It all came crashing to a halt that New Year's Day when I finally had the guts to open the envelope. Inside were a small brass key, two photos, and another envelope, scrawled with a heavy "FUCK YOU" on the outside.
I started shaking and sat down without thinking. The photos--one was a picture of her in bed. The other I stared hard at and finally moved my thumb to better see the right side... turned it over and stared at the blank back, then up at the wall, heart pounding.
I had taken both. The second was a scene I'd held in my memory for two years, since the day I'd met her. It was on a beach outside Cabo. She stood with wet pants in the surf, the setting sun making the fringes of her black hair gold. That was the image that kept me going for the last two years. Her loveliness and her laugh were in it; I pulled that moment out every time I was sad or missing her, which had been a lot.
But the photo was different from the memory.
We'd met on that beach--I was traveling alone, she with friends, but we were so drawn to each other we'd had sex on the second night. And you have to really like someone to have sex on the floor of a laundry room in a Mexican hostel and still have it rank as one of the most unbelievable, most spiritual experiences of your life. She snuck away from her friends to spend time with me every other day for a week but then she flew back to L.A., and I eventually to San Francisco, and that was when the pain began. The excited first visits and heartbreaking goodbyes, the phone conversations, the overnight meetings in motel rooms that went from elation to misery over the course of twelve hours, the excuses.
He was in the photo. Along with a couple of her other friends that I remembered, he was just a little further down the beach, beer in hand. He had been there.
In our last phone conversation she'd told me that she thought he knew, and she was angry at me for my indiscretions. She screamed into the phone and I pulled it away from my ear and set it on the table and walked outside for a minute. When I came back I told her that I loved her. And she didn't relent--she was furious, I could hear the tears in her voice and the clack of her shoes on the floor as she paced.
The key I didn't recognize. I held the smaller envelope, the Fuck You envelope, in my fingers for a moment before I opened it and pulled out a folded sheet of notepad paper. It read, "For two years I have been asking you to be there for me. You know what I have been going through and how much I needed your support. I needed you, I loved you, I gave you my heart and soul, and I thought we'd be together for the rest of our lives. So FUCK YOU for doing this to me and for saying you would always be there. Never, ever contact me again." I didn't recognize the handwriting.
I looked again at the key. I had no recollection of what it could be, until I suddenly did--it had been on her third visit to San Francisco, when we stood on the Golden Gate Bridge and she took out the lock we'd just bought at the hardware store. She ripped open the packaging with her teeth and we wrote our names on it with a Sharpie and locked it onto the chain link. And then she took the key out of the package too and tossed it up and over the fence and I tried to follow it all the way to the water.
But she hadn't thrown it. Or there had been two keys and she only threw one. And she hadn't been "on a break" from her relationship when we met in Cabo. She had been cheating on him under his nose.
She had told me a couple months ago that she was feeling ready to leave him, and the new year would be a good time to start fresh. I don't believe in New Year's resolutions myself, but sometimes they're forced on you. Before I slid everything back into the envelope I stopped to look at the other photo. I had taken it here, in my bed. She looked five years younger than she was. She was half-naked and asleep, catching a few more minutes before having to get up for her flight, sprawled awkwardly with her arm under her belly and one thigh pulled up to her chest. At the time it had been achingly beautiful.
