A Thousand Letters

I took off my coat too, tossing it on my bed, stepping behind her to hold her around the waist. My chin rested on top of her head, and she covered my arms with hers.

"Feels like yesterday," I said. "Time is a funny thing, isn’t it?"

"It is," she answered quietly before turning around in my arms. "I’ve missed you. Every second of every day."

I brushed her cheek with the backs of my fingers. "I thought I could forget you. I even convinced myself I had, for a time. But it was impossible. You left a mark on my soul I couldn’t erase."

The feeling of her body against mine, the weight of her hands on my chest reminded me she was real. And then I kissed her, compiling the sensations blissfully.

"I want to know everything," I said, pressing my lips to her temple. "Everything I missed, everything that’s happened."

She chuckled. "So much. Seven years’ worth."

"I’ve got all the time in the world to listen."

She sighed, the sound full of perfect happiness. "Where should I start?"

"From the minute I left."

"That," she said sadly, "was not a very tale-worthy time."

"But I want to know all the same."

She took my hand and led me to my bed, climbing in to lie against the wall, and I lay next to her. Her body curled and molded to mine, our legs wrapping around each other, her arm over my chest and mine under her shoulders, her dark hair fanned out and my hand unable to leave it alone. I slipped silky strands of it between my fingers, lost in the moment with her.

We lay like that for a little while before she spoke.

"You read my letters, so you know a bit."

I nodded and kissed her forehead.

"For almost two years, I floated through life, not knowing if I’d ever recover. I just kept writing letters, an exercise likened to stamping your feet in the cold to keep the blood flowing. It was the only way I could survive, to get the words out and away from me. Except the words were wind. They meant nothing to anyone but me. Or, I thought. I wasn’t sure if you’d even gotten them or if you did, if you’d read them."

"I did. I read every one, just not when I should have."

She was quiet for a moment. "I think I’d rather hear what happened to you through all that time. I’ve missed it all."

"I … Elliot, I don’t know how to tell you what it was like."

"Words, strung together, one at a time."

I took a deep breath, her arm riding the rise and fall of my chest. "When I left, I left my soul here, with you." I paused, not sure how to put it but trying to, regardless. "I was empty at first, focused only on basic training. Every day was scheduled, every minute from the time I woke to the second the lights went out, and it seemed the next thing I knew, I was shipped off to Iraq."

Her hand shifted, resting in the hollow of my chest, just above my heart.

"It was … extreme, intense is the only way I know to explain it. You know, during the war, we had ways to call home, ways to keep in touch, but none of us did. I mean that — not the guys with kids or families, no one. It was too hard, knowing that back home, everyone went about not knowing, not seeing the world for what it is, not knowing what we knew. I barely spoke to Dad or the girls, but they wrote, and you wrote. But I couldn’t answer. I tried. I was going to. But there was a moment …" I paused. I’d never spoken about it.

"You don’t have to talk about it," she said softly, as if she knew.

I squeezed, holding her to me as I pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

"It’s okay. It was a long time ago. Our truck hit an IED and flipped. My friend died, and I knew I couldn’t answer you because I was sure, certain in that moment that I would die before I could get home to you. I dug a hole, a deep hole in myself, and I hid there, burying that most precious part of me so it would survive what I went through, all I saw. The only problem was that before long, I’d forgotten where it was buried. I don’t think I uncovered it again until I found you again here, now."

Her fingers closed, clutching my shirt.

"But I wrote to you every day. I’d write them over and over again. Admission after admission. Some days, I’d just tell you what I did that day. Some days I’d beg for your forgiveness. And some days, more days than I’d care to admit, my words were angry, hurt, unforgiving. But no matter what I wrote, I couldn’t send one back. I needed to be cut off from the rest of the world. From you. It was the only way I could survive everything I’d seen and the only way I could protect you from losing me. You’d already lost me. Better that than to give you hope. And part of me thought that if I didn’t respond that you’d stop, that you’d be quiet and leave it alone, all while hoping you’d never stop, riding to every mail pickup with my heart in agony and hope.

"I was in Afghanistan when you finally gave up on me. I’d brought the box with me to every station, the only personal effect I kept with me always. I bought it on my first tour to Afghanistan in a village nearby from a man who’d learned to carve from his father, who learned it from his father and back generations. A few months after I bought it, that village was laid to waste. I always wondered if he’d survived to teach his sons. But I never saw him again."

She took a shuddering breath, and I pulled her closer.

"It wasn’t long before the letters didn’t fit, and I’d gone through a journal. Then another. So when I came back to the States, I kept only the ones that meant the most. Every time I came home, I switched them out, and every time the ones I kept changed, with the exception of just a few. I have thousands of them in Germany, all worn, the creases soft from folding and unfolding them so many times over the years.