, “what are you doing now?” “I’m a writer,” he replied. “You wrote good letters,” she said.

Good letters? True, they exchanged many letters during their courtship. That’s what you did in those pre-Internet days when you expressed yourself on paper instead of on screen. She was patient and supportive. He was selfish and condescending, the archetypal bad boyfriend. 

They met on a blind date when she was 17.  He was two years older. Although paired up with other people on this particular outing, they gravitated to each other, flirting behind the backs of their pre-arranged mates. The pull was magnetic. They were partners, they told each other, until time and distance said otherwise. 

“I thought about you a lot,” she said. “I thought about you too,” he replied, hoping his casual demeanor would mask his secret. He frequently thought about her, perhaps too frequently. Wasn’t that flouting the natural order of things.? Convention said you experimented, you grew up and you moved on.  Yet, she was always there tucked away in small recess of his brain, a touchstone he would call up whenever he felt lost or overwhelmed, an emotional balm so to speak. Their courtship was a delicious time of innocence, excitement, and discovery and he often used the memory to mollify the harsh realities of the modern world.

He was delighted, of course, when she agreed to meet for lunch the following week. To show her he had accomplished the goals he had set out for himself?  Possibly. To relive his lost youth?  Maybe. But there was more. He wanted to settle those rumblings in the pit of his stomach. The Portuguese have a word for it – saudade – a profound melancholic longing for someone that we care about and he did care for her even though she was no longer a girlfriend but rather, as the song says, someone that he used to know.

Their lunchtime conversation was easy and breezy. There was no rehashing of past missteps, no crying over missed opportunities. When she smiled, her cheeks dimpled and his mind immediately flashed back to their passionate fumbling in the back seat of his best friend’s car. It was if that 12-year gap never existed and yet it did.

They parted casually. “See ya,” they said to each other, tacitly acknowledging they would probably never meet again. 

Letters. “You wrote good letters,” she had said, and he raced home to double down on her correspondence. He parted a wall of boxes undisturbed since moving into his house 5 years ago and there it was, a Pandora`s Box of memories – childhood comics, his university degree, early letters of employment, workplace identification tags, and letters from Emma. It was, in effect, a collection of milestones.  

As he shuffled through her letters, he realized their past wasn’t as perfect as he thought it was. His letters were short and inconsequential; hers were meaty and expressive. 

When she started university in another state, she wrote to say she felt adrift in her new digs. “One whole year and no girlfriend to talk to,” she lamented. “I didn’t think I was that creepy.” He chastised her for not treating her California move as an adventure, a chance to broaden her perspective, get and experience new things. She wanted sympathy; he offered criticism. 

“All I wanted in those first few months was for you to assure me that you missed me a little. I missed you very much,” she wrote.  She accused him of shutting her out. “To my mind there’s only one reason why you do this – you’re afraid of being hurt. Do you think I ever wanted to hurt you? You hurt me very much and I cried a lot.” 

So open. So direct. Emma exposed her vulnerability; he confessed his insecurities and received a 16-page missive in return culminating in those three little words, “I love you.” It was such a raw expression of two people trying to find their place in the world and with each other.

The more he read her sentiments, the more he realized his mistakes. He regretted the way he had expected love and affection without offering much of himself in return.

He realized how his constant criticism undermined her trust and self-confidence. 

He deplored the way he took her for granted.

He choked at what could have been. If only he had been more communicative. If only she hadn’t moved away. If only…

“I did better with my relationships,” he thought to himself, a fistful of correspondence in his hand. Emma had played an important part in his life helping to shape the man he would become. 

“Thank you, Emma, I got it,” he said out loud as if she were there.   

Their lunchtime reunion had left him discombobulated, neither lustful nor indifferent but awash in warm familiarity. His melancholy had been addressed and he was content with the outcome. 

Suddenly overcome with a wave of tenderness towards Emma, towards his wife, hell, towards everyone he had met and loved, he carefully gathered her letters, read them one last time and slowly and reverentially placed them in the trash can. 

The letters were gone but the memories would linger.

John Thomson holds a BFA in fine arts majoring in painting. Trained to take a critical eye to everything he sees (when painting a tree, the tree doesn’t always have to be green), his love of analysis and interpretation pushed him into a career in journalism. Years of writing exposition for print, broadcast, and online followed. Factual is fun but anxious to put his creative chops to work, he recently turned to fiction. His stories have appeared in Vernacular, Westworld, Y.A.M, Salt, WordWorks and others.