Thanks for your letter,
Arizona
Track 23. Treacherous (3:39)
I can’t do this…
I logged into my email account and saw that Carter had sent me over fifty new emails since I’d come to France. My mouse hovered over the first message—Subject: Truly Missing My Best Friend, but I couldn’t open it.
It’d been hard enough responding to that first letter of his—that generic “Let’s just act like nothing ever happened between us” bullshit, so I shut off my computer and got into bed.
My days were now a lot shorter without talking to him, a lot less memorable and trivial, too. But I couldn’t sacrifice my heartache in exchange for empty conversations between us. Not now.
I needed to think long and hard about everything before I sent him any more correspondence…
Track 24. Half of My Heart (4:15)
Subject: Phone Update.
Dear Carter,
I tried calling you earlier, but the static in my flat is so bad that the call never went completely through…I’m actually typing this email from an internet café in town since the internet in my flat is even worse.
Anyway, our program is about to kick into even higher gear than before, and even though I have a charger now, I’ll have little time to take breaks during the week to talk.
I just want you to know that I’m not avoiding or ignoring you.
I hope you are well, and I’ll do my best to send you physical letters as much as I can…
Also, thank you for mailing me those tins of waffle batter from Gayle’s. I truly appreciate it.
Looking forward to talking to you when I get a break.
Sincerely,
Arizona
Eighty percent of that email was a lie.
My flat had perfect internet. My phone service, even better.
And I was ahead in all my classes so I had ample time to take breaks. The only thing that was true was my appreciation for the waffle batter; I’d made half of it the first week I received it.
I hit send on my lie-filled email to Carter and changed my email settings, making sure that any future messages from him would go directly into my spam folder.
I’d still been crying myself to sleep every night, no matter how hard I tried not to. In class, I was poised and focused—eager to soak up anything that would take my mind off of ‘not in that way,’ but once I was left alone, without structures and rigorous lessons, I fell apart.
Several times, I even tried to respond to one of his handwritten letters, but the only words that came out were curse words.
Even worse, I felt like the two of us were so fucking close that I had nobody else I could talk to about this. He was literally all I had.
I started to log off the internet, but I saw Nicole’s “online” symbol light up in my video chat sidebar and clicked “connect” without thinking twice.
The screen read “connecting soon” and within minutes her face appeared on my screen.
“Well, hey there, stranger!” She smiled.
“Hey…” I managed.
“I’ve been trying to connect with you for the longest! I didn’t even know you’d left so soon until I heard it from Carter…You could’ve at least said goodbye.”
I stared blankly at her.
“Ari?” She asked, looking confused. “Ari, why are you looking like that? Can you hear me?”
“Yes…Yes, I can hear you.”
“Okay, then.” She smiled again. “Well, how are you? How’s France? How are you holding up without Gayle’s and having your BFF around all the time?”
I couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“I slept with Carter…” I burst into tears and my chest heaved up and down. “I slept with him damn near every day after the EPIC party…”
Her jaw dropped.
“I didn’t think it was ‘just sex’ though,” I continued, feeling the tears fall nonstop. “I thought I was falling in love with him because I thought...I thought he was…” My next words came out muddled and I shook my head. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and I can’t even think straight anymore…”
“It took so much out of me to finally tell him that I was in love with him, and I honestly thought he would say that he loved me back…But he said, ‘I love you, but not in that way’…He said that in his eyes, we were just friends. That the sex didn’t mean anything more…”
Nicole looked completely shocked, dumbfounded, and I didn’t stop talking. I couldn’t.
“I’ve been crying every day since I got here, Nicole. Every. Fucking. Day. On the one hand, I’ve cried because of the situation, because it hurts not to be loved back. But on the other, it’s because I really really want to talk to him, you know?”
“Awww, Ari…”