AnActualCrow's Sandbox

Jett gave me an envelope in the summer of '06. "You're a great person, and I never want you to forget that" He told me. "If you're ever feeling shitty, I want you to read this." For a second I pretended to tear open the letter right then and there. It was a plain white envelope that puffed up a little at the sides like it had been overstuffed with papers. "For Cynthia on a rainy day" was written on the front in the neatest handwriting Jett could muster.

"How much did you write in this?" I turned the envelope around in my hand. Where any sensible person would have sealed it with spit and glue, Jett used a short line of scotch tape.

"It's got pictures too." He said. "It isn't War and Peace."

That afternoon, I stuck the letter where I stuck all the letters I wanted to keep: the bottom-left corner of my desk. The plain white envelope stuck out amongst the colorful hoard of cards that one builds up after 17 years of life, but that was fine. And then I forgot about it.


Jett and I drifted apart after that. Part of me says that he saw it coming, that the letter was his last hoo-rah before he changed from a best friend to a friend that was just sort of there. There wasn't any moment. No argument, no betrayal. We just… floated away from each other. As things do. And as I was sorting through all of my stuff for college my focus inevitably shifted to the bottom-left drawer of my desk. And as my fingers caressed the zig-zag edge of the scotch tape, I knew it wasn't the time. And so I took it to college, stashing away the rest of my assorted cards in a box on the top shelf of the closet I had emptied a few hours before. I left Jett behind too, suspended in that muggy Florida air like a fly in amber.

The evacuation order came during the start of sophomore year. Wildfires had been spreading across the state, and one of them was on the path to UCLA. The firefighters were going to do the best they could, but it was too risky at the moment to have us stay in our dorms. In what little time I had to pack, I grabbed what I saw as the essentials: clothes, meds, phone, laptop, chargers. And as I tried to fall asleep in the baseball field's dugout next to a snoring computer science professor, I longed to tear that little piece of scotch tape. And in my shivering desperate misery I shuffled around the dark and grabbed a pen off the ground and a flyer explaining how to protect yourself from the particles in the air. I flipped it to the back:

Dear Cynthia,

I expected reassurance to billow out of me like smoke. But despite whatever ballad of good will Jett had originally composed, I scraped out two measly sentences.

Dear Cynthia,

You're an amazing person. Things will get better.

— Jett

They told us we could go back to our dorms around a week later. The desk in my dorm didn't have any drawers, so I had put the letter in a box on the top of my new closet. Everything else was there: sun-bleached photos, action figures with chipping paint, heavily annotated copies of the first couple Warrior Cats books, and all the other memorabilia that I had brought from home and couldn't find a place for. But the letter was gone.

I looked high and low, sweeping my room over and over before coming to terms with the fact that I either talked myself out of taking it to college and forgot, or that I really needed something to write on one day and just scribbled all over the envelope before tossing it. Or… something. Either way, I wasn't getting that letter back.


Two days ago I was walking to my dorm from class when something in the bushes caught my eye. A thin white rectangle was stuck between the stems and the leaves, rattling with the wind in protest. I'd expected an envelope sitting outside to be in worse condition. It wasn't dirty, wasn't creased, and the little piece of tape on the back had gone unremoved. It was like it had just floated over there. As things do.

I broke the piece of tape and flipped up the tongue of the envelope, eager to read the last deep words of a former friend. The wind didn't hesitate to blow the ash and smell of blue ink that filled the envelope into my face. And so the moment I had spent so long chasing after ended with me, good ol' Cynthia, doubled over and spitting Jett's forever unread words onto the concrete.

And it was okay.


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