But sometimes, especially tonight, I wish you did. I just need someone to talk to about everything I’m feeling. It’s been six months since I’ve seen Atlas and I honestly don’t know where he is or how he’s doing. So much has happened since the last letter I wrote to you, when Atlas moved to Boston. I thought it was the last time I’d see him for a while, but it wasn’t.
I saw him again after he left, several weeks later. It was my sixteenth birthday and when he showed up, it became the absolute best day of my life.
And then the absolute worst.
It had been exactly forty-two days since Atlas left for Boston. I counted every day like it would help somehow. I was so depressed, Ellen. I still am. People say that teenagers don’t know how to love like an adult. Part of me believes that, but I’m not an adult and so I have nothing to compare it to. But I do believe it’s probably different. I’m sure there’s more substance in the love between two adults than there is between two teenagers. There’s probably more maturity, more respect, more responsibility. But no matter how different the substance of a love might be at different ages in a person’s life, I know that love still has to weigh the same. You feel that weight on your shoulders and in your stomach and on your heart no matter how old you are. And my feelings for Atlas are very heavy. Every night I cry myself to sleep and I whisper, “Just keep swimming.” But it gets really hard to swim when you feel like you’re anchored in the water.
Now that I think about it, I’ve probably been experiencing the stages of grief in a sense. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was deep in the depression stage the night of my sixteenth birthday. My mother had tried to make the day a good one. She bought me gardening supplies, made my favorite cake, and the two of us went to dinner together. But by the time I had crawled into bed that night, I couldn’t shake the sadness.
I was crying when I heard the tap on my window. At first, I thought it had started raining. But then I heard his voice. I jumped up and ran to the window, my heart in hysterics. He was standing there in the dark, smiling at me. I raised the window and helped him inside and he took me in his arms and held me there for so long while I cried.
He smelled so good. I could tell when I hugged him that he’d put on some much-needed weight in just the six weeks since I’d last seen him. He pulled back and wiped the tears off my cheeks. “Why are you crying, Lily?”
I was embarrassed that I was crying. I cried a lot that month—probably more than any other month of my life. It was probably just the hormones of being a teenage girl, mixed with the stress of how my father treated my mother, and then having to say goodbye to Atlas.
I grabbed a shirt from the floor and dried my eyes, then we sat down on the bed. He pulled me against his chest and leaned against my headboard.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“It’s your birthday,” he said. “And you’re still my favorite person. And I’ve missed you.”
It was probably no later than ten o’clock when he got there, but we talked so much, I remember it was after midnight the next time I looked at the clock. I can’t even remember what all we talked about, but I do remember how I felt. He seemed so happy and there was a light in his eyes that I’d never seen there before. Like he’d finally found his home.
He said he wanted to tell me something and his voice grew serious. He readjusted me so that I was straddling his lap, because he wanted me to look him in the eyes when he told me. I was thinking maybe he was about to tell me he had a girlfriend or that he was leaving even sooner for the military. But what he said next shocked me.
He said the first night he went to that old house, he wasn’t there because he needed a place to stay.