While strolling down Park Avenue, the cool autumn breeze hits his face. Hands knuckled and tucked deep in his brown overcoat, Jason stops next to a blue mailbox to put on his gloves before picking up Julia from her apartment. He looks at his feet to admire the fallen leaves that have crunched into pieces from the overwhelming busy feet that stepped on them all day. But Jason then notices something white and flat, definitely not a leaf. He picks it up after putting on his gloves. It's an envelope. While rubbing his numb and red nose he squints his eyes, the envelope is signed in a hurry, clearly, because the handwriting was nearly unintelligible: “Nijel Sloan. 16th street Hamilton Avenue, apartment number 27, 11231, Brooklyn, New York”. With intense curiosity, Jason opens the envelope, knowing Julia will take a while to come down. Kneeling his freezing elbow on the mailbox, Jason begins reading the letter which seems to be written more neatly than how it was signed in the front.

In beautiful penmanship it read: “In between thoughts of you, while the coffee cup scorches my thumb, I notice there is a man reading intently across from me. He has the face of a fascist ruler, but is also dressed in all beige and white like from a Calvin Klein advertisement, posing like Michelangelo’s David. Every few seconds is a new herculean pose. That thought made me giggle, got me out of my stomped reverie. I love the oddity of the human race. The pencil balances behind his ear and he cranes his neck every few seconds like he's forcing himself to read in a lost language. I'm then jolted out of my trance even further by the muffled sniffling of a woman behind me. I wonder what she’s crying about. Could it be because of the man that stormed away from her? Or the invisible weight of the world that we all carry but can never see in each other? Or maybe she just has the flu and needs a tissue. Either way, it got me thinking about how it takes strength to cry, let alone in public. Our lives are intrinsically connected to the chemicals that open and close us, most of the time without our control. I think it's vital to let it loose and let people see that looseness. We have been convinced to think that strength means numbness or a chained up and “controlled” heart, but the real strength, the real superpower, is vulnerability. We all have it, but not everyone uses it. Or even has the capability to. Anyway, I'm going on a tangent. Remember when you used to get impatient and annoyed when I tended to speak in circles and intense detail? I saw it in your eyes that you wanted me to “get to the point”. But what did you expect from an incessant thinker?

So, what does this have to do with thoughts of you? Well, I've been meaning to write to you. Just to tell you that your fear of vulnerability is what killed us. You might think otherwise, and that's fine by me.

Oh by the way, you forgot to unlock the chain from the cage you put me in. But it's fine really, I'll figure a way out. Maybe bend the iron with my teeth. I might bleed and that might wrench my teeth out, have no bite left, but I don't really want to bite anymore. I can get a new set of teeth anyhow, all the Hollywood stars do it. Jane Fonda did it, and if there's an example to follow I believe it would be her. Remember the day I introduced you to Barbarella? I fed you ice cream in bed as the sun touched our skin and you touched me.

I understand now why you had to leave me, and I know I wasn't the best to you sometimes (or was I just merely emotional and you can't sit with that? I’m still not sure. It could be both) I'm stuck between rationality and emotion. There is so much I love about you but then I remember when you called me a piece of shit, then on other days you whispered “you’re an angel” in my ear as the blanket wrapped us closely we became one. I remember when I used to lay my head on your shoulder while you'd drive gently so I could get some sleep. But then I remember that night you kept stepping on the gas harder with every word that came out of my mouth and it felt like you wanted to kill us. But you loved me. You loved me so well. Didn’t you?

I wrote poems and I buried them in all the corners of my room that you kissed me in. My brother tells me to toughen up but how much tougher can one get?

I’ll be walking to the mailbox soon to mail this to you, once I finish my coffee. It doesn't scorch anymore, it's too cold now actually. Guess that happens to people too when time slips through our fingers and negligence becomes the routine. The weather is getting colder, have you noticed? Or are you coddled in the safety of the blanket we bought together?

I still love you, you know. It’s difficult not to. And I believe that at some point you loved me too. I promise I saw it. But your shadow has a shadow. Hers. I know her voice echoed after mine, and I know you’d rather chase the ones that left. I’m sorry for the moments that were bad for you too. But I'm not sorry for having emotions. I’m sorry you were not able to sit with your feelings. But I’m mostly sorry for trying to help you feel yours. That apology is directed to myself. I guess this is a lesson for me.

This letter will probably scare you away like our passion did. But I have nothing to do with that now. My last act of love is letting you go.

- Dakota.”

Julia finally comes down, with frazzled hair and red lipstick, her chin half covered with her big green scarf. She jumps up and grabs Jason and gives him the sweetest kiss on his icicle cheeks. “Hey you, what are you reading?” It takes him a while to answer her.

Jason has struggled for years with his inner wounds. It all started to come back to him in painful flashes. The loneliness thrust him into a void of all his past mistakes. He understands the pain of vulnerability and being around someone where it flows from them, sometimes too frequently. There's really no person in the wrong here, he thinks. These are two individual experiences and both have their version and validity. That's the way life goes.

His brain tethers between hope and uncertainty.

“How about you go and grab us a taxi? I need a minute”, Jason says, looking at her sparkling eyes, so full of love. “Sure darling.” Here we go again with the distance, she thinks.

It is as though time has frozen with the weather. Unmoored, Jason's brain frantically spirals down a familiar hole. What should I do? What in the world should I do? This letter was surely meant to be sent but somehow didn’t land in the mailbox. I know how it feels to be left and dangled in the air wondering over and over what could have been, thinking profusely about what can lead someone to falling out of love. and I also know how it feels to have so much in you, so much to heal, that you simply are unable to love another person. I ran away from love once too. Who do I honor? The person that might have chosen themselves to work on the broken pieces , or the pieces that they broke while leaving?