The letter arrived in March, written in handwriting she had not seen in six years. Elena Varga had been married to David for three years before he deployed to Afghanistan the first time, and for two years after he returned before he deployed again—and then a third time, and then a fourth, each deployment extracting something from him that the previous one hadn’t touched, until the man who came home after the fourth time was someone she recognized in outline but not in detail. After the fourth deployment, he had come home, and he had sat at their kitchen table, and he had told her that he didn’t know how to be a person anymore. That he loved her. That he didn’t know how to love her and also be what the military had made him. That he was sorry. That he thought they should stop.
She had listened. She had not argued. She had not begged him to stay or promised to fix him or told him that everything would be okay. She had signed the papers when he asked her to, because she understood that sometimes love was not enough to hold two people together, and sometimes the kindest thing you could do for someone was let them go—even if letting them go felt, in the moment, like letting a part of yourself be taken away without anesthesia.
The letter was from David. Not a lawyer. Not a mediator. David—the man she had married, the man she had watched disappear into something she couldn’t follow him into, the man whose handwriting she would have recognized anywhere because she had spent three years reading grocery lists and postcards and notes left on the kitchen counter.
Elena,
I don’t know how to write this. I’ve started this letter eleven times over the past three years. I’ve written it and burned it, written it and torn it up, written it and thrown it away and then dug it out of the trash and put it in a drawer where it sat for six months before I took it out again. I’ve written it in the notebook my therapist gave me to keep track of my progress, which is a weird place for a letter to my wife, but there it is.
The VA has been good to me. Not perfect—they’re never perfect—but good in the ways that matter. I have a therapist who specializes in combat trauma and who doesn’t make me feel like a case study. I have a dog, a mutt named Captain who is afraid of thunderstorms and likes to sleep on my feet. I have a small apartment in a town where no one knows my name and no one asks me questions I don’t want to answer. I am learning how to be a person again. It is slow. It is the hardest thing I have ever done, harder than any deployment, harder than any firefight, because this is a war I am fighting against the version of myself that the other wars left behind.
I think about you every day. Not in a way that interrupts things—I can function now, most days—but in the background, like music that’s always playing that I’ve learned to tune out but that I never actually stop hearing. I think about the kitchen table where we used to have coffee on Sunday mornings. I think about the way you laughed when the neighbor’s dog barked at the mailman through your window. I think about the night I asked you to marry me and you said yes in the middle of a sentence, before I’d even finished asking, because you’d already decided and you didn’t see the point of waiting for the question to be over to say it.
I let you go because I thought I was protecting you. My therapist tells me that was a form of cowardice disguised as nobility. She says I took away your choice because I was afraid you wouldn’t choose me once you saw what I had become. I think she might be right. I also think she might be wrong. I don’t know. That’s the problem with being inside your own head—you can’t get far enough away from yourself to see the shape of what you’re doing.
I am not asking you to wait for me. I am not asking you to take me back. I am asking if you would be willing to meet me for coffee on a Sunday morning, in a café neither of us has ever been to, so that we can start over—not as who we were, but as who we are now. Who we are now is different. Who we are now has been broken and rebuilt in ways that neither of us chose. Maybe who we are now can be something that works. Maybe it can’t. I’d like to find out.
If the answer is no, I will understand. I will stop writing. I will disappear again, the way I taught myself to do, and you will never hear from me again and you can go on with your life without the complication of my existence. If the answer is yes, I will be at Café Meridian in Dupont Circle on the first Sunday of April at 10 AM. I will be the man with the therapy dog and the nervous hands and the hope he doesn’t know what to do with.
Either way—thank you. For the years we had. For the way you loved me, even when I didn’t deserve it. For the letter, because writing it meant I finally had something true to say.
David
Elena read the letter three times. Then she folded it, placed it in an envelope, and addressed it to herself, as though the act of sending it would make it real, would transform it from a wish into a fact, from a possibility into a thing that had happened and could not be taken back.
The first Sunday of April was three weeks away. She had three weeks to decide.
She knew, even as she thought about it, that she had already decided. Some letters arrive not to ask a question, but to give you permission to answer the one you’ve been carrying for years—the question you didn’t ask at the kitchen table when he told you he was leaving, the question you held behind your teeth when you signed the papers, the question that had lived in you since the morning you woke up in a house that was too quiet and understood that he was gone and wasn’t coming back.
The question wasn’t whether she would meet him. The question was whether she was ready to find out who they had both become, and whether those people could build something new from the wreckage of who they had been.
She was. She went. Captain the dog was there, and the nervous hands, and the hope that neither of them knew what to do with. And on a Sunday morning in a café neither of them had ever been to, two people who had been broken by separate wars began the slow, terrifying, necessary work of learning to stay.