Preface: Dear Old Friend
Dear Old Friend,
I promise I stopped searching for you. And I promise, I’m not trying to pull you back to me. I know I’m but an echo of smiles and tears from your earliest chapters. You left me in the dust, and for good reason, but a string on my heart still hurts whenever I try to yank it. I don’t believe in the burning necessity of closure.
I took this photo on a rainy summer evening after you picked me up from work. We watched the sunset in the parking lot. I said I didn’t like to get too far into my feelings. You argued that writing is a discipline for over-thinkers, so that could never be true. We were at the turn of our regular road, and I captured the heavenly raindrops with my phone. It takes me right back to the inside of your car’s rainy window.
I kept trying to capture the highest point of the hill, but every time, no matter how many times we drove through the road slipping beneath us, I couldn’t get a clear shot. You asked me if I wanted you to stop for me, but I said no. I wanted to hold onto the same angle of the horizon. My camera could not recreate it, so I stopped trying to. I had this photo printed onto a postcard to do things the old fashioned way.
The photo compelled me to write these letters from my heart that I didn’t end up wanting you to read. I couldn’t bring myself to burn them, shred them, or watch the paper and ink disintegrate in water.
I can’t stop playing the song I wrote for you. I see the happiest and saddest skipping flashbacks on the piano, and I’ll always love it.
I’ve made a predicament of my reputation in such a way that the counterclaims about me are rehearsed and ready. I can’t sit inside a hot car while my old friends roast me.
I can assure you, I have changed from the last time you observed my failures. I’ve been thrust into a new life now where I’ll meet with the stars, clouds, and ocean in the summers. The raindrops are different in those coordinates. They’ll go out of their way to knock against my window whenever this recurrent longing nags at my attention.
So you might want to keep the letters hidden away in the box, not to be opened for years, or, you might have an easier time getting rid of them.
The late July morning’s storm system hovers above the mountainous road. Minimal stoplights ease the ride. The view of the city at the peak of the hill tempts Harmony Hazelton to halt traffic and photograph it, but the road moves like a wave about its winding dips and upturns.
One someone haunts the view behind her eyes- a stale hope, a dream given back to the world as a lie of its own. She had already decided that she no longer had the time nor the will to contemplate his whereabouts. High school was eight years ago, and a botched 21st birthday party is his last memory of her- a night where reality had exaggerated the unromantic. Oakley Barklay’s impersonality would never again be worth stopping by for. Assuming that he would not have wanted her to say goodbye anyway, she considers how gravity must be different in these matters, for how else could the empty air feel so heavy?
The playlist beaming through the truck’s speakers drowns out the sickening thoughts planted by the past. The look in his grey-blue eyes when he finds the box on his doorstep is one Harmony is grateful to miss. The road trip along Highway 101 held the dream of a quiet beachfront town called Cannon Beach, Oregon.
