“You’ve been on my mind,” I told the summer time peanut
butter-colored woman on the other end of the Campbell Soup can with the
string attached. I felt like a child calling her out of the blue, but
the skies have been leaking for several hours on the other side of the
Starbucks window, and I don’t do so well with keeping secrets during
rain times.

She didn’t mean to answer, but I forgot to tell her I
changed my number, and she was hoping I was someone calling with a
potential job. “I can’t do this with you right now, “ she exhaled. She’s
with someone who loves her, but not as much as I did. He’s not a
writer, but she can understand the life of a bookkeeper, so she equates
his showing up for her book club meetings ever fourth Sunday with love,
and my absence and an attempt to distance myself from a situation she
feared I feared. “It was always you,” I told her.

She can’t hang
up because I may never call back, and secretly that would kill her.
It’s been years since we’ve talked, but that was on some social media
site and nothing we said sounded like “I miss you.” But I did tell her
I’d be in DC in a few months and I’d love to see her. She never
responded and this was the first conversation since then. But she didn’t
mean to pick up. She fears I’ll hear the red drippings running down her
arm and tears that follow closely behind. I heard them drop into a sink
with no water.

“Are you in the bathroom,” I asked. The acoustics.

She
doesn’t want to meet me because she’s in love with a man who loves her,
but not as hard as I did. He’s just able to tell her more than I could.
She believes actions speak louder and written words, and I gave up
writing letters when they stopped working. She doesn’t want to meet
because I remember her old dreams. I remember the girl who got excited
at the thought of becoming the kind of woman who carried around a zoom
lens that would allow her to sit on a cliff and take photos of lions,
tigers and antelope. She doesn’t want to remember that girl. She wants
badly to believe she’s always been happy with never knowing
international calling codes.

She became a girl who tapes razor
blades to her thigh in case she cuts too deep one day and someone
mistakes her actions for a failed suicide attempt. She just needs to
know I wasn’t the one who cut her deepest. I call her to remind her I
was the one who hurt her the most. I put her dreams on that string
between out two cans and let them hang there until she grabs them or
until she’s bold enough to change her number so I may never find her.

And
I know I’m fucked up for reminding her that no one will ever love her
as hard as I did, and she’ll cry most nights when he’s paying too much
attention to her instead of ignoring her and writing in some Moleskine
journal, and she’ll convince herself and her friends that those are
tears of joy because she’s finally found the one who dared to let her be
his one and only.

“I guess that’s it. I just wanted to say I’ve been thinking of your face.”