zeroinitiate

Fear, Message

“I love it,” she said.

I looked at my best friend with a mix of skepticism and surprise. What she said didn’t make sense to me.

“What’s so lovable about it?” I asked.

“It’s like you didn’t write it,” she replied.

We were sitting across from each other in the balcony outside the office pantry, our usual meeting place when we didn’t want to be disturbed. We were drinking coffee while talking about an email I wrote to a friend of mine, a former flame, one that I had not contacted for more than a year. I found myself looking at her as I waited for her to explain what she meant.

“The person who wrote that email is not the guy I’m used to having coffee with at this hour,” she said. “It’s a completely different person.”

I made a slight nod.

“That’s a good thing,” she concluded, answering my question before I even asked.

I didn’t want to send the email. At least not with its current contents. The original message was meant to be a question about where to meet and when. There was supposed to be no revelations, no confessions. Just a guy wanting to meet a girl again. My best friend scoffed at the idea, disgusted with the fear and the careful plotting.

“Just tell her how you feel,” she said.

I coughed, felt like the coffee got stuck in my throat. Whatever amount of skepticism I had earlier was nothing compared to what I felt after what I just heard. It took a couple of seconds before I could stop coughing. After that I couldn’t find anything to say. No words were coming to mind.

“Listen,” she started. “You’re already past being careful. At least, I think you should be. She replied to your first email. So you know she got your message. You should take this as a chance to tell her how you really feel. You know she’ll read it.”

“I don’t want to scare her away.”

Impatience crossed her face. She took a deep breath.

“There’s no guarantee she’ll reply regardless of what you send.”

She was right, of course. Those were the words that made me write the email as I finally understood what she meant.

And so I wrote. I told her what I went through, what I thought and felt when she left me. I wrote about the confusion, the anger, the loneliness, the regret. The fear of scaring her slowly washed away the more I wrote. When it was over I sent it then showed it to my best friend a couple of hours later.

“I love it,” she said.

I looked at my best friend with a mix of skepticism and surprise. What she said didn’t make sense to me.

“What’s so lovable about it?” I asked.

“It’s like you didn’t write it,” she replied.

And she was right. Whoever wrote the email wasn’t me. At least, not always.