Letters Never Sent Never reached their destination Mostly born of pain Resurfaced with the purpose of A trip down memory lane Broken hearted, breaking hearts All the way it went Evidence of what I saw My experiments Life’s a riddle, life’s a dream Life’s an accident Now I’m gonna set them free Letters never sent Letters never sent to you Letters never sent Once upon a time taboo Letters never sent Letters never sent to you Letters never sent Incongruous, and overdue Letters never sent

Letters never sent

That is how I came to be sitting in my sweet, silver Sentra driving to Bixby to break into their house.

Actually, I wouldn’t have to break in.  I had an access card for the gate, I had a key to the garage door, I knew the code for the alarm, I even knew the password for the security company (in case I accidentally set off the alarm instead of disarming it, something all of us have done at least once).  Of course, the fact that is was “Cleo has head lice” wasn’t exactly flattering, but it was vintage Zac.  As I drove along the freeway with all the windows rolled down, I found myself wishing I had thought to grab a scrunchy for my way too long hair and that all four of the speakers worked.  But, hey!  I hadn’t and they didn’t.  I sped along with my hair creating almost impenetrable blind spots and the sound of a very young Taylor exhorting me to not accuse out of crackling speakers.  Now, it felt like home.

So, Taylor loved me.  And to be completely honest, I knew I loved him as well.  Jarrod had asked me to define my love for him.  He had wanted me to break it down into easily understandable language.  But really, how could I?  Taylor was the air I breathed, he was the blood in my veins, he was the spark of life that kept me moving.  Every conscience moment of my life had him in the background.  He may not have been a major player in every moment, but his  presence colored every memory.

Diana was sitting next to me on the couch breastfeeding her brand new baby.  I had been told his name was going to be Jordan Taylor, but we all already called him Taylor.  My mother was in the kitchen preparing a meal for the Hanson family.  Thad, Jarrod and Isaac were on the floor playing with Isaac’s new Tonka truck set.  When Taylor had come home from the hospital, he had given Ike a gift for being his older brother.  And although I hated dolls, I was fascinated with this small human.  In my almost 3 year old mind, he looked like an angel.  He was probably about 3 days old, he was red and wrinkly and beautiful.  I thought the sounds he made were amazing.  He sounded like a kitten as he sucked, making soft mewing sounds.  Even when he cried, it almost sounded like singing.  I remember watching the soft spot on the top of his head move in and out with his sucking.  I put my finger on the spot, Diana smiled down at me.  “Can you feel that?  That moving in and out?”  I shook my head solemnly.  “That is his heart beating.”

“His heart?”

“Yes, your heart is what keeps you alive.”  She said taking my hand and putting it on her heart.  “See, I have one and so do you...”  I smiled as I watched his heartbeat.  I leaned forward after a few minutes and placed a kiss on the top of his head.  “Cleo, would you like to hold him?”  She asked as he finished eating.

Again, I nodded solemnly.  She took him and placed him gently on my lap, holding his head as she positioned a pillow under my arm.  His little arms swung around in the air as he stretched.  He yawned an enormous toothless yawn, his breath smelled sweet, almost fruity.  His enormous eyes looked up into mine.  I remember thinking his eyes were too big for his head.  I took his tiny
hand into mine and his fingers immediately wrapped around my finger.  “Look,” I said.  “He’s holding my hand...”

“Yes, he is...”  Diana said.  She had scooted in close to me.  She had both of us cradled in her arms.  “He already loves you.”

“I love him too.”  I said.  He was so small and so beautiful, his arms curled in and his legs pulled up.  He hardly looked real.  “Was he really in your tummy?”

“Yes, he doesn’t look like he fit, does he?”  I shook my head and watched as his tongue stuck out between his chubby, blistered lips.  “You know, he was just with the angels.  He is still perfect, he is still an angel.”

I closed my eyes momentarily as I sat at a light.  It was all so long ago and yet, it was just moments ago.  Maybe Zac was right.  Maybe, I had always been in denial.  Maybe, Jarrod was right, I had thought I deserved to be punished because I had lived.  But, it always came back to the fact that Taylor loved me.  The car behind me honked when the light turned green shocking me out of my memories.

Jordan Taylor Hanson was in love with me.

This was a thought so huge and overwhelming, I could scarcely process it.  And really, I can’t even explain why it loomed so large.  But it did.  Sometimes, when I thought of him and the fact he loved me, I would see black dots in front of my eyes.  Almost as though I was going to pass right out.  And really, I didn’t know why.  Maybe, it was because he seemed too perfect.  Maybe, it was because he ALWAYS reminded me of Thad.  Or, maybe it was because “I love you” meant forever.  I know people fall in and out of love all the time, but both of us came from families where our parents had fallen in love young.  Our parents had gone to high school together.  Diana and Walker had double dated with my parents pretty much constantly.  The four of them were seen as a group.  And, in our families, being in love meant getting married and getting married meant forever.  I wasn’t sure I had forever to offer to anyone.  I sighed as I turned into their driveway and slid my access card through the reader.  The reader beeped twice and the gate slowly swung open.  I drove up the winding tree lined driveway and parked behind Taylor’s black BMW.  As I walked past, I noticed a note stuck under the windshield wiper.  I pulled it out.  A note from a fan.  Man, some girl was really brave to trek all the way up to the house.  Brave or stupid.

I looked up at the enormous new house Isaac, Taylor and Zac had bought their mother.  This house was a castle compared to the one they had grown up in and yet, it had the feeling of their old house.  Diana had created another warm and comfortable environment.  I quickly punched the familiar numbers on the alarm keypad and again waited for it to beep twice.  After it had, I slid the key into the lock and stepped into the garage.  This garage held cars and motorcycles.  They didn’t need to have their studio in the garage anymore.  Now, they had a state of the art recording studio with lovely real maple paneling and gorgeous maple floors in the basement, no more hand wrought murals, no more cinderblock walls, no more hard cement floors.

I opened the door that led up into the house.  At the top of the stairs, I opened the door into the house.  To my right and down four steps was the living room, to my left was the kitchen and family room and behind me, were the stairs up into the bedrooms.  Now, for the first time in her life, Diana had a real living room, with thick cream carpeting and matching leather couches and chairs.  And in her curio cabinet where all the awards each of her children had won.  To her, these were the real treasures.

I turned and started up the second set of stairs.  Zoë’s room was the last one on the right, it was closest to Diana and Walkers room.  I looked curiously into each room.  The beds were all made and small piles of clean clothes were sitting at the foot of each bed.  I smiled.  A housekeeper was another luxury the boys had been able to give their mother.  I stepped into Zoë’s room and there on her pillow nestled among the other stuffed animals lay her Zubbie.  I picked up the well loved blanket and stepped over to the window.  The backyard of this house not only had a swimming pool, it also had a tree house, built no doubt by some contractor.  And instead of a goal in soccer being between 2 trees, there were soccer goals set into the enormous expanse of perfectly manicured grass.

I sighed and the sound scared me.  This was probably the quietest the house had ever been.  There was always something going on.  But, with all of them gone...  I turned and started back down the hallway.  I was about to go down and leave, but the staircase up to the boys room was right there.  I had to go up.  I had to.  I mounted the steps slowly.  Should I be doing this?  Should I be invading their privacy?  His privacy?  Probably not, and yet...  I was going to.  The door was open a crack, so I pushed it open wide.  And there, before me, was their room.  I had to laugh as I thought about all the girls who would give their right arm to see this room.

I stepped inside and took a deep breath.  Although the boys hadn’t slept in here for months, it still had the essential, almost fetid smell of boy in it.  The walls were painted a deep and soothing blue with the carpet a still darker blue.  Even though this room was big enough for each of them to have their own double bed, they still slept in a bunk bed with a trundle for Zac.  Now, they had nicer comforters on their beds, but other than that, it was exactly like it had been in their old house on 78th Street.  They had decided instead of new big beds, they would each get their own desk with bookshelves.  So, on one wall was their battered old bed and on the other were new beautiful desks and bookshelves.

I walked over and sat on the bottom bunk.  There in the headboard were some of the things that made Taylor, well, Taylor.  There was a dog eared copy of Atlas Shrugged with a bookmark about 2/3 of the way through.  A tube of cherry flavored Chapstick with no lid.  2 or 3 necklaces he hadn’t taken on tour with him.  A half-empty box of Kleenex and a few Fisherman’s Friend throat lozenges.  A ring.  A watch that probably needed a new battery.  A jar full of change.  I smiled as I looked at the jar of change.  Taylor is notorious for climbing into bed fully clothed, just taking time to kick off his shoes.  The change in the jar was the money that had fallen out of his pockets into his bed.  The housekeeper carefully gathered up the change each morning and put it into the jar that had at one time had peanut butter in it.  I leaned down and took a deep breath of his pillow.  Yes, his smell was there.  It was a strange combination of a shampoo, Coolwater, Colgate, coffee and sweat.  I curled up on his bed and buried my face in his pillow.  I missed the smell of him.

Sometime later, I jolted awake.  It was now fully dark outside.  I hadn’t meant to fall asleep and yet here surrounded by his smell, I had.  I sat up and stretched.  I padded over to the bathroom.  I really, really needed to wake up.  If I was going to drive all the way home, I needed to splash some water on my face.  I laughed as I was greeted by the enormous collection of toothbrushes stuck in a cup on the sink.  There was probably 6 or 7 of each of their colored toothbrushes.  Out of curiosity, I opened the medicine chest.  Inside, there were about 10 of each type of shaving creme and toothpaste they liked.  When they got home, I was going through their luggage to see if I could find all of the lost or left behind toothpaste, toothbrushes and shaving creme.

I stepped back into their room and looked at their desks.  Each desk told their own story and told more about the personality of their owners.

Isaac had an actual antique rolltop desk with an equally antique bankers lamp to light his desk.  His bookshelves were antique pharmacy shelves.  His desk was the organized, but still cluttered.  His pens and pencils were carefully tucked away in a drawer.  There were a few framed photos lined up across the top of his desk.  There was a jar filled with guitar picks of every type and description.  I could read the band or guitarist name on a few of them, Jonny Lang, U2, Steven Perry...  Isaac really was just a glorified guitar groupie.  I curiously pulled some of the papers out of the various pigeonholes along the back of his desk.  All I found was some old fan mail, credit card receipts for pretty much everything he’d ever bought and what looked like lyrics written on every random scrap of paper he could find.  In fact, one of the scraps of paper was a deposit receipt from my bank account.  I smiled remembering the afternoon we were driving along and Ike had suddenly demanded I get him a piece of paper and a pen.  After a frantic scramble, I had handed him this receipt from my bank.  Ike had written what would eventually become the chorus to a song as we hurtled down the highway with him driving.

Next, there was Zac’s desk.  It was an ultra modern metal and white wood computer desk with matching shelves.  Everything on his desk was organized or more organized than either of his brothers.  All the various computer disks lined up in alphabetical order.  Unlike Taylor, he hadn’t ever lost a pair of sunglasses, they sat lined up across the top of the desk.  In addition to pens, pencils, markers, pastels, and paints, he had drumsticks and pieces of drumsticks.  He had computer magazines, video game magazines, Billboards and Rolling Stones and the occasional Playboy (very well disguised as a Rolling Stone).  There was also pile of prints, postcards, ads torn from magazines, drawings...  Things he was going to have framed one day.  In his bookshelves, there were multiple metal magazine holders.  Each one filled with comic books, each box carefully labeled in his backwards slanting handwriting, telling which titles and issue numbers.  And art books.  Zac had a seriously impressive collection of art books covering everyone from Van Gogh to Picasso to Ansel Adams at 100 to Diane Arbus’ Twins.  And between all of this was sketchbook after sketchbook, each of his sketchbooks was dated according to the day he filled the last page.  Zac truly was an amazing artist.

Finally, there was Taylor’s desk.  Both Zac and Ike’s desk had a sort of order to it, but Taylor’s?  It was a total mess.  There were no orderly piles.  His pens and pencils were buried under papers, resting on the keyboard of the computer, resting in cups.  The papers were a strange collection of old schoolwork, particularly memorable fan mail, articles ripped from newspapers and magazines, none of them seemed to be related and yet each article had notes scribbled in the margins in his sloppy looping handwriting.  I sat in the chair before his desk and let my hands slowly move across the piles.  I occasionally would stop and read the words on the pages.  Taylor had one of the most amazing voices, could play the piano with such passion it brought tears to my eyes and now as I read his words, I could see he had the soul of a poet.  The words on these pages would never be in songs and yet their beauty and honesty deserved to be seen by the entire world.

I pulled open the top drawer and in there was a large scrapbook.  A scrapbook so much like the ones the fans made for their birthdays and yet, on the cover was a simple pencil sketch of me.  I picked the book up and looked carefully at the beautifully wrought picture, it was beautiful even if it was me.  And for perhaps the first time, I saw myself through his eyes.  In his eyes, I was truly beautiful.

I carefully opened the book and on the very first page was a picture I had never seen before.  It was a picture of me before I’d cut off all my hair, so, it had to be before Thad had died.  In the picture, I am sitting on the roof of the shed, my knees pulled up to my chest, my face turned to the sky.  It appears that my super secret hiding place hadn’t really been all that secret.  The look on my face seemed to be so hopeful, so filled with the endless possibilities stretched out before me, so unaware of the heartache waiting around the corner for me.  All around the picture, Taylor had drawn shooting stars and the moon in all it’s phases and in the lower right hand corner were the words:
 

 And now here is my secret, a very simple secret;
 it is only with the heart one can see rightly,
 what is essential is invisible to the eye.
                                    --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Little Prince had long been my favorite book.  In fact, I had sent him a copy of the book as a thank you gift for helping at Thad’s funeral.  I had never known until this moment whether or not he had actually read the book.

On the facing page was a picture of me holding Taylor on my third birthday.  I remember Walker taking this picture.  My dark curly hair pulled up into messy, unruly pigtails and I’m wearing my only dress.  At this stage in my life, I insisted that I dress just like Thad, ‘cause in my mind, that is what twins did.  I knew this because of the Wilson twins, these little girls always wore identical dresses with matching ribbons in their hair.  Every Sunday morning, I threw a major tantrum when my mother made me wear a dress.  So, we compromised.  I wore a dress on Sundays and I wore boys clothes the rest of the week.  I remember throwing a tantrum to beat the band; my mother was just stepping over me as she got ready for the kids and their parents to show up.  She told me I could scream all I wanted, I was NOT wearing my football outfit to the party.  As I screamed, the Hanson family walked through the door.  I remember a laughing Walker leaning down and picking me up off the floor and carrying me slung over his shoulder out onto the sun porch.  He had set me down in my fathers forbidden La-Z-Boy and had then taken a 4 month old Taylor out of Diana’s arms and placed him in my lap.  He had then began making silly noises and faces until both Taylor and I were smiling.

I turned the page and spread out before me were pictures of myself, things I had drawn.  I cringed at some of the pictures of me in what is obviously boys clothes.  I remember begging my mother over and over to let me cut my hair short like Thad’s, but on that point she had been relentless.  If I was going to dress like a boy, I was going to have long hair.  So, in picture after picture there was me and my huge, curly hair.  Me on a boys only soccer team.  Me playing little league on a boys team, eschewing bonnet ball cause they played like girls.  A picture of all of us up in a tree, I’m the highest.  A picture of me laying in the grass with Taylor’s head on my stomach.

I began to notice something, in most of the pictures I was close to Taylor.  In a picture of a game of Red Rover, I’m holding Thad’s hand on one side and Taylor on the other side.  In the picture of all us lined up in front of big splash, Thad is on my left and Tay is on my right.  The picture of us on the roller coaster, I’m sharing a seat with Taylor, not Thad.  Sitting in the booth at Sonic, Tay is next to me on the bench.  In all the church programs, at all of Thads swim meets, even on the bench of one of our soccer games.  And we always seem to be talking only to each other.  I turned another page and there before me was a whole 2 page spread of Taylor and I covered in chicken pox.  I looked at the pictures on these pages.  We were so comfortable together.  Laying on the floor creating an enormous Lego city, eating popsicles perched on the kitchen counter, a picture of both of us sticking our tongues way out to show the little blisters on our tongues, there was even a picture of both of us in the big tub in Diana and Walkers bathroom, neck deep in the milky water.

And then, suddenly, we weren’t near each other anymore.  I was off chasing Jarrod, with Taylor watching me.  I’m climbing a hill and I’m way ahead of everyone.  I’m standing alone on the top of the high dive.  Suddenly, I was apart from everyone, even Thad.  As we got older, the momentos pasted to the pages changed as well.  From the simple drawings I did in class.  To movie stubs and fortunes out of fortune cookies.  Scattered between the pictures were handbills and tickets from shows.  I laughed at the picture of Taylor trying to look all hard on one of the first Hanson Brothers poster.  Now, the pictures of me had become more solitary and more random.  And, if I was with someone, it was either Isaac or Zac.  As I got closer to the middle, I realized that the pictures on this page were from mine and Thad’s 16th birthday party.  These pictures probably represent the last carefree moments of my life.  I felt tears spring to my eyes as I looked at the pictures of Thad and I standing on the picnic table dancing like fools.  There were pictures from our colossal cake fight.  Me holding a sticky Mac in my arms.  Zac kissing me on the cheek.  Isaac dipping me.  Thad standing behind me, his chin resting on the top of my head his arm wrapped around me, it actually looked like a sweet picture except I knew he was restraining me so Zac could put cake down my shorts.  Taylor had pasted a series of pictures of me standing on the table with my arms crossed over my chest and me falling back into the waiting arms of Thad, Jarrod, Isaac, Taylor, Zac, my dad and Walker.  In that moment, I had felt such complete trust in the men in my life...

I turned the page and sucked in my breath.  There on the page was the most perfect pencil drawing of Thad.  I don’t know if the drawing was from a picture or from memory, but it captured him so perfectly.  His head was titled back and his mouth open in a laugh, his eyes glittering with vitality.  On the facing page, was a copy of the program from Thad’s funeral and a picture of all of us in our Sunday best.  My hair cut up to my shoulders all uneven and messy.  I looked closely at the picture and noticed everyone was giving or receiving some sort of comfort, but me.  I stood alone, my eyes vacant, my hands clasped tightly before me, crutches under my arms.  Isaac had his arms around both Taylor and Zac’s shoulders.  My mother and father were holding hands, comforting each other, sharing their enormous grief.  Jarrod was crying into his mothers shoulder.  But I stood alone.  I knew that anything after this page would be secondary.  I had continued and yet, I hadn’t.  I felt tears spring to my eyes, hot and angry.  I silently ran my fingers over the drawing, wondering what Thad would have looked like today, wondering if he would still have that completely infectious laugh, wondering who I would be.

I slowly shut the book.  I had seen enough.  I had invaded Taylor’s privacy more than I should have.  I pulled the drawer open again to put the book away, but an envelop fluttered out of the pages and down to the ground.  I picked it up and noticed that it had my name on the front of it.  It wasn’t sealed and well, it was addressed to me.
 

 Cleo,

     There are so many words I need to say and yet, I can never open my mouth when you are around.  These are words I would have said long ago, except...  it wasn't my place, you belonged to someone else.  And now, you don’t.  Sometimes, I feared you would be Jarrod’s forever.  I was terrified that I would never get the opportunity to tell you things that need to be said.  And now, I have my chance.  I came so close to telling you in the car that night...  That night in the parking lot of Taco Bueno.  So now, I’ll try to tell you what is in my heart.  Then I’ll try to find the courage to give it to you.  I have loved you for as long as I’ve had a conscious thought.  And I know most people would dismiss this as some sort of sick, silly puppy love (for want of a better word), but let me assure you that indeed, it is love.

     It is as surely love as the sun rises every morning.  As surely as I will take my next breath.  As surely as tomorrow, follows tomorrow and tomorrow.  I sound like the inside of a greeting card or a sappy song.  I don’t mean to.  I just want you to know that I am serious.  My love is as real and inevitable as the sun and breathing and that tomorrow will come.  And as surely as you will laugh again any moment now...  There,  there it is.  Your laugh, but it is meant for someone else, you laugh with Zac, with Isaac, with Avery, but never with me.  At one time, you used to  laugh with me.  I used to be the hand you held at scary movies.  I used to know all your secrets.  But somewhere along the way everything changed.  Maybe, it was me.  Maybe it was you.  But it is undeniable.  I want to know why or how this happened.  And yet, I have no clue.  So now, you sit maybe 15 feet from where I sit writing, yet you may as well be a world away.  Even if I called you and you walked into this room now, I would never be able to say what
I really wanted to say.

     There are so many things that we’ve left unsaid, unmentioned, or maybe you’ve even forgotten.  But I will never forget.  And somewhere deep inside, I know that you remember.  I replay that moment over and over again, that moment when I stepped out of the bathroom and you were sitting in a cloud of dark curly hair your eyes so sad, so full of heartbreak, I wanted more than anything to make the hurt leave...  I thought we had found each other that day.  I thought maybe I had taken a small portion of your heartbreak.  I thought I could be the harbor in which you could drop your anchor.  I thought so many things.  But, at the funeral when I saw that my small act, my small comfort was not enough...  could never be close to enough.  I was so young and your need was so huge.  I’ll be honest, I was scared.  Here I had loved you for so long and the first and only time I ever had the courage to show you or tell you and I could see that it could never be enough.

     So, when my family left for the second time.  Instead of you and Thad standing on your front porch waving goodbye to us.  We left and it felt like forever, nothing could ever be the same.  All the windows in your house were dark and closed, the blinds drawn almost as if you could stop a new day from coming by denying it’s light.  I don’t think I had ever seen them closed in my entire life.  The entire time we were in LA that first time, I couldn’t get the image out of my head of you laying in your bed, your eyes open and vacant, tears just leaking out of them.  I remember sitting on the edge of the bed and pushing your suddenly short hair back out of your face.  I remember kissing you and you turning away from me, “please, just leave me alone” was all you said as your shoulders began to shake.  Cleo, I wanted to comfort you...  I wanted to hold you...  I wanted you to comfort me...  And all you could do was turn away from me and it hurt.  And I know this isn’t any sort of excuse, but it really, really hurt.  It hurt to the point that I never wanted to see you again, never wanted you to be able to hurt me again.

     The next 6 months were busy.  Busier than any other time of my life, busier even than when we recorded This Time Around.  And to be honest, it was easier to not think at all.  The few time Zac, Ike and I did talk about you, about Thad, about all of this...  None of us could ever figure out what to think or what to do.  I would pick up the phone to call you and would realize I had nothing to say.  I wanted to call and ask you if what had happened meant as much to you as it did to me.  I don’t think I have to tell you this, but you were my first.  And I suspect I was your first.  Then, I began to think about what had happened.  We’d had sex...  The very idea of it was so enormous.  Sex at the best of times is just enormous and here we were at the worst of times trying to create something...  I was 13, you were barely 16.  Our timing couldn’t have sucked any worse, but God!  I loved you.  I loved you more and more with each passing day.  The very thought of you, in Tulsa, alone...  It was almost more than I could bear.  And the hardest thing was that I couldn’t banish the idea from my mind that I had meant nothing to you.  I started to believe that to you, I was just another little boy.  I even started to wonder if I was really your first.  I know the saying is that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but for me...  It was pure hell.  My insecurities mounted until soon, I was sure I had taken advantage of you.  That you hadn’t even been aware of what was going on.

     And then, we pulled into our driveway.  I wanted to run across the lawn, run up to your bedroom and find you still laying in your bed, waiting for me.  But I had to help bring things in, but each time I looked over toward your house, I was sure I could see Thad standing in his room.  I could see his curly hair in the window, or I thought it was him.  I remember sitting on the back steps to our house.  After LA, Tulsa felt so cold.  Then, you opened the blinds.  I could see you standing in Thad’s bedroom, your hand on the window.  I wanted to run over and find you and hold onto you, feel how real, how solid you were.  Just as I moved to go to you, Ike opened the door and told me Mom wanted me to come inside.  As I stepped into the kitchen, I reached for the phone to call you and found Ike already talking to Jarrod.  I was sitting holding the cordless as Jarrod ambled through the back door.  He pulled the fridge open and pulled out a coke, flopped down into a chair at the kitchen table and looked at me over his coke.  He asked me who I was calling, when I told him it was you, he laughed.  He threw his head back and laughed out loud.  Then he said, and I’ll never forget these words or the sound of his voice, “she can’t come over...  she’s all tuckered out...  but damn, she gives good head.”

     I don’t think I have to explain to you how hard those words hit me.  Ike started laughing.  Zac was almost in hysterics.  When I told Jarrod that I didn’t think it was very funny, well, he just looked at me and called me a fag.  So, from that moment on, anytime you were mentioned, I was made fun of.  But to be honest, I didn’t mind, cause I was getting teased for standing up for you.  I honestly didn’t like it, but I could take it because I didn’t think you deserved to be treated that way.  And then, I found myself avoiding Jarrod at all costs, but that meant I was avoiding you.  So, for the last 4 years I’ve watched you from a far.  I’ve watched you become more and more beautiful and more and more inaccessible.

     Then you began to show up with bruises and bumps.  And I knew where they came from. But how was I supposed to even approach you about that?  How do you walk up to the woman you love and ask if her boyfriend is beating her?  You came to work for us and things seemed to get better, cause you weren’t in Tulsa very often.  But every time we’d go home, you’d have a new bruise.  I have never wanted to kill someone so badly in all my life.

     And then you told me the happy news, you broke up with Jarrod.  And, you told me, not Isaac, not Zac, but me...  How was I supposed to take that?  Was it a sign?  Was is just because I was the only one in the car?  Was it because you wanted me to kiss you?  To hold you?  To comfort you?  If it was comfort you were looking for, again, I failed you.  I sat in your car holding your hand, willing you to know how I felt, to know that I loved you more than anything, to know this...  I will wait for you forever.

     I should go now and if I had half the balls I claim to have, I’d walk into the main room of the suite and hand it to you while you play Yahtzee with Avery, Ike and Zac.  But, I know this won’t happen.  I will fold this and stick it into my scrapbook.  And hope and wish you knew.

    Love always,

    Taylor

I carefully folded the letter and put it back into the envelope.  The envelope was well worn and dirty with smudges, it even looked like it may have been folded and in his pocket for a while.  I looked at it and wondered how long he carried it with him, hoping to find the courage to give the letter to me.  I slid it back into the scrapbook and stood up.  He had kept the 5 messy hand-written pages, so they must mean something to him.  And now, they meant everything to me.  I flipped the light on his desk off and walked over to his bunk again.  My hands trailing lovingly over his possessions.  How could I have missed it?  How come I never noticed he loved me?  I reached into my bag and fished out my cell phone.  It was 1:30 in the morning.  I wanted to call him, but it was far to late.

I leaned down and took a deep breath of his pillow again.  The smell of him was overwhelming.  I wrapped my arms and legs around his pillow.  When I moved his pillow, I found one of his t-shirts shoved carelessly underneath it.  I wrapped my hands in soft fabric and put it up to my face.  It smelled so much like him.  It smelled like the warm earth and natural musk.  It smelled of deodorant, cologne and sweat.  And as far as I was concerned it was heaven.  I closed my eyes against the tears that rushed into them.  I wanted to touch Taylor, to hold him, to tell him his little pieces of comfort had been felt and appreciated.  I wanted to beg his forgiveness for not noticing anything earlier.  I wanted to tell him I loved him, tell him I would die without him, tell him I would love him forever.

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