Letters

Write me letters.

i.
"Tell me your story," a shy smile accompanies the words, as he leans towards me, hands wrapped around my perpetually cold ones. "Please." It's eighty degrees centigrade, and yet I'm wearing my favourite sweatshirt, the one with the white strings that he he can't seem to stop playing with. His fingers inch up towards the laces again, and I gently push my hands back towards him, sighing as I frustratedly tell him for the umpenteenth time to stop it. I close my eyes and let out a breath, muscles loosening [but immediately tensing again]. He can feel it too, and squeezes my wrists gently, forcing me to release my clenched fists. "Please," he implores. I shake my head slowly, musing.

ii.
I've fallen over my own feet for the billionth time, it seems, and he's cracking up at my clumsiness. I snap my teeth together in an effort to keep it together; to focus on the ground before me. He grabs my hand and smiles like it's the best day of his life, swinging our hands until he's spun me around and we're both laughing. I don't need to worry about balance anymore; he catches me every time. I've forgotten to be afraid, and I'm finally a little bit free. "I used to dance, you know" I whisper.
"So you used to dream." He states.
"Yeah."

iii.
I'm half asleep and drowsily grumbling at him for 'having to' wake me up at three am, stumbling out of the truck into the most beautiful sight ever... There seem to be a thousand fireflies winking around me, while the sky's spread out above me in all its splendor. "Where are we?" I ask.
"We're where we met. It's the forest clearing in the park, remember? The one with all the flowers." He pulls me into a ballroom-style dance. "For the summer dance. The one you didn't want to go to, so you went here to read your book. The book that you whacked me with because I startled you."
I laughed. "Yeah, I did. And it was hardcover, too."
"I know."

iv.
It's three summers past the first, the eighty-degree-centigrade one. It's two past the goofy dances on sidewalks, one past the dance at three in the morning. My box filled with letters from him is the only part of him I have, because our smiles and hugs and silly dancing is somewhere else, fighting for freedom. The warm summer air drifts in through the window that he'd climbed through so many times before, back when my dad had dared him to, and the strings on my sweatshirt tangle up with the breeze. "Tell me your story" His words echo through my healing memory...

v.
I start writing.