Page 57 of Way Down Deep

I debate deleting your number, burning the account statement, culling all the messages I’ve sent since I got my new phone. I toy with telling myself it was all a hallucination and destroying the evidence that keeps me from believing that.

It’d be so sweet if that were true. So sweet to imagine it had never really been.

So I never really ruined it.

Goodbye, my love.

22

Saturday

8.02am

I told myself that hiding my phone in a room I never go inwould mean it no longer existed, but I was just fooling myself about that. I had to go in after barely five days away from it—though, god, I didn’t expect it to ping. Honestly, hearing that sound from a phone that should have been dead … it was like being electrocuted.

And of course I tried to play it cool, to not look, to do everything but check. I went to bed. I forced my eyes closed. I even made it as far as five in the morning.

But you should know by now that I couldn’t resist forever.

Nor am I capable of pretending to be calm in this reply.

So I’m just going to go with what I want to most:

Oh my god, Malcolm. Malcolm. Are you still there?

Because I’m still here I’m here I’m so sorry I’m here. I thought you were the one who’d changed his mind, and then I was scared and I turned off the phone because it was so hard to look at that blank screen. It was killing me.

I can’t believe it killed you too. But I should have known. I should have believed in you. Oh god, why didn’t I believe? Now you’re moving to some place I can barely pronounce with a terrible injury that I wasn’t there to help you through and a broken heart that I accidentally passed from me to you like a pathogen from a zombie movie.

I should be quarantined for crimes against romance.

Malcolm, if you’re there, please don’t go. Don’t do anything, okay? Just let me talk to you first—let me be all the things you were hoping I could be when you were laid up and lonely. I am those things, my love. I’m here for you emotionally. I can be more than here for you emotionally in fact. All I need you to do is answer this message.

8.33am

Maya, Jesus. Hi.

Hey, it’s okay. Holy shit, I mean, it’s more than okay. Don’t feel bad. I don’t blame you for hiding your phone away, if you felt even half as awful as I have since we fell out of touch.

Thank god. You’re there. You’re still there.

And you know you don’t have to feel bad either, right?

At least you had good reason to suddenly stop messaging me.

That must have beena lot to take in. The news, but also … you know. What I said.

Wait, there I go being cagey about it again, after regretting it so much the first time. Fuck it—I love you. Let’s put that right out there, once and for all.

You helped me dig myself out of the darkest episode of my life. You’re amazing, and I love you, and it doesn’t matter that we’ve never even met. And that we never will, now that I’m going back to the States.

Unless…

I dunno, unless you’d like me to come and see you before we go? I haven’t booked the tickets yet, but I doubt I’ll be here more than another two weeks. It’s just too hard, and I’m so fucking tired. I can’t drive now, but I could pay for a cab. I don’t know how far away you are, but it’s not too far. There’s no such thing as too far.

Would you like that? If I came to see you? To say hello, and then goodbye?

Idon’t thinkI could bear to say hello and then goodbye. But that’s okay, because we don’t have to. There doesn’t have to be a goodbye if you don’t want there to be. You don’t need to come and see me. And you won’t ever find things hard or be tired again, I promise. Just hold on. Wait, okay?

You’re sweet, but it feels like I’ve already been holding on forever, honey. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to keep on struggling, wearing myself down and winding up back in the bottom of that well where you first found me.

And it’s fine if you don’t want to meet. I hope it wasn’t too much to say. I understand how you are, and if that’s how things need to be, I get it.

Shit, hang on. There’s someone at the door.

Iknow, my Malcolm. I know.

It’s me.