Julenor

Julian Today

If anyone were watching, they’d find it difficult to tell whether Julian was man or a statue. He stands by his dining table, in his modest single bedroom apartment. He stares at the envelope he’d left there the night before.

His name is etched on the front in blue ink. Swirling perfect letters, the penmanship announces their author without need to unseal the envelope and read the contents. 

Julian isn’t sure he wants to open it. 

It’s been many years since he’s dreamed of her. Perfect green eyes that see inside him.

But this morning Julian woke with a smile on his face, the dream only reluctantly letting go. He’d stared at his phone, recalling the times he’d dialled her number, knowing she wouldn’t answer. So he could listen to her voice in the message.

He’d had to train himself not to. Whole routines, actions and thoughts to exorcise her. For so long, he’d be walking down the street, and a stray sound, or smell, the sight of someone flicking their hair, and his mind could send him back into the old pattern.

So long ago. He couldn’t go back. Maybe if he just didn’t open it. 

He’d found the envelope yesterday. Helping his mother clear out boxes of old things from his mother’s place. He’d opened a box of old winter coats, just to see what was inside, and there it had been. 

Blue ink, his name artfully inscribed staring up at him in her distinctive handwriting. Waiting for him all this time, a time capsule from a whole different life.

Julian reaches down and tears open the envelope.

Young Julian

Julian was four the first time he realised someone had given up on him.

He was in kinder, and he’d just thrown his sandwich at one of his classmates.

He waited for the eruption, for a shrill voice to demand explanation. How could Julian do such terrible things? Threats to tell his mother. Lecture explaining he would need to learn respect.

The teacher sighed, and took the girl to clean herself up.

Julian remembers a hollow feeling. It wasn’t lack of attention, which his mother always accused him of seeking. It was realising the teacher did not know what to do. And she wasn’t going to try.

It was the first time Julian remembers feeling lonely.

Young Julian sat on the floor and cried. Nobody came to help. So when he realised you can’t cry away loneliness, he stopped. 

Julian didn’t cry again for a very long time.

The Letter

Dearest Julian,

I suspect our conversation will not have gone well. So I’m writing this to tell you all the things I’ll forget to say once I have to actually say them.

I am sorry.

I love you.

If you ask me to stay, I will.

Julian Today

Standing by the table in the dining room, once again the room is a frozen tableau.

This time the stillness is broken by the sound of Julian’s heavy breathing. This is not the place to read these words.

These words could have changed everything. 

Julian throws on a light jacket and shoves the letter in a pocket. As he makes for the front door, his gaze is captured by a photo on the wall.

The frame is 4x6, but the photo within is square, leaving awkward, empty spaces around the edges. A younger Julian grins out from the image, arm slung around his best friend, Lefty, their bond frozen in time. The mismatched frame leaves the picture looking incomplete, but this picture is motivation. Julian likes it this way.

The image is only a little older than the letter. 

Julian pulls the photo from the wall, hesitating briefly. Yes, if he’s going back there, Lefty should come too. Julian steps out the door, and descends the stairs to where his pickup is parked by the curb. 

Teen Julian

Julian met Lefty when they were fourteen.

By then, Julian had grown used to the whispers.

“So much energy,” and “he’s got ants in his pants,” had slowly shifted to “Troubled,” “hard work,” and “wild.” Then, seemingly overnight, they became “Bad news,” “nasty,” and “a lost cause.”

When you’re the kid who hears those whispers, they follow you. You recognise the look adults give you. They stop giving up on you because they never believe in the first place.

You’re the hard part of their day, the squeaky wheel, the jagged edge they wish somebody else would find a way to deal with.

At home, it was just Julian and his mother. She worked hard, but there was never much to go around. Sometimes she had three jobs, sometimes she had none. Julian never felt poor—he never had the latest sneakers or console, but his belly was full, and if dad was absent, mom loved him enough for two anyway.

But love didn’t pay for fancy psychologists the schools wanted him to see.

Julian knew the routine. New school, new faces, the same looks from teachers.

Then trouble would inevitably come. Usually in the form of kids who thought it was fun to push the new guy around. Julian wasn’t the kind of kid who put up with being pushed around. Trouble turned into referrals to offices stocked with fidget toys, staffed by people who asked questions about feelings.

Those people didn’t give him the same look as the teachers. Their looks were full of so much compassion they made Julian feel small.

The referrals came with a few funded visits. Then the school expected his mom to pay. She couldn’t. So the school would start talking about how “something needed to change.” And before long, Julian would be moving again, his mom would be switching jobs.

Finally, one day, someone made a different suggestion: stop fighting Julian’s energy. Channel it. Maybe a sport.

Boxing changed everything.

Julian was good at hitting things. He was good at taking hits. He was willing to work hard. He was strong, and, as it turned out, you could get a message through his “thick head” after all. You just needed to be saying something worth listening to.

Best of all, the kids he fought didn’t hold it against him. They didn’t try to make him erupt, then act shocked when he did.

They tried to hit him. He hit them more. And they respected him for it.

Only Lefty hit Julian more than he hit back. But it was hard to be mad at Lefty for that.

Lefty was like Julian—or close enough.

Lefty’s family was rich, with the latest sneakers and console, but that wasn’t what mattered.

Lefty had ants in his pants too, grown ups gave him looks like they gave Julian. Lefty was more interested in hitting things than hearing things, and, most importantly, he saw Julian as a kindred spirit.

Lefty was Julian’s first real friend. Julian would have done anything for him.

When they weren’t at school— sometimes when they should have been—they were inseparable.

They went to parties and chased girls. They tried booze and weed, found their limits, and laughed later about going past them. They even dabbled in stealing small things, ran from cops when it went sideways, and decided together they weren’t cut out for a life of crime.

They agreed on nearly everything.

Until Eleanor.

The Letter

You’ll think I’m giving up on us - giving up on you. I promise I’m not.

I could never give up on Julenor.

But Lefty needs me, Jules. I think if he’s alone, he won’t make it.

And it’s not that I don’t think you need me. I need you too. But right now, he needs me more than you do. 

Julian Today

Julian sits in his truck, parked outside his mother’s house—the last place he’d seen Eleanor.

He’d thought about reading it here. His mother had been the one to help him back then. She’s always been the one to help him.

He can’t put this on her again.

This isn’t the place either.

His gaze shifts to the photo in its misfitting frame on the passenger seat. 

“Fuck you, Lefty,” he mutters under his breath.

He turns the key and starts the truck again.

Julian at Seventeen

If you’d asked Julian when he was seventeen, he’d have said he and Lefty had one rule. No cheap shots. If somebody needs to be hit, let them see you coming. Hit them in the face.

“Did you kiss my sister Saturday night?” Lefty demanded one day, sitting in his family’s pool house. 

The tone of the question told Julian asking which Saturday, volunteering he’d been kissing Eleanor for a while was a bad idea. 

As he thought about how to respond, how to tell Lefty he’d really like to keep kissing her, Julian was surprised to learn that there was a second rule, and it trumped the first. 

Lefty punched Julian in the face, and Julian didn’t see it coming.

“Get up!” Lefty demanded.

It was the only time Lefty and Julian fought each other for real.

Lefty was a better fighter than Julian, so Julian wore the worst of it. But every time Lefty would get through Julian’s guard he’d taunt “you ready to stop?” and Julian knew he didn’t just mean the fight.

“I’m not stopping!” Julian would insist, and Lefty knew Julian didn’t mean the fight either.

The fight lasted till they couldn’t stand any longer. As they lay gasping for breath on the floor of the poolhouse, Lefty looked at Julian through sweat and blood and declared, “alright then. But anyone messes with her, you fight them like that. And if you break her heart, I will end you!”

And that was how Julian and Eleanor officially became Julenor.

The Letter

I think mum and dad are right. I think Lefty is mixed up in some bad stuff. And I get why they think moving the whole family away will make things better.

But if you’re not there, and I’m not there, what’s he going to do?

Maybe worse stuff.

Someone needs to be there.

Julian Today

Julian sits in his truck outside the apartment block that he and Eleanor had toured back when he was eighteen and she’d just turned nineteen. 

He’s trying to find a place with good memories to read the letter.

And this plan had been ridiculous.

Even if they’d had jobs, there was no way El’s parents would have let her move out with Julian. They tolerated him. Somewhere between acceptance and turning a blind eye to the frequency with which Julian crashed in their pool house.

It made their relationship tough at times. They’d broken up twice in the last twelve months. But Julenor always found their way back together.

So they’d gone checking out apartments. It had been a joke, really, pretending for real estate agents to be highly paid young masters of the universe. 

This had been the first - the only - place they had tried. The gag had turned on Julian. The living room and kitchen here was nearly as big as the whole house he and his mother lived in. He knew Lefty and El’s family were from a different world, but the pool house had been so beyond his hopes it almost didn’t register.

As he’d walked through this place with El, being shown through by a young man his age in a suit, he’d felt a sense of near panic. This was what she expected. There wasn’t a hope in hell he could provide it.

Afterwards, away from the kid in a tie, El had laughed.

“I feel sorry for that kid! He thinks we’re moving in!”

When Julian didn’t laugh, she sensed something was wrong.

“What’s up Jules? Don’t feel too bad for the kid, he’ll be fine.”

Julian tried to think of some sort of quip. He needn’t have bothered. When their eyes met, she knew. She always knew.

When El looked at Julian, she looked at him differently than anyone else. Like she saw him, and believed he was worth seeing. Julenor was a team. They had each other's backs.

“Don’t let it get you down. Maybe we shouldn’t have started in this neighbourhood. Remember Jules, I don’t actually have a dime either.”

When he didn’t respond, it was like she read his mind.

“Julian, the only thing that will stop you living in a place like this someday will be you deciding there’s something better!”

Julian loved El’s scarlet curls, and her athletic frame.  But what he adored was her eyes. When El’s green eyes met his, really looked at him, anything was possible.

That was his dream.

Just those eyes.

This isn’t the place either. If Julian’s going to read this letter, he has to really look, like she would have. He knows where he has to go.

Young Adult Julian

“What do you mean you’re leaving?” Julian’s heart was in his mouth. 

He knows this memory takes place on a sunny day, at the beginning of spring. In his mind's eye it’s cold, without sunlight, the world closing in.

“My whole family is going, Jules. I’m sorry. They sprung it on us.”

Julian knows El’s parents have never cared for this relationship, but that seems extreme, even for them.

“But why? They can’t hate us being together that much, can they?”

“It’s not us Jules. It’s Lefty.”

“Lefty?

“They think… they think he’s been robbing houses.”

“What? Lefty? No… me and him, we were always up for a scuffle, but we were never any good at any real crime…”

Julian’s been working as a labourer. It’s hard work, but it turns out he’s pretty good at it. He’s willing to work hard. He’s strong. He’s eager to learn from his workmates, who have interesting things to show him. 

The foreman has been talking about finding him an apprenticeship. 

“I think they’re right, Jules.”

Julian had to admit, he wasn’t really sure what Lefty was doing a lot of the time these days. When he wasn’t working, he was with El. He was really trying to make it work this time. They were fiery together, but nobody looked at him the way she did.

“You think he’s robbing houses?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. Mum and dad say the only way to fix things is starting over.”

Julian can still taste the bitterness of his laugh all these years later.

“Won’t work. Want my list of school transcripts?”

Julian wants to scream. To put his fist through a wall. To hold El and never let her go.

“I believe you. But… if you were them, wouldn’t you want to try?”

She was right. Of course she was right. She was always right, it was her most infuriating trait.

But Julian wasn’t feeling anger. He was panicking. He and Eleanor had broken up many times. This was different. She was leaving.

Eleanor was giving up on them.

“Do you have to…”

“I don’t want to go. But I have to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you.”

Eleanor lingered a final moment. Through the tears in his eyes, Julian didn’t see Eleanor place a letter on the hall table. Didn’t see the breeze of Eleanor’s sudden departure blow it off, to settle into a box of winter coats his mother was halfway through packing.

Once the door was closed, for the first time since he was four, Julian cried.

The Letter

I don’t want to leave. You must realise that. Things have been so good between us. Your job is going well. I really was going to move out with you… 

Mum told me this morning. That’s how much warning I had. It’s not fair. Not fair on me, not on you.

But it’s not fair on them either. We’re going because they’re worried that if we don’t, Lefty is going to end up in jail. Or worse. 

So we’re moving to our vacation place in Europe.

I don’t want to leave you. But I can’t give up on Lefty. 

I hope you can understand that.

I hope you can forgive me.

I love you!

El

Julian Today

Tears roll down Julian’s cheeks as he finishes reading.

She was right. Of course she was right. She was always right.

She hadn’t given up on him. She had been faced with an impossible choice.

Julian looks up. He sits on a bench, in a cemetery. He hasn’t been here since the funeral. 

He reaches into his pocket, producing the picture, and opens the frame. He removes  the square photo, and unfolds the left-hand side, revealing the full image. Young Julian’s other arm is slung around El, who is laughing toward the camera. Three young friends, sharing their joy with the image’s viewer.

If he’d just asked her to stay…

Lefty and El never made it to the holiday house. Lefty had been part of a burglary. Swiped a set of keys, and stole a car. Somehow, El had ended up in the passenger seat as Lefty took a joyride to farewell his hometown.

It was lucky the family in the SUV Lefty hit ignoring a red light hadn’t been hurt. Lefty and El weren’t so fortunate. The stolen car was estimated to have rolled six times before it hit the tree.

Julian stares down at the image. Himself, flanked by the two people with whom he’d passed from bad news kid to functioning adult. At their best.

He approaches the headstones. “Leonard and Eleanor. Forever missed. Forever in our hearts.” There are fresh flowers. 

Julian replaces the image in the frame. Properly now. It fills the frame with no gaps. He leans down and places the frame beside the flowers.

He is sure he’ll dream of green eyes tonight, but as he turns to leave, he finds he is less scared of it than he was this morning.

He folds the letter and places it in his pocket.