Signed, Love

Love looked up from her writing desk just in time to see a grey SUV drive past the front window of her first-floor apartment. This wasn’t the kind of thing she was used to seeing here. Despite the wide streets that so many cars used to navigate, most people either walked or rode their bicycles into town. If she hadn’t been plugging away at her typewriter that morning, she wouldn’t have been around to see it at all.

Love had hardly even left the bedroom. It had been three days since she’d showered. She didn’t know how long it had been since she had cleaned her usually-tidy apartment. Ordinarily, she kept to a strict schedule of doing the washing up after each meal. She had a chart pinned to the wall and everything. Now the dishes were stacked in the sink, caked with leftovers from the past week. She couldn’t even bear to think about the laundry.

She sighed, looking out at the street. Raining again, she thought as she watched the miniscule droplets hit the screen of the window. She hadn’t stopped typing. She’d been doing this long enough to not have to look at the keys as she pounded them with her thin fingers. The polite dinging of the machine snapped her out of her trance. She pulled the paper from the typewriter and turned around in her brown leather chair. She faced the white cat sitting in the basket in the corner of the room. It looked up at her with its clear blue eyes. She cleared her throat.

“Dear…you,” she stuttered. “It’s been a week since you left. It took me two days to take your towel out of the bathroom, and another three to wash it. I threw away your toothbrush, but it’s still sitting in the trash. I have to keep my eyes above the counter because it always feels like it’s looking at me. I really should take out the trash.”

Love swiveled in her seat, pulled a red pen from the cup on her desk, and crossed out the last sentence she had read. She turned back to the white cat, still looking at her, wide-eyed.

“I can still feel you here. My apartment is haunted now. Everywhere I look, I can see you. You’re still cooking eggs in the middle of the night and typing crass messages onto the blank pages in my typewriter. You’re still playing love songs on the cheap guitar you left here – the one with the broken string. I think you called the guitar Giselle, but I don’t remember. It feels so long ago now.”

Love looked up at the cat, who had rolled onto its back in the basket, never taking its eyes off her. She stood, letter in one hand, and walked to the basket. She knelt and stroked the cat. Love could swear that this was the only cat that would tolerate having its stomach stroked. This one only purred. She walked to the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors. This may have been her favorite place in the whole world. When he was around, fiery-red tomatoes grew in the planter boxes he had built for her. They always rotted before she could pick them, but she supposed that the sentiment was the important part. Her favorites were the peonies she had planted in May. They had grown shockingly fast. Perhaps the rotten tomatoes had fertilized the soil – she couldn’t be too sure. The rain was stirring the soil and wetting her hair. She walked quickly to the covered part of the porch and sat down on the ground. The letter was wet now, too, but she didn’t mind. It added to its charm, she supposed. She cleared her throat once more.

“I knew from our first date that I would fall in love with you. I loved the way that you ordered us gin and tonics, and grazed my hand when you set mine in the space in front of me. You couldn’t have picked a worse location for a first date, but you also couldn’t have picked a better drink. The way you looked at me made me feel like I was the only person in the whole world that mattered.

“Maybe I fell too fast. Or maybe I was already in love when you found me. Either way, you were all I had ever wanted. I started writing poems again when you found me. I started singing, learned how to make bread from scratch. All for you.”

This was never the easy part. She looked out at the rain, stirring the soil. At least her peonies looked happy.

“I keep thinking about your scars, and how much they looked like the stretch marks on my inner thighs. I hope you know that I fell in love with those too. You, with them. All of you. I didn’t really care that you smoked so many cigarettes. I just wanted you to be here with me as long as you could be.”

A gentle tear gathered in the corner of Love’s eve, and she quickly wiped it away. She had forgotten her pen, and stood up slowly. She hurried through the rain, closing the door behind her. The cat was waiting on the other side of the door, and followed her back to her writing desk. She sat down on the leather chair, which resisted her weight with a sharp creak. She lifted the pen and crossed out the line, “I didn’t really care that you smoked so many cigarettes,” as well as the word “just”. “Just” sounded too apologetic, and he didn’t deserve any apologies from her.

She glanced up at the papers pinned to the wall. There were photographs of those she cared for. So many people she had come to love. And so many letters. The most recent were the closest to her desk. She pulled the last one off the wall, not bothering with the thumb tack. Dear Love, it read. She skimmed its contents, letting tears pool in her eyes again. The letter was signed, Regards, Hate. She crumbled the paper and tossed it into the bin behind her, her breathing growing sharp and heavy with each passing moment. She inhaled deeply, and went on reading.

“My poetry professor told me to remove ‘you’ from my poems, because ‘you’ are getting in the way of the meaning. It isn’t wrong. ‘You’ are invading my life. Eroding me from miles away. Destroying my sleep patterns and wasting the pages of my journals. We were in love once, whatever that means. Even still, I can feel you here. I can feel you in the smoke. In the wind on my cheeks. I felt you when I noticed the stars for the first time in months.

“I’d like to think that we’re looking up at the same sky. Same stars. Same big moon. I think about all of the things that we never got to do, the things I never got to say. The things I’ll never get the chance to tell you. We weren’t star crossed. We weren’t meant to be. We weren’t battered into the very cosmos. But I bless you. And I know someday I’ll walk backwards to the spot we first met and…” Love inhaled sharply. “Forget you.”

She needed to let Hate go. She gazed out the front window again. A man rode past on a shiny silver bicycle. The sun had burnt away the clouds.

She reached for the cup on her desk and pulled her favorite black pen from the masses. She uncapped it, took a deep breath, and lowered it to the page in front of her.

Signed, Love.