The
first time I had met Calyn she had been a sophomore in high school, and I was a
senior. That year we had become really good friends. She had been fifteen so I never asked her
out. Don’t get me wrong, I had wanted too. By the time she was sixteen I was
almost ready to go on a mission: I couldn’t get attached to her before I left.
Throughout my mission she would email me occasionally, but then about seven
months before I was to come home, the emails stopped. And I never knew why.
The last time I had seen Calyn she
was waving good-bye as she drove away. I vividly remember calling her the night
before I left for my mission. I thought
she was crying by the way her voice sounded, but I didn’t say anything about
it. I had told her I would see her in two years. And I honestly believed that I
would. I think the biggest shock was when I came home and learned she was gone.
It was two days after I got home when I picked up my phone to call her. I
remember my mom putting her hand over mine and telling me she needed to talk to
me. About six months into my mission Calyn found out she had cancer. “Why didn’t she tell me,” I asked my mom.
“She told your sister she didn’t
want you to worry. She didn’t want you to think about coming home,” my mom’s
eyes welled with tears.
“She talked to Jarin before
she…before...” I couldn’t say it because I still didn’t believe she was gone.
My mom nodded, “She gave Jarin
something to give you when you came home.”
I stood in the doorway of Jarin’s
room, watching her at the computer. Her fingers rattled away on the key board.
“Jarin?”
She turned around, her bright smile
fading when she saw me. “Mom tell you?”
I nodded, trying to keep the tears
away. “She said Calyn had given you something for me.”
Jarin nodded as she went to her
bed, pulling a box from underneath. It was an old box with Calyn’s sleek
writing across the tope: Wilder.
My little sister handed me the box as her tears dripped onto
it. Soon I found that my tears had joined hers on the lid of the box. Jarin
wrapped her thin arms around me, the box in between us. I don’t remember how
long we stood there, holding onto each other, crying.
That night in the safety of my
room I opened the box and found a short note.
Wilder,
I’m sorry,
but I need you to do this one thing…well actually its thirty-seven things. Each
of these letters is addressed to a person and has a date. If you want to do
this, please go in order. Don’t skip letters. I know it’s silly but it means a
lot to me. On the date of the first letter give it to the person it is
addressed to, read it with them and then move on to the next one.
….I’m
sorry.
I pull my jacket on as I pull myself out of the memory. I had made it to the thirty-seventh letter.
And the letter was addressed to me. For the last year I had delivered the other
thirty-six letters. I think I know what she was trying to do when she wrote
those letters. Each of the letters was addressed to a mutual friend of ours,
someone who had experienced something with us. Each date had been specific to
when that experience had occurred. They were all three years apart from whatever the
situation had been.
The first letter I delivered was to her mother. Her mom read
the letter aloud, it was about the day we had first met and when she had come
home and told her mom about it. She told her mom she was sorry and she loved
her.
The second letter was to a friend from school. The third was
to one of the kids we had worked with. The fifteenth letter was to our
government advisor. The twentieth letter was addressed to Calyn’s dad. The
twenty-fifth letter was the one year anniversary from when she learned about
the cancer, and she had addressed that to her sister. The thirty-third letter
had been to my sister. The thirty-fourth was addressed to my parents.
The thirty-seventh was addressed to me. I have the letter
tucked in the pocket of my jacket as I make my way to her grave. There isn’t a
certain place where she wanted me to read this, but I have a feeling she would
want me to read it with her. The cemetery
is deserted when I arrive. The clouds gather thick and grey overhead. I push a
hand through my hair as I walk towards where she is buried.
Tears drip from my face as I sit down next to the grey
stone. I trace the name engraved there.
Calyn
Jay Hardings
March
14, 1996 – April 25, 2013
I take a deep breath and pull the letter out of my pocket.
The handwriting across the top isn’t hers. I break the seal of the envelope and
withdrew the letter. My hands are visibly shaking. I take a deep breath before
I begin to read the thirty-seventh letter.
Hey Wilder.
If you’re reading this, then thank you
for delivering the other letters. And if you aren’t reading this, then I guess
these words shall just stay in space. But that isn’t such a bad thing is it?
I think you probably already guessed
what those letters where for. I hope they took you through the last two years
of my life. From when I met you to when you left. And then everything that
happened after you left. Wilder, I am
sorry I didn’t tell you, but you see why don’t you? I didn’t want you to worry and
I didn’t want you to think about coming home.
When the doctor first told me I had
cancer I couldn’t believe it. It was like a numb feeling and then this stabbing
pain. I kept thinking why did this happen to me? But I think it turned out to
be a blessing hidden deep, deep in disguise. I met so many amazing kids while I
was in the hospital. A four year old boy named Aden recently lost his leg due
to cancer, and a little girl, Oliva, just got her wig and Wilder, it made her
so happy. I realized there are worse things than having cancer at seventeen. I
could have had it when I was seven, before I got to live life, before I got to
meet you.
Remember when I used to say you’ve
changed my life and you would just laugh at me? I want you to take me seriously
right now. You changed my life. The day I met you, you smiled right at me and
made me feel right at home. Since then I’ve considered you to be my best
friend. I thought a lot about you when you were on your mission and I missed
you like crazy. And I thought about what it would be like when you came home.
Maybe I’m just getting the guts to say
this now because I know I won’t be there, but I had hoped we would still be
friends. In fact, I wanted to be more than friends. I have since I was fifteen.
But after you left, I wasn’t sure how I felt.
Then I started going through the chemo
therapy. That’s when I really became friends with Jarin. She was there for me
when no one else was, Wilder. I seriously love your sister, please let her know
that.
There are water marks from where her tears landed while she
wrote this, and new marks from where my tears join hers. I angrily push the
tears off my cheeks and continue reading.
Do you know what today would have been?
One year from the day you should have gotten home. One year from when I would
have seen you again. Wilder….I miss you and I’ve been so lucky to get to know
you. And I’ve got to tell you that I
There are smudges from where she had erased and re-erased.
And that is the last thing on the page. That is the last thing I get to hear
from her. The letter just ends there. A single post it note is stuck to the
inside of the envelope.
Wilder. She didn’t get to finish this
letter before she passed away. I hope you know what you meant to her.
-Kara
Kara is Calyn’s mother. I would never get to know what Calyn
wanted to tell me but I have a pretty good idea that it’s what I want to tell
her. I push the tears from my face as I lift myself off the ground. I carefully
fold her letter and tuck it back into my pocket. I stand above her grave,
gazing down at the headstone for a moment.
The rain begins to fall from the
sky. It drops from the clouds to the earth, cleansing the earth of impurities,
washing away the dirt. “I love you too,” I whisper to her, to the rain, to the
world. With those words on my lips I turn and walk away, the thirty-seventh
letter seeming to burn inside my pocket.
