R J Hembree - Writers' Village University

I hope you’re doing well.
--K
Dear M,
Today it rained and Dad didn’t go into the office. We sat on the front
porch swing, talked and drank cinnamon coffee. He knew that’s my favorite
and purchased two cans of it at the corner grocery when I arrived. The soft
pitter-patter of raindrops soothed me. He asked me why I’m here. I told him I
wanted to make sure he was still comfortable living on his own. He said, of
course, he was all right. His eyes were in need of repair but the rest of him
still worked. He’s not ready to be put up on a shelf just yet, he joked. He
asked me pointedly if I was okay. That’s a complicated question, I said. I told
him that you and I had decided to part ways, but I didn’t tell him why. He
asked me if I missed you, and I had to answer yes.
Last night I lay in the bed that I slept in as a girl and thought about
the first day we met. I never dreamed that a girl who majored in hotel
management in a Missouri college would fall in love with a park ranger in
Sedona, Arizona. My love for Sedona began the first day I drove my Jeep into
town after transferring in with the Hilton Companies. Two weeks later, we
met in the bookstore. We reached for the same book, poems by Charles
Simic. You wore denim jeans, boots, a brown tee shirt and a cowboy hat.
Your shoes had red Sedona dust on them. I said, “You don’t look much like a
poet.” “All cowboys are poets,” you said.
We decided to go for coffee together and wound up at a truck stop at
midnight, eating biscuits and gravy, still full of conversation. You said you’d
been a loner all your life and loved the desert like a mistress. You were a
cowboy at heart and wanted nothing but a cold beer and a steak after a long
day in the wilderness. You fixed your steely gaze on me and told me that you
felt your life was about to change. We were as smitten with each other as we
were with the red rocks, so who could blame us that we ended up living
together after only two months? I know that you know all this since you lived
it with me. But writing it down is comforting to me, somehow.
I hope you don’t forget to wear your sun block, as you have a tendency
to do. That hot Arizona sun wreaks havoc on your skin.
My cell phone number hasn’t changed. I’ve thought about calling you
a thousand times, but I don’t know what I’d say. It seems we said it all,
before we had to split.
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