Authors: Nate Allen
He had never taken part in anything like it. Perhaps relationships weren’t his forte after all, at least not relationships of this nature. It would get exponentially worse. He thought he had attached his heart to an unavailable woman, he had seemingly hitched it to Halley’s Comet, and it wasn’t going to be back for another 75-76 years or so it felt. What the fuck? And like Bob from the local morning radio
Showgram
was always saying, “
I quit this bitch,
” he thought. See ya!!!
You have to remember he had a kind of emotional OCD, and this shit was eating him up from the inside out. He could’ve hurt somebody. He went home and composed a very pointed and targeted email, of the
“fuck you very much”
variety after he had some difficulty digesting his “lunch,” for it had not settled well.
So brace yourself, might want to go get a drink or a snack cause this could take awhile, but its relevant for a couple of reasons. First, it was impressive how the landscaper could articulate himself, and if you pay attention, he’ll tell you in a sense how things could take the turn they did. Secondly he was a wordsmith, it was his
twelve-inch cock
so to speak, and he would poke her with it just often enough that she wouldn’t forget it. The only common denominator between her “types” was that they had to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation, and he had no equal in that arena.
The first letter is extremely honest, it tells you what was going on inside the man, and in a sense it represents the last we’ll see of rational thinking where she was concerned. But she would never see it, there’s certain to be irony in that. For the most part everything afterwards would be written with ulterior motives, so here it went,
It read:
Dear Rae,
You asked me to trust my instincts and intuition and as such, I’m sensing a change in the role I’ve played in your life, or perhaps sadly, a cessation of it. I’m glad you’ve begun your journey anew, and I hope time and reflection will tell what a happy, enlightening, and fulfilling one it has been. I also hope you find something to sustain you along the way. It is becoming apparent why I was brought into your life, to fan the fire, as a bridge from one part of your life to the next, or maybe just as a short chapter in the story you will tell of your life. We existed in a vacuum of sorts for a moment in time, and it was an extremely intense, passionate and loving period. I ache at the thought that it is coming to a close, but I’m thankful for the experience of it at this time in my life nonetheless. I hope you have some similar feelings.
It was difficult at times to be separated from you, extremely difficult, and I think I could have sustained it. But I realized some things about your feelings toward me after the Beaufort trip, …as did you :)) when you explained that you had come to the realization that you could feel whatever it was you felt in your experience with me… without me, …and that I was not the source of it. And while I understand what you meant it was saddening to hear it, because what I have felt when I was with you was unique and specific to you, rare and not commonplace. The language you had used in the previous weeks is missing from your messages of late… “
that you could not imagine seeing me and not wanting to have a physically intimate relationship
,” that you were afraid if you let yourself you would “
consume
” me, “
the affection between us was so strong it couldn’t be hidden,
” and that your “
insides were raging,
” that you had never met anyone like me, and didn’t want me to not be a part of your life.
They are all wonderful things that will echo in my heart and head I am sure. But unfortunately they didn’t really withstand the first pierce to the armor, and I think I will consequently have some doubt regarding their strength and sincerity, not to mention my ability to trust my intuition in such matters. I am glad that I have given you something in our friendship that was of value to you, glad that I helped push open that door to the powerful love we all deserve and desire, and yes, truly saddened, in the deepest of ways, that I will not be the one who gets to walk through it. I have shared things with you that I have learned on my journey, words that have a pain associated with them for me, and while I know you understand the meaning in them, they will never truly mean what they should until you too have a pain associated with them to understand their value and wisdom.
Thank you for letting me be a part of your life, for allowing me to travel however briefly a part of this road with you. In reality it will be a journey that you must take alone, and I wish you all the best from the bottom of my heart, and wish for your safety as well. You will always be the “third” woman I have loved in my life, and I will remember you every time the wind blows through the hole left in my heart of that space only you have occupied. As always…
Love,
-Jake
…and he promptly sent it without hesitation …and then panicked as soon as he had done so, wishing he could undo it, to the point he began trying to access her email that he had helped her set up in an attempt to permanently delete it before she read it. If he couldn’t guess the password he was prepared to try and answer the secret question to reset it, even though it would send up a red flag to her in doing so …he didn’t care. His attempts failed to the point it triggered the automated prompt to reset the password via the secret question.
He had six adolescent boys downstairs making all the ruckus in the world, all calling for his attention and presence, and he was upstairs panicking like he had hit the launch codes for a nuclear attack, or the drug addict who in a moment of dread over their situation has flushed the remainder of their stash, only to then try and stop it from going completely down the toilet and salvage some trace of it, regretting the decision …it would have been pitiful to watch, he really was an inherently good guy, but unknown to anyone he was becoming an aberration of himself.
The secret question was “
What was your first car?
” He knew this, he had replayed the conversation in his mind, they were lying in his bed that Sunday morning the first weekend they had spent together, revealing bits and pieces of each other as unacquainted lovers do, and she had told him about how she was the first of her girlfriends to get a car. Her father was getting a new one and handed it down to her, it was a yellow Lincoln Continental, big as a damn classroom he remembered kidding her. She had told him that all the boys called them the ’Nental chicks as they drove around their Five Points neighborhood. It was so big they made her get two parking permits to park in the Broughton High lot. She kept it throughout her college years.
It was “
Continental,
” so he knew the answer to her secret question, but it was his last resort. He closed out of the webmail, and decided he would wait a few minutes, clear his thoughts …and the cache on his computer, and try the password again, he didn’t want to alarm her that it had been compromised if at all possible, and in the process close the window of communication. He pulled up the email login again, and tried a couple of more passwords, he remembered vividly the context of the conversation they had when she was setting it up, the password had to be something relevant to
their
situation, and what it represented to her,
escape
seemed relevant. He tried it, and boom …he was in.
It sounds unbelievable, but it happened, and there he was in her email account, but there was a lot of damn mail and it wasn’t all his. It was like a perverse soap opera, he was reading her emails from this guy Timothy she had told him about, emails from men who wanted to sleep with her, men she wanted to sleep with, and the competition was fierce and there was woefully plenty of it. She was like the cheese in a room full of hungry rats, and everyone wanted a
piece
. It would prove to be painfully masochistic to the pleasure-seeking monkey in Jake. But there was no going back, no erasing the knowledge of it. He copied all the emails and addresses, and everything that was saved in her sent and inbox and pasted them into a word document on his computer, then saved all the emails “keep as new” or “unfucking read,” or whichever way he’d found them, deleted any trace of the email he had sent and logged out.
He had seen behind the curtain and the image had disturbed him. He had that summer camp “I wanna go home,” look about him. Yet in spite of everything, he wasn’t able to walk away from the relationship, couldn’t change how he felt about her.
Unable to exit or make a U-turn at this pivotal point, he became that
crooked man that walked a crooked mile,
and this milepost on the journey represents the point where the man went from being “
different,
” to being “
weird.
” From being the man he was …to some corrupted version of himself.
He would wait a day or two before composing an upbeat email that he thought would speak well for him as a progressive open-minded man… Written in a tone she would appreciate, surprise her, and hopefully alleviate any stress she had regarding his reaction to what she had said. This one read:
Hey Doll,
I know I probably seemed a little weird after the news of your Beaufort trip, and yes I was a bit jealous, but it wasn’t necessarily what you may have thought. Contradictions are fine, even attractive… I have plenty myself, but inconsistencies are scary. I was still on the 8th or 9th floor of a 10 story emotional building and your elevator seemed to be falling fast ;))
Hell, if you recall when I spoke to you that Saturday while you were at the wedding you told me that you didn’t want to have to choose between me and your husband, …those are powerful, endearing words Rae, and in a day’s time, or a chance encounter, all of that seemed to have changed. Perhaps you can’t understand or empathize how the loss of significance (or the
appearance
of significance) affected me, but I hope you’ll accept that’s how I felt. The only possible conclusions I could draw weren’t very comfortable ones.
Let’s face it, for all of my experience and maturity, I’ve never been in a relationship quite like this, and I’m still feeling my way around a bit. I’ve had time to trim my sails and adjust my course so that I don’t end up in the emotional rocks so to speak ;) Truthfully, I had to dial down the emotions a bit, and that’s okay. I like to think that friendships are living things, kind of like a tree, and during the life of ours we will have different seasons, all the while the roots growing deeper and stronger, and while each season will have its own intensity and passion (or lack of) it will eventually fade into the next, never gone, just waiting to evolve and return anew.
I hope these words find a home in your heart in a way which you find attractive, they are after all, a part of me which belongs to you …whether you want it or not :)) So feel free to tell me, as always, whatever you want to, or don’t tell me if that’s what you prefer. I understand your situation and circumstances, and I also understand my place in your life, perhaps better now than before.
As you know …or are learning, I am not one to refrain from saying what I feel… I think it’s emotionally unhealthy to do so, and I needed for you to know this because I’ve sensed a degree of awkwardness that doesn’t need to be there. And look, if I’ve misinterpreted something on your behalf, you need to let me know.
Sorry I haven’t written before now. I enjoy getting emails from you as often as you can write, and you can always expect to get them back from me. Those days when I check my email and find one from you are always better than the ones I don’t ;) I look forward to seeing you …in any capacity, soon :)) Call or write. As always…
Love,
-Jake
She would reply:
I wanted to cry after reading your letter. Nothing you said surprises me. You are right when you say I am not immune to jealously. Perhaps I was being a bit manipulative. I don’t know how to begin to respond to such a thoughtful message but I’ll try. First, I think you are an incredibly wonderful person because you do tell me what you are thinking and feeling. I find this very attractive about you among other things. I don’t mean to be inconsistent although I have been all that and more in the last few weeks. Let’s face it I am a very confused individual on many levels and yet solid as a rock on others, and I am having all kinds of positive and negative feelings.
The bottom line for me is that I have so many desires and opposing concerns, and anything I THINK threatens or adds to them scares me away a bit. I really do care for you and part of me thinks that I could really get caught up in this relationship, and “yes,” that frightens me Jake, so I keep all doors open because I’m going to be here for a while to come. Is that a contradiction? Absolutely. You’ll have to decide if this relationship is worth the pain it may inflict. I hope you know my thoughts on that. I will talk to you soon.
Love,
Raen
It was the first time she had used her nickname, afforded him access to that layer of herself, it was significant, or intentionally meant to seem so, who knows? Her post coitus this time would leave her feeling a bit depressed after the endorphins had retreated. She actually felt as if she had cheated on two men, her husband
and
Jake, and she was in all likelihood more regretful of the latter.
It was wrong, he knew it, and it was so wrong he wouldn’t tell anyone, and as a result he would definitely lose his bearings for a time. He felt like that tractor trailer we’ve all seen on the highway, out of align, his ass-end swaying, not following the front. His actions about to change lanes against the advice and logic of his mind, his instincts telling him to
abort…abandon ship …run like hell!!!
But he couldn’t help it, sad as it was, there is no reasoning with emotions remember, so with an eye towards regaining the upper hand, like a bully on an invisible playground he was going to have to create some apprehension and doubt about her other options …until like it or not, he was the only playmate available.