Unfinished...

He chose a pencil to write the note because those words could always be erased.  But he also chose a pencil because it showed that he had to push the graphite to the paper, exert effort, carve the letters and then let her consume them as she pleased.

He was traveling again, yet again, and before he had departed he thought he would give her the tiniest glimpse into what he was struggling to say.

He had exhausted the usual ideas, and then he felt that the most simplistic bare-boned effort would probably be the best he could do.  He would write her a letter.  Not type her a letter.  Not text her a letter, but rather go to the store, buy himself a pencil and then sit down and craft a note.

It was way harder than he imagined.  Nobody sold pencils anymore.  And the ones he found were unsharpened.  He would have to buy an electric sharpener or literally do the small square with the razor that peeled back the skin of the pencil until it was semi-blunt but never sharp.  He felt like a caveman.

Couple in the fact that his handwriting was careless at best, he felt like he would most likely reveal that not only couldn't he write, but he couldn't script either.  It felt clumsy.  Thumb-like.  And she deserved a stiletto move, a razor-sharp retort.  He needed to give her heart a paper-cut.  Not a major injury, but rather an annoyance that she felt touched, yielding to something he had provided.  It might not even bleed...it might be a pinprick, no bigger than a dot left by a wayward pencil.

So he had written her a few lines, a poor man's lyric, for her to stumble upon before his departure.  He had even worried about the folds and the lines as he tucked the paper into quadrants.  He decided to leave it underneath her windshield wiper, the left one, so that she would see it first thing in the morning.

And he remembered how he wanted to keep the cadence with her at a very slow beat.  A metronome in a 4/4 movement that might have been a funeral dirge.  She revealed very slowly, and mostly through a visceral move...a touch, a glance.  She hardly cracked open the book of her mind or the book of her tongue and let him know exactly, at that moment, where she was.  It was interpretation, it was an obscure Chinese language. 

So his only alternative was to commit it to a sentence, commit it to a word. 

So he spent the day away from her and heard nothing back.  No text, no "thanks for your note."  His immediate responses ranged from that she was the rudest of the planet or that she was worrying to figure out how to respond.  Neither favored him.

Finally, he decided to call.

How was the flight she had asked.  The flight had been fine, the landing had been fine.  Did she notice anything today?  Any note?  Any communication?

I left you a note on your car this morning.  Yes, I know it's a somewhat archaic move.  But I thought I'd give you something to ponder.

Her quiet air didn't let him know if she had read it or if she hadn't.

Really?  god it poured this morning.

It did?

Yeah, like white sheets.  I had to sprint to the car and got drenched.  


Do you want me to go look? She said.

He laughed a brief unbelieving laugh. Short and cutting.  No.  It just figures.

I can go look.  It might still be out there. And they both knew it was a lie.

Well tell me what you said?  What did you say?

He had purged his mind into the note, had felt the pencil almost snap with his words, letting them flow out and spread across the page.  He knew he would never remember, and he knew he would never be able to pluck the muse again.

Please tell me a little bit of what you said.  She was being polite. He hated this miss, this complete miss of a chance and now he had to go back and re-sculpt.  Vacuuming after the party.  The fun was gone, the noise abated.  Now it was an ugly echo.

I'll write you another one someday.  I'll try to remember what I said.  I think I can remember the good parts.

Okay.  I hope you will.

I will.

Goodnight.

Goodnight.

She hit the button on her phone, killing the call and looked at the shredded molt of paper on the desk.  She had found the note, crushed into a collapse of wet folded paper as she pulled into her office at work.  She had initially thought it was a campaign flyer, some annoying nuisance.  She had pulled it from the brim of her car hood and was unfolding it with very little care.

I just wanted to tell you that there is a part of me that has separated and it has left me

If I could describe, in petty spend-thrift words the perfection that I

Anyways, you have tattooed me and

a permanent scar

You

These were the only words that she could see, as the paper shredded in pieces in her hands.  The pencil writings were faint, and barely perceptible.

She wondered what it all meant.