Your Loves Whore

“Your Loves Whore”

The pendulum swings between numbness and pins and needles, making it hard for her to write. Her eldest tells her she can just speak into a phone and it will type it out for her, but no – she wants pen, she wants paper. She doesn’t trust these technology things, plus there aren’t any phones where this letter is going.

He can always print it out and send it, even deliver it in person if she likes, but she waves him off with a hand, and so pen and paper it is.

Her handwriting isn’t what it used to be. Her elegant loops and curves have become something closer to chicken scratch. She almost calls her eldest back to show her how that damned phone works but no, she doesn’t need him chancing upon any of these words and so she stills her hand as best she can:

Dear Julio,

If you’re reading this, then I have reached the end of my road and my feet have given out from under me, the letter begins.

I have decided that before my hands give up on me as well, that I shall write you a letter. Whether it will reach you when it will make a difference I do not know. I have made an agreement with Time, or is it Fate, or is it Space, or are they one and the same – The Trinity, without the trappings of the sacrament.

In any case, it is in His/Her/Their hands I will place this letter and maybe just maybe, if the terms of our agreement are met, this road I have found myself at the end of will double back on itself and rejoin yours.

That is not to say the life I have led has been a bad one. In fact, it has been good. Big and robust and full of love… but one without you. I finally married – after waiting and waiting and waiting and realizing you weren’t coming back for me.

I waited until dawn, I waited at the fork in the road, I waited in the cold. Where were you? You broke your word, and you were never heard from again.

And me, with my bloody and beaten heart in my hands, I was left with the embers of your touch on my skin, the echoes of your promises in my ear, and the shadow of your smile on my closed eyelids.

Did your road lead to death? Did it lead to happiness? Did it lead to theater halls and world tours and fields of hearts hung from guitar strings? Or did it lead to bitter nights and sliced tongues and a soul bartered and drowned at the bottom of a bottle?

I wonder.

I have wondered.

Even as I cradled life pure in my arms, I wondered. Even as I danced on anniversaries and made love electric, I have wondered.

And so I write this letter to ask you:

Wherever you are, whoever you’re with; whatever hall you are playing at, whoever’s skirt you are swimming in – come back to me. Meet me where we said we would meet: at the fork in our roads, in the midnight hour, under the Nagoye Tree.

Let us rewrite our story to the one we promised each other. The love to end all loves. Mukwanja and Nagoye: Lovers and friends until we’re old and grey. A love that slays monsters, births nations, and yells at Death in the face, “Not today!”

You are my Forever Love, Julio, and I am Forever Yours.

Come back to me,

Estella.

A single tear wets the page, muddying her final invocation, her final “Come back to me,” but she doesn’t mind, the spell has already been cast.

Pins and needles spear Estella’s hands as she folds the letter and slides it into an envelope. She considers scratching Julio’s name across its front, but Time or Space or Fate or whoever They are already know who the letter is for. And so she waits. And she wonders. But a life of waiting and a life of wondering means she doesn’t mind either, and before long, They appear.

Space scoops up the letter, hands it to Time, who then nods at Fate. Don’t they want to read it first? But there’s no need to; they already know what it says.

Space places a hand on Estella’s shoulder. Time tells her it’s time to go. Fate takes her by the hand. Is she ready? Estella closes her eyes; sees the shadow of Julio’s smile on her eyelids, hears the echo of his promises in her ear, and feels the embers of his touch on her skin.

She smiles. Yes.