Yours, Poppy

My dear Callum,

I’m painfully aware we made an agreement to not speak anymore. But it is mid-to-late October, and I find it remarkably hard not to think about you when I watch the first specks of snow beginning to fall from my bedroom window. You know I get rather glum in the cold.

And in watching the fragments of dry ice blowing in the wind, I find myself wondering. Was this agreement really mutual? Or did I agree to it so that it’d make our lives easier? Your life easier. Because when I think about it, I honestly don’t know if I could ever agree to something like that. But I guess I did, didn’t I?

Sometimes it’s hard to remember who I am without you here. Your presence always made it easier for me to see myself, if even just an outline sometimes; made me feel like I was actually real, someone with the capacity to evoke feelings of devotion in others, not just, you know, this shell of bones wafting through a rather difficult life.

I’m sorry if I’m imposing myself. For all I know you probably have a girlfriend now, someone warming your sheets, someone starting to fill the space I once occupied. Does she know it wasn’t always vacant? Does she know you once, drunk, told me I reminded you of sand, the way it fills every vessel it infiltrates, no matter its shape?

Did you just say that to please me then? To fill up any voids I myself desperately wished to settle?

It’s okay if you have. A girlfriend, I mean. It wouldn’t surprise me much. You’ve always been a remarkable person. It’s probably nothing new to you though, having people fall for you like flies combusting mid-air. Maybe being a writer helps you. Being so good with words and all that.

And you are completely unaware of it, that’s what pisses me off the most. You have absolutely no idea the impact you have. You’re the material unpacked on therapists’ couches. The climax, the main character, both the beginning and end.

Have I idolized you, you think? Sometimes people do that when they hold on to the idea of someone they once loved, admired. A therapist blabbered about it once, when I was younger. A defense mechanism of sorts. Remembering only the good about someone, disregarding the bad, the things that made you want to gouge your eyes out.

My mom suffered from it with dad. I think I told you about it once, that warm and humid day in June where we’d sat by the lake and listened to the crickets chirping.

I write to you as I drink the last drops of coffee you left behind. The Colombian coffee you adored, the medium-roast beans that bloomed and wafted their toasted aroma throughout the cabin every morning. You were always such a snob about your coffee, but I found it amusing. I’ve always admired people who are headstrong about such trivialities.

At first I didn’t touch it, the bag remained half-empty, half-full at the back of the spice cabinet, where you preferred it to be. But the minutes passed, the days passed, the bugs that once chirped endlessly when you left were now dead, silenced by the cold, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

The cabin not smelling like your daily habit. It made everything so painfully real. The fact that you’d left behind our lives, what was supposed to be, what we’d built inside it throughout two years. You left me with a half-built cabin, and I hate you for that. I truly do. I’m sorry.

I started brewing coffee some mornings, even on mornings when I would’ve much rather preferred tea. I used small amounts of beans every time, used a scale even. Obsessive. I’m still that, yes.

Thirty grams of coffee beans, that’s all I was willing to sacrifice to feel you around here. But like all things in life, they must come to an end. And I must admit, as I sip on the last bit of murky water, today they taste to me rather bitter.

Yours,

Poppy

Dear Callum,

I know you’ve always been against technology and rarely use your phone. Is that the reason you’re not reaching out? Is there a chance—even if rather implausible—that you didn’t receive my first attempt at reaching out to you? Or could it have possibly gotten lost in the pile of other important e-mails you receive from your Dartmouth students?

Am I delusional? I sometimes feel like I am. Just yesterday, in fact. I kept looking for my car keys, they seemed to have disappeared into thin air. I looked for them under carpets, in every cabinet and drawer. Went as far as to rake off some of the snow that’d crept into the porch’s floorboards to see if they were stuck there, for whatever reason. When they’d been in my hand all along. The keys to my car had been looped around my index finger, Callum. It felt like a metaphor to something greater. Hell, maybe it is.

Selma came to visit a few days ago, told me she saw you in this old bar by the riverbank in Hanover. I have to admit—because I’ve always been much more honest with you than I’d rather—my jaw twitched for a second. I honestly thought the worst was coming, that all of my conspiracy theories were about to cease being conspiracy theories. You, a ring on your finger, a shrieking newborn, a beautiful woman by your side rocking said newborn, maybe a man. I don’t know. These days I’m not so sure myself the scope of what I could possibly be interested in.

But she said you were by yourself, and looking quite glum as well. Might it be that you were thinking about me? Were you? Were you thinking about my long, auburn hair, the hair you used to love twisting around your fingers? Were you thinking about the way your oversized, cashmere cardigan looked on my frail frame while we drank wine in the kitchen, and you’d stand between my thighs and kiss my currant stained lips? Or about the time we made cookies, and you burnt your arm with the oven, and I kissed it until it got better?

I wished you’d left it here. If only by mistake, by a mere act of inattentiveness. You know, the sort of things you leave behind when you’re in a hurry. A pair of dirty underwear that gets stuck in a crevice down the laundry basket. A charger left plugged behind a bureau. A bag of used coffee beans. But I guess you knew exactly what you took and what you left behind that day. And I can’t forgive you for it.

Not that you’ve asked me to.

I don’t know why I keep writing to you. Maybe it’s a way to cope with the fact that I have no one in my life I truly feel close to. Which is sort of insane, isn’t it? I mean, it’s depressing, to say the least. Feeling like I’m closer to this person at the receiver’s end of an e-mail that isn’t even being acknowledged? Maybe it’s my fault that I’ve become the sort of person no one actively reaches out for. Even when I know I’m a good person. I’m great, in fact. I’m a great fucking person even if you’ve left me. I can be both. I can. And I really, really wanted you to know that.

Yours,

Poppy

Callum,

The snow has thawed outside, given way to what some of us around here like to call, the muddy season. Most of what had been bright white a few weeks ago, has now turned into gray slush, unraveling what had been lying there all along, beneath cold piles of crystalized water. It’s still rather cold outside, but the cabin remains warm thanks to the constant roar of the fireplace I refuse to let extinguish.

Remember that time we drew ourselves on the fogged up window beside the front door? How much we’d laughed at my awful depiction of you. All sticks and dots and curves and not much specificity. “That might as well be anyone,” you’d remarked, a soft smirk plastered across that beautiful mouth of yours.

But much like the mud unraveling from within the melted snow, it’s as if something within me had unraveled as well.

For the first time in a long time my body seemed to want to become an outlier to what my therapist had once blabbered about in my youth. I found myself remembering some of the bad. It was like opening a wound that’d already been closed up and healed. I poked it and poked until it bled again. And my God, did it bleed, Callum.

I hope you know I don’t wish any ill on your life, but I hope you know I sometimes do. Am I a monster for admitting that? Today, in fact, I woke up to a dampened nape, on the verge of hyperventilating. I saw you there, in my head, going off at me for not wanting to move to Hanover.

“I feel like you’re asking too much from me,” I was saying, my teetering voice echoing around the halls of my brain, almost indistinguishable, buried under the weight of elapsed time.

“I’m just asking you to love me someplace else, is that too much?” You always made things sound so goddamned easy, as if words were just that, sound, a mouth moving, nothing else.

“You’re asking me to leave all of this—” I motioned to everything that surrounded us, “behind.” Little did I know back then that most of what this meant, was really just us.

“Poppy, it’s just a house,” you answered softly then, cautiously, too cautiously, your toe millimeters away from touching the shard of an invisible eggshell. I tucked my hands even deeper into your cardigan’s sleeves, loose cashmere falling forward like limp worms. “Don’t you think you need a change of scenery?” Your eyebrows crept upwards and I knew what you meant. How about we move someplace where we can sleep under a roof that hasn’t seen your mother’s death?

“You don’t understand.”

You walked over to me then, your strides almost chary, as if debating whether or not to go caress the tiger.

“Poppy, she’s not coming back.” A tear I hadn’t even realized was there, now being stroked away from my damp cheekbone. “And we can’t keep pretending this is all there is to life.”

“Am I not enough, is that what you’re saying?”

“You misunderstand me,” you clapped back, raking your fingers through your shower-dampened hair, the side of your mouth twitching. “They’re asking me to come teach in person now, they’re promoting me, they’re promoting us.”

I didn’t tell you then how I didn’t feel promoted; I felt hindered, thrust into the possibility of a life I didn't feel equipped to navigate. Not then anyway.

“Look, I love you. I really fucking do. But I also love having a job.” I felt somewhere between those words and thoughts of yours that you didn’t appreciate my rather vapid outlook on life. Probably found it too simple, too naïve, glittery, rainbow-driven. Easy for you to pretend this is all there is to life when you have a limitless inheritance to spend. I knew by the look in your eye, just how much you disapproved of how I dealt with grief, the way I was being selfish but couldn’t admit to it.

Then you said nothing good could flower from tethered soil. You fucking said that.

And that’s when I woke up. I ran to type all of this up. I was seething. And I was seething because you were right. You have been right all along. I’m wizened and withered and this soil has been nothing but toxic to me, nothing has grown on me but resentment and hate and visceral feelings I’ve been compulsively pouring onto a computer in the hopes that things can go back to the way they were before. Before I felt like this, before I ruined everything with my stagnant tendencies and my deep-rooted, pointless superstitions.

I know now that nothing about my mother dying will change with me staying here. I wish I’d known that then, I wish I’d listened to you, been more open-minded. I know now, that by wanting more for yourself, you were also wanting more for me.

You wanted to pluck me from the ground and plant me in New Hampshire, in the hopes that I’d spread my roots there, possibly even bloom. But you do know that lupines, for example, don’t have a high chance of survival to such change? Some die before they can even be planted again, they wither on their way there. Did you ever stop to think that I could very well be a lupine in this scenario?

But I feel somber right now, thinking about you by yourself in that bar, seeming glum. You deserve happiness. And I don’t even know if you’re glum about me. For all we know you could’ve just had a bad day, and, I don’t know, maybe I’m forcing myself into a storyline where there’s clearly no space left for me.

Yours,

Poppy

Dear Callum,

I know enough time has elapsed for your silence to be considered anything but intentional. I’m not angry, I’m not disappointed. I was before. Now I understand you don’t actually owe me anything. The decision to write to you has been mine and mine only, and I should’ve known what doing this would bring about. The definite possibility of feelings being exposed once again, of scars being re-opened, of restless days waiting for a number in my inbox to change.

On my morning walks, the damp smell of thawed earth, of pine and soil envelops me, and I can see mottles of moss emerging and bursting from within the earth I walk on. There’s no neutral colors anymore, but rather a muted olive hum of life beginning to reset, beginning to warm, if even by a few degrees.

There’s this beautiful fog that sits atop the lake like a disfigured ghost, especially very early in the mornings, like a mist that washes over the water and blurs the surface into one cohesive entity. It’s breathtaking, I’ll attach a picture of it, in case you ever wish to see it.

I miss reading your students’ manuscripts, the ones you’d print and leave scattered all over my dad’s old office. The ones I wasn’t supposed to read. Student-teacher confidentiality bullshit. I mean, no, I get it, but I was much too curious sometimes. Remember this paper specifically, from this woman, Alicia, wrote fervently about infatuation, desire, love, sex. Always wondered if you ever slipped into her mind when she wrote. Is she still your student?

In any case, I wanted to let you know I wished to go with you, be there by your side as you taught writing to all of these bright students. But the idea of leaving what our life had been felt incredibly risky, scary, outright outrageous. It’s as if my brain had conditioned a false sense of relief and safety to us being confined to this remote cabin, to Vermont, this tiny plot of land.

I realize now, how selfish I might have seemed. I was just this kind of crazy scientist wanting to keep the sample of our life confined to a controlled environment. I wanted to freeze us, to keep us in a petri dish.

Don’t get me wrong, I love you with my whole heart, I always will. But sometimes I can’t help but find myself reflecting about the reasons why I do. I know some things in life shouldn’t be examined too much, tampered with. Some things are far better off being uninterrupted, unaltered with. And God, do I know some things are just not logical. But I tried anyway, and I came to realize that you were the one constant person there for me after my mother’s death. Sure, there were other people. But not like Callum Baldwin. No.

And then I dug more deeply, because I was in the mood to forage. Had my body viewed you as the only available lifeboat I needed to stay afloat? Had I for this reason, developed such strong feelings for you? Because I felt I owed you my life? I must admit, I do feel somewhat indebted to you, and if you suddenly called and asked me to empty my bank account and transfer the whole lot to you, I’m afraid to admit I would.

And just the same, if you suddenly called, asked me to transfer myself to you, I would.

Yours,

Poppy

Dearest Callum,

I promise you this is my last e-mail. I found myself desperately wanting to let you know I sold the cabin. It was long overdue, and I’ve come to realize my mother will always be with me, no matter where I find myself in. She’s a part of me, she’s within me like just another one of my veins, just like you are, and will always be.

I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you wanted; it’s hard being what someone else wants when you don’t even know who you are to begin with. But I don’t have to. Maybe I just have to be. To live, breathe, exist and create, just like you once told me. Get out there, spread my roots in land that isn’t so sullied, find a way to see myself without needing someone else to loan me some light.

I brewed myself a cup of tea this time, chamomile, the one you said you liked least. Tastes like dirt water, you’d say. With a brave heart and a plane ticket in my hand, I say goodbye. For now, anyway.

Love,

Poppy