The Letter

Dear Reader,

The first time I met Luka was when we were five.

He was watching ants as they crawled across the sidewalk. I asked him why, but he just told me that he liked watching them. In my young mind, that was a good enough answer, so I just shrugged and sat next to him.

Over the years, we became the best of friends. Luka would talk to me about why birds can fly and not humans, what certain clouds looked like, and once called me at one in the morning to ask what was in the depths of the ocean.

He was hyper. He could never sit still, and jumped from one topic to another before you could get a word in.

Luka was smart though. He wrote poetry and stories, and only stopped writing when he ran out of paper. He taught himself how to knit and crochet just so he could say that he could. He got straight A's all through school, earning himself scholarships to dozens of colleges.

I thought he was just this happy go lucky person, and I found myself developing a crush on him.

I can still remember the night everything changed.

The summer before we both headed off to college, my phone rang just before I went to bed. He was on the other end, crying his heart out. He asked me to come open up the door for him. I ran downstairs, flung open the door, and there he was, standing in the pouring rain.

I ushered him in the house, gave him dry clothes, and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. We sat on the couch in silence, before he threw himself in my lap, crying harder than ever.

When I asked him what was wrong, he said, "I can't take it anymore. I just want to die."

He didn't say anything else for a while, so I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed him tight. When he finally did speak it was to say thank you for being there for him. I told him that I hadn't done anything, but he shook his head and replied, "Just being my friend was enough."

"And it's not anymore?" I asked quietly.

"I just want love," he murmured, his head buried in my chest. "The love between couples. The love two boys shouldn't have. The type of love you aren't willing to give me."

I was quiet for a second, before I said, "What if I am?"

He looked up at me, a small gleam of hope shining in his big blue eyes. "Really?"

"Yes."

The years after that were long and tough. I convinced him to see a therapist, and he let me take a box full of notebooks and video tapes he had made to the police. The notebooks were filled with stories of the times his father raped and beat him while his mother stood idly by, and the tapes had been hidden and on them were recordings of nights these things happened. His father was tried and convicted of rape and assault, and his mother of child endangerment and neglect. They both went to prison for a long, long time.

I got an apartment close to the college we were both attending, and every night, he would crawl into bed, curl up against my side, and hide his face in my chest, as if to block out all the bad memories.

We graduated, and Luka almost immediately got picked up by a publishing company for the series he had wrote about his life. He got medication for his depression, but he always said that I was the thing that pulled him out of his dark days, not the pills. He's cheesy like that.

I couldn't be more proud or more in love with him. On his birthday, five years after he showed up on my doorstep in the rain, I asked him to become my husband.

Now, here I sit, writing this, just minutes before I have to go out there to get married. God, I'm so nervous, but I know with him by my side, we can get through anything.

Signed,
Arthur Haling

The firefighters, medical personnel, and police officers stared at each other. All was silent as one tear slid down the sheriff's face. No one had made it out of that fire. A full church, and no one had made it out.

The sheriff turned and saw two men standing behind the police tape, holding hands. The taller of the two turned to the other and said, "Well, I guess there's no getting my letter now. Come on, Luka, let's go home."

They turned to walk away, but the sheriff stopped him. "Is there any chance your name is Arthur Haling?" he asked.

"Uh, yeah. That's me," the taller man said, slightly confused.

The sheriff held the letter out, and, with a tear in his eye, said, "I think this belongs to you."