The Letter

Jane had made it all the way to the door, her hand raised, before her body locked up and she couldn’t will it into motion.  She stood frozen, taking in the details of the door in front of her.  The brass knocker that no one really used.  The wreath still hanging despite the end of the holidays.  The blue paint craggy over the multiple coats layered on year after year.  She also noted the lack of camera assisted doorbell technology, thankful that no one would be witness to her indecision.  Time passed in a way that was difficult to track and she finally huffed out a cloud of breath, lowered her hand, and walked back down the pathway toward the sidewalk.  Today wasn’t right.  She’d know when it was, Jane thought.  Surely she’d know.  

A month had passed since the letter had arrived, an unexpected delivery amidst the cards and well wishes from people Jane never heard from the rest of the year.  This was not photo-filled cardstock covered with smiling faces but a bona fide handwritten letter, something she hadn’t received since perhaps grade school when computers and cell phones and email were a novelty and letters were both romantic and necessary.  Jane read it once, then again, chalking it up to end of year nostalgia before folding it away.  Wasn’t everyone prone to this type of sentimentality when looking at the end of something?  Surrounded by best of’s and reflections and resolutions, who isn’t cataloging the year, thinking back on themselves with some measure of regret, planning for something more in what’s to come.  

The letter bore an offer, one that followed Jane like the letter itself which she stowed in her purse and never seemed able to throw away.  Fool me once, shame on you, repeated in her mind but the letter seemed to keep pushing its way into her hands and its folds became so crisp they could have torn with a strong breeze.  Anachronistic in and of itself, the letter pulled Jane into the past and she lingered there even as the days pushed her into the new year.  The pain of that time was still clear but was only an echo of its former incarnation, duller and quieter.  Beyond the pain though was the joy which was almost more difficult to recall.  She walked away from the blue door, down the street, past her car, and then kept going.

When Jane showed the letter to her sister at Christmas, she just shrugged.  For the first time, Jane wondered if her relationship to the letter had become unhealthy.  

“He sounds like he’d just like to reconnect.  It’s not such a bad idea.  You’ve both lived your lives and ended up back here.  Kind of romantic, in a sense.  Don’t you think?”  

“I’m not sure if I want to reconnect.  I’m not in a good place.  We didn’t exactly leave things on the best terms.  It might be weird.”  Jane recognized her laundry list of excuses for what it was.

“That was a long time ago, Jane.  Maybe just see him and see how it goes.  It doesn't have to be anything too important.  Just a cup of coffee or something.”  

“You’re right,” Jane replied, feeling the complete opposite.  

He had written to fill her in on his life - the divorce, his almost grown kids, his mother’s illness and recent passing.  He was living in her house for now, settling her affairs.  He knew Jane was home too, had heard about her own father’s passing, shared his condolences.  The parallels seemed uncanny, he said.  Maybe they could talk sometime, he added.    

He left a phone number but calling felt too awkward and texting seemed ridiculous given the last time she spoke with him cell phones had barely become a part of their vernacular.  Anyway, she knew the address.  She’d spent nights in that house in his childhood bed, his parents away on weekend trips, likely aware of what happened when they left.  Seeing him again on that doorstep felt oddly right but also vulnerable, like she was admitting to something she wasn’t sure was true.  

She’d made it to the pond near his house where they used to walk when they were home from college breaks.  “This just isn’t working like this,”  he’d finally admitted after a year of living apart at their separate schools living increasingly separate lives.  Jane knew it was true, but also felt like letting him go was untenable.  She tried to say so but he didn’t seem to hear her words the way she tried to say them.  They had spent their last hours together around this pond and Jane could feel the cracks in her heart, still evident where they had forced themselves back together after that day when she had to move on with her life without him.  She didn’t speak to him again, pain then pride then fear getting in her way.

She met someone new the following year.  He was nice, a word no one wants to hear as a descriptor of themselves but it was the closest to what Jane felt for him.  There wasn’t passion but there was a quiet, steady hum of something Jane thought was love and that she followed unwaveringly forward.  Passion was for the foolish, she reasoned.  The way she had known love before was gone and there was no retrieving it in the same way that the years passed and you could never move back in time.  They lived this way for many years, meeting milestone after milestone until the final one - children - eluded them and the challenge of that became too much.  The dependable quality of their love dissolved and there was little left to hold them together.  He had another wife, and the children he’d so desired.  He was happier now, she thought, with some jealousy but not much.  

The letter said little about his own divorce except that it had been a few years prior.  This was the age they were in, the era of weddings ending and divorces beginning, the startings and stoppings of life all turned around.  She silently agreed to herself that the fact that both their parents had been ill and passed so close to one another seemed like some kind of kismet but then this too just spoke to their age.  Everyone’s parents were getting old, ill, dying.  They were getting older too, mostly measured in life milestones that no one looked forward to.  In her more self-destructive moments of recent years, Jane had wondered if there was anything to look forward to anymore.  Then the letter arrived and it felt like a piece of hope made material.  

The letter was a door to something new and unknown and maybe impossible.  There was no undoing their choices and there was no way to be the people they had been all those years ago.  But perhaps these new people, who had lived full lives and made mistakes and seen triumphs, could know each other in the way their past selves had.  Would the passion they had felt still be there, like a flame they’d each kept burning without even realizing it?  Jane wanted that to be true so badly that she wasn’t sure she could ever find out if it actually was.  

Jane thinks of what it felt like to see her life stretched out in front of her, a series of pathways and choices, a string of doors waiting to be opened.  She now feels like she’s looking back on all the doors that had been closed with no doors left to open.  All of the big decisions have been made, the big risks taken, the consequences paid in full.  The letter was a new door and the fear of opening it was suffocating but enticing, the desire to know being one we never really lose.  

Jane’s thoughts churned while her feet moved and she suddenly looked up to find herself back at the house, muscle memory of so many walks before bringing her back to this doorstep.  She stuck her hand in her pocket and palmed her keys, considering how easy it would be to drive away.  She would throw the letter out.  She would return to her comfortable life and put this whole episode on a shelf where she could examine it from time to time to remind herself she had made the right choice.  But wouldn’t that relic always contain a question?  

Her feet continued forward and her hand raised and knocked and her heart hammered in her chest.  She waited a moment and almost turned away when she heard the knob twist, the door creak open, then a voice both new and familiar.

“Jane,” he sighed.  “I hoped you’d come.”

“Me too,”  Jane answered, and she followed him inside.