Dear Camilla,

2: Everything Could've Ended Differently

Camilla,

I remember that first day clearly. How could I forget?

I am laying in Central Park. It's early August, around four o'clock in the afternoon. The sun shows no sign of letting up anytime soon, a faint golden glow covers everything, coloring the shadows from the fiery fall trees above an electric shade of blue. The dry grass beneath me is bothering the skin exposed from my white sundress, so I flip onto my belly and examine their stocks between my thumbs idly, bending the blades and breaking them into pieces. My mind clear as the sky above me— save for the thoughts of you, Camilla, that drift aimlessly like clouds. I still get goosebumps.

The Fates once bound our strings together, I entrust. Our stories colliding into a symbiotic harmony where, forever after, your insight, your perspective, your eyes have been my religion. But, though I care about you profoundly, you didn't come to our planned meeting. It might have seemed an innocuous thing to do, but that deviation from the script was devastating. I had been dreaming of seeing you since the moment you abandoned me in Tennessee.

In your wake, I met Oliver.

I recall that last night vividly, too. Out of breath, but not breathing, in front of his apartment door, a sprinkling white mist, illuminated in the twitching street lights, dancing through the bare oak trees. Shaking, shocked, and scared— a cold deep in my bones so pronounced I might as well have been laying naked in the snow.

Then everything changed:

Is now not a good time? I asked.

No, no. Please, he said, a youthful twinkle in his serpentine eyes. Come in. I'm so very glad to see you, my dear. Won't you give me a moment to tidy up? He peered devilishly through the crack in the door, awaiting my response like a cat eyeing a mouse.

So, I stood there patiently in my yellow rain boots, the rubber squeaking eerily awakening the evening from its quiet sleep. The smell of bleach, cut by a faint lemony citrus, grew stronger by the second. The faint scratches on his locked office door that proceed late into the night must've been his cat, I told myself.

It is challenging to accept that killings so unfortunately horrendous happened, and even more taxing to recognize I was never suspicious. Moving blindly with the sun in my eyes; making out only shapes and colors, never squinting to define the world around me. The excitement that enticed me might've ended me entirely. Living in the aftermath, though, has proved to be death's darker twin.

But, everything could have ended differently. I wouldn't be writing to you, I would be speaking to you. All of this madness could have been avoided if you had just shown up.

You have to believe me,

Maxine.