A ray of sunshine warms my face as I turn my head to glance out of the window. Houses, streets, people, all of them a colourful blur as the train whips past them smoothly, at an incredibly fast speed. Eagerly, I wait for it to arrive at the signal, about twenty minutes into the forty-five minute journey. Occasionally it's green, but most of the time it's red. Faulty, maybe. But I don't really care whether it's faulty or not, nor do I want to wonder whether it is faulty or not, at least not today. I only want to get a clear view, to let my eyes snatch whatever they can before the train moves and everything goes blurry again.
Fifteen minutes past before the train slows to a halt and I am able to have a couple minutes' glance of the world outside. It is a glorious evening, the pavement glittering with the orange-gold light of oncoming dusk as the sun starts its lazy descent down the hills. Children chase each other on lawns, taking advantage of the last of the summer sunshine before their mothers call them in for dinner. One girl, with sandy blonde curls veering towards ginger, suddenly looks away from her playmates and at the train. Her round eyes creep upwards and spot me, they lock with mine. For a second, we stare at each other. Then she lifts a tiny hand and waves, and a smile stretches on her face.
The smile of someone I last saw nearly four years ago, of someone whose face is etched deep into my sea of memories, someone who still creeps into my dreams every now and then, as if to say, you can't forget me. The smile whose owner I will never see again.
A heavy weight settles on my chest, I cannot look any longer. I drop my head and glue my eyes to my lap, telling myself, you will not look. You will not look. I squeeze my eyes shut and count to ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty. When I open them again, the train is moving, whipping past the row of houses, and the girl is gone.
I heave a sigh of relief and let my shoulders slump forward--I haven't realised how rigid with tension they were until they're not, and the heaviness lifts, but only a little.
Like every other day, I check the mailbox for letters, and I discover a small cream envelope. I take it out, frowning. It's very small, so small that only a slip of paper can be inserted into it. Maybe she doesn't have much to say this time.
The letters have been coming for a long time, almost four years, at the point where I had completely adapted to my new life here, in New York, and she was starting to fade to a hazy picture in my mind. That was a grave mistake. I could never forget her, and I should've known it. Because one day I came home to a lilac envelope, tinted with the scent of lavender, the address scrawled out in loopy, swirly handwriting, with hearts dotted on top of the i's, and my blood ran cold, because I knew it was her. Of course it was her. She wants to be a part of my life so she can leave me tormented and terrified, like before.
I opened my first letter from her. It was two pages long. I scanned the first line, stuffed it back into its envelope and headed towards the trash can, about to throw it. At the last moment I hesitated, my hand hovering over the bin's mouth, and I withdrew it and decided to keep it. I don't know why I hesitated. I guessed that the arrival of letters would be continuous, and if I ever wanted to go to anyone about them, the evidence would still be there.
She sent me letters sporadically, sometimes as much once a month or as little as three or four times a year, most of them a page long, judging by the weight of their envelopes. I keep them all in a box at the very back of my closet. I haven't read any of them. I know it's strange to keep the letters of someone you'd rather forget but not read them, especially if just the sight of the letter sitting in your mailbox badly unsettles you. And I'd really rather forget her, because she is the reason behind every single tragedy of my childhood, and she loved it. I detest her with every single fibre of my being. But somehow, unexpectedly, astoundingly, unbelievably, there is a tiny, twisted part of me that looks forward to the arrival of letters, likes keeping them in the box at the back of my closet, watch them pile up. Likes that I am important enough for her to remember to write to, even if the letters' content may unsettle me even more than the moment I spot the letter in the mailbox.
