Page 112 of Her Sloth

Scared that if I go, I might wreck down the world behind me.

A letter.

From Elise.

She was in love with someone else.

“Tell me to stay,” I whisper. My breathing flattens.

“No, I won’t,” she says. “Because if it were reversed, and that letter was from Hailey, I’d run to it.”

I stare at her, frozen to the spot.

“Go,” she says again. “Run. And if you decide to come back, I promise you I'll be here.”

My breathing is erratic.

I can’t.

How can I walk away from a woman like her?

How can I put a ghost before her?

How can I even think⁠—

She mouths I love you.

I look into those blue eyes for just one moment.

Then I turn.

I walk.

Then run.

Run to the truck and rip open the door.

There it is, waiting for me as if it had always been there.

I grab it.

Sit down in the truck.

Stare at it.

She was in love with someone else.

My fingers tremble.

I unfold the paper.

My love,

This is the fifteenth time I've tried to write this letter, and I am nowhere near getting it right. There is so much I want to tell you, so I’m gonna start by saying I am sitting here in a house so beautiful you can’t comprehend, in the middle of pure nature, green grass and the ocean right in front of me. Although your New York City ass would probably suffocate from too much clean air.

I can literally hear her dry humor resonating through me as if it were yesterday when I last heard her tell me that I am not meant for everything outside of New York. We got lost upstate because she “knew a shortcut”. The memory of her laughing her rich laughter as we stood in absolute darkness and nothingness somewhere in the Adirondacks with just the moonlight falling onto us.

A stabbing pain in my chest thinking about it.