And the justlovemeback is an impossibility, but that’s okay, because you’re seventeen and time is on your side. Time is on your side, Time has his arm slung around your shoulder and you’re getting ice cream, you’re friends. At seventeen, justlovemeback only hurts a little, only sometimes, because the world is wide open and no one has touched you yet. No one has loved you, no one has left you. No one has made you realize, yet, that you can never love someone enough to make them love you back.

Jay looked surprised. This must have been because he thought I had simply overlooked the fact that I was holding a cell phone bearing the time and not realized that I was, in fact, a gigantic, colossal moron who should never again be allowed to communicate with any other member of the human race, especially him. ‘Of course. It’s a quarter past eight.’

I mentally kicked myself and prepared to walk away. ‘Thank you.’

It’s hopeful. Even in its hopelessness, at seventeen, falling in love is the most hopeful thing in the world. Maybe because it happens so early on. Maybe because you spend the rest of your life trying to feel like that again.

But suddenly you’re brushing twenty-three, and has it really been six years already? Six years watching in the shadows, six years waiting for him to notice you, six years of trying to shape yourself into something he could love without having any idea of what that is.

So you spend all this time growing up into whatever it is you were meant to be, and then one day, the universe comes alive at you, the frequencies create a sudden cacophony as they start to vibrate, and you think—why not? Six years and two days have passed. Everything else has moved on and still, and still, and still and always, you can want no one but him. It’s time. Now or never, Tara, now or never. And sitting in your wrought-iron chair, on that patio, on a working Tuesday—like the first brownie, like the first drink and the first drag—you decide to take the plunge.

You fish around in your purse for a pen, and you put ink to a paper napkin. You could have tried to just say it, walked back up to him and let him remember you. But you wanted him to hold your words, to feel their weight in his hands and their strain on his mind.

You rationalize away the slight resentment (if I had given you less, if I had given you less than six years, would you even turn around?) and you’re shaking; you can hardly hold the pen steady, you hope he won’t mind the terrible handwriting.

Dear Jay,