Jimmy Jane

Chapter 1 ~ love letters

Jimmy Jane

Chapter 1 ~ Love letters (3 months later)

Jane's P.O.V

I sit in my study, my black inked pen pressed in my palm and a single sheet of paper lying on the desk in front of me. I stare at it, as I have been for the past two hours. I am not really looking at anything thing, just nothing, my eyes strain under the pressure and occasionally a little tear may seep out the corner of my eye.

I should write to him, I want to write to him, I know he wants me to, but I can’t, every time I read his letters I rush to my desk to reply but as soon as I get there I choke. Why is this so hard, he is my husband for Christ’s sake, well soon to be husband…! If he ever to comes back.

I bury my face in my hands, pushing my fingers into my closed eye sockets trying to stop the overwhelming hysteria that always seem to follow after the first tear drops. Everyone cries once in a while, it’s okay to cry, unless you’re a guy, if someone saw a guy crying they would gossip and before you know it, that guy would hit rock bottom and be a social outcast. Not that it matters for me; I am not a guy, and already a social outcast.

There is a light tap on my hard wooden door, and my mother puts her head in. My mother, now in her fifties has always been my hero, always been my backbone, my biggest fan. She is the only person I let see me cry, not that I want to sound weak or anything, but if others see me cry, news might get to Timmy and it will make him feel a whole lot worse. I promised I would be strong, but breaking down in front of my mother doesn’t count in that promise.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she sighs and comes and sits next to me on my bed, she pulls me off my chair and into her lap, like she did when I was younger and I grazed my knee climbing a tree or something that I wasn’t supposed to do as a little girl. She is a fragile woman, my mother, with a very fine build and an hourglass figure; she is the woman that every man wants to marry, but also the woman that every woman wants to befriend. Unlike me, she has dark brown hair, but like me her hair is curly, not in tight afro ringlet, in nice long shoulder length ringlets that bounce when you pull them. Hers are brown, mine are blond. I breathe in her scent, roses and scones.

“It’s okay, he will come back, I know Timmy, and he would never leave you.” She moves her fragile pale fingers through my hair.

I look up into her eyes and she wipes away my tears, silent tears, the worst of all crying, they are the tears that rack the body and hurt your heart.

“But that’s the thing, he already has,” I sob into her shoulder as she softly strokes my back.

“No he hasn’t see,” she pulls out a crisp white envelope from her apron pocket and hands it to me, on the front, in Timmy’s neatest writing, my name is written: Jane Dearsley. Every week without a fail, Timmy sends me a letter, describing what he has done, how much he loves me, and sometimes he tells me a funny joke or something.

I look over at my desk, piled high in the corner, neatly tied by a bright red velvet ribbon. I have read them all, and every time I kiss the letter and tie it in the red ribbon, my mother says I should keep every letter, maybe one day we could make a book about the war.

She looks over at the desk, and sighs.

“Still trying to write that letter?” she wipes at my tears. Yes I am still on my first letter which has no words on it, not even a dot of ink to show I have even put my pen on the paper.

“Honey, he needs to hear from you, he is worried?”

“How would you know, you don’t read my letters” I snap.