done, step one
Today, I finished the rough draft of the story I have been working on this spring. It is a very skeletal version of the book I hope it will be someday, but I’m still quite pleased. I can’t wait to dive in and put some flesh on its bones.
The last chapter is very short, and like the first chapter, it is called The Beginning.
That was the last time any of us stepped inside the yellow house. It sat empty for several months, and then the “For Rent” sign fell, and the dark windows glowed with light, again. I’m not sure what those people are like or if the yellow house was as kind to them as it was to us. Maybe someday, I’ll ask it as I walk by. Maybe it will answer.
Eric Jon’s phone number is still tucked, untouched, in my cell phone. I can’t bring myself to call him. I can’t bring myself to erase it, either. His life, now, is a mystery to me, like he is, but I still love him and always will. Like the words in that old, crumpled letter, he was a friend when I needed one most.
I read, once, that love endures. I think that must be true. Your love for me has been constant as the sun, whether I’ve seen it or not. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen out of love. I still love the boy I loved that spring. I still love the one before him. I still love the friend I looked up at the sky with in high school. I still love the boy who ate apples with me on the bus. I still love the girl I sang with in the back of my parent’s car. I will always love my best friends.
This constant flow of love, that has sometimes worried me and often caused aches deep in my chest, is what I now take comfort in. It is a comfort, as the houses and cities and plane rides between us grow, that I will always love the Gorham girls. That love will change, but it will never diminish.
Sometimes, I disbelieve the miraculous. But I have witnessed transformation. I have witnessed full hearts that stir with life. I have witnessed true beauty open like a flower in eight girls one spring. I have felt your breath become mine and your love burning inside my bones, which had always been cold and quiet.
In the beginning was the word, and word was with God and word was God and the word lived inside the fingers and ribs and lips and stomachs and toes of eight girls that left one yellow house on a sunny day in August. The life they carried with them was bigger than their boxes and bags of books and beauty.
