Letters

The Letter

The public library was only about 10-20 minutes from our house. It was pretty big, two stories and made of brick. When I was younger, I used to love coming to the library but now, like most guys my age, I didn't read anything except sports magazines and occasionally books for school. Today though it looked like they were having some kind of sale. Tables were set up outside the door and people were milling about flipping through the stacks of ratty-looking books.

"Oh this is awesome!" my mom said when she saw all the people. "They're having the biannual used book sale." She turned to Sadie and I. "Do you guys want to get books? They are usually super cheap."

"I'll look," Sadie replied. "They might have something good." I didn't respond, knowing that my mom didn't expect me to.

"C'mon let's go. Zeke, you too, maybe this'll cheer you up." I reluctantly got out of the car groaning. I wanted to go home away from people.

As I looked around I couldn't help but be amazed. There were a ton of people. Immediately when Sadie got out, she got excited because two of her best friends, and our next door neighbors, Amelia and Katherine were here with their mom. My mom also followed suit and went over to chat. Amelia was a year younger than Sadie and Katherine was in my grade at school, but I didn't really talk to either of them, so I meandered over to where a couple of sports books were lying on one of the tables.

"Do you need any help?" the man standing behind the table asked.

"No, I'm just looking." As I looked through the books one of them caught my eye. It was a battered copy of The Blind Side, a book I knew was supposed to be really good. I might have watched the movie version once.

I flipped it over and skimmed the back. It seemed good, but not something I would read. I was about to put it down when all of a sudden a piece of notebook paper slid out and floated to the ground. I leaned down to pick it up. It seemed to be some kind of note. It read,

Dear Andrés,

I'm not sure where you are now or what you must think of me, but I hoped you've moved on. I hope you've married and found an amazing wife to raise our son with, someone who will always be better than me. I know you must hate me, for leaving you and the life we were going to create together, and I'm sorry. I don't have much time left but I wrote this letter because I want you to know that I love you, and I will forever in this life and the next. And I'll always watch over you and our son, whose name I cannot bear to write.

I almost put the letter down when I read that. I didn't want to read this random person's note to her husband, it was an invasion of privacy and the note itself seemed awfully horrible. But something kept me reading.

I want to leave you with one last thing, an explanation. It started that first day when I told you that I was going to the doctor to check on my foot. It had been aching lately and sometimes collapsing at random points while I was dancing. I thought it was something normal for a dancer such as arthritis or tendinitis, but it was much more than that. That day the doctor couldn't tell what it was. He wrote it off as soreness and told me to come back in a month if it didn't get better. It didn't, it only got worse. I tried to hide it from you, but the ballet masters and choreographers were getting increasingly frustrated with me. There was no place for weakness in my profession.

In a month, I went again. I told the doctor about my new symptoms, the increasing weakness in other parts of my body, I was stumbling more, my dancing was becoming more sporadic, and I had trouble doing simple movements. When I told him, his expression fell. That day he ran all kinds of tests on me, blood tests, neurological exams, and sent me, the same day for an EMG, or a brain test, at one of the bigger hospitals. They told me they'd call me in a couple of days. I was scared, so scared, all I wanted to do was tell you what was going on, but I didn't want to worry you unnecessarily. I was a dancer, it was probably nothing, probably something small.