I’m crying.
I don’t realize it at first—I’m just reading, and then there are drops on the paper, and then I’m sobbing so hard Ruffy would be deeply concerned if he weren’t currently enjoying a walk with my traitor of a mother.
He waited.
He said he would wait, and he did. For ten years, until I came back at twenty-seven. And then I left again, and he finally stopped waiting and became exactly who he said he’d be—someone playing music, someone who writes songs.
Songs about me. Songs the whole world knows.
I left, and he turned his heartbreak into art, andnow he’s a rock star, and I’m sitting in my kitchen crying over a letter he wrote when we were teenagers because I never told him why I ran.
I never told him I ran because I loved him too much to hold him back.
I reach for my own envelope. The paper is thinner, more fragile. My seventeen-year-old handwriting is neat and careful—I was always the organized one.
Dear Future Me,
I hope you’re happy. I hope you figured out how to be brave. I hope you didn’t run away from the scary things like you always do.
Mostly I hope you’re still with Levi.
I know Mom doesn’t think he’s going anywhere. I know she thinks I should focus on college and “my future” and all that stuff. But here’s what I can’t tell her: when I’m with Levi, I feel like my future is already here. Like I don’t need to go looking for it somewhere else.
He makes me want to stay.
Nobody’s ever made me want to stay before.
So here’s what I promise: I will try to be brave. I will try not to run when things get hard. I will try to believe that I deserve good things, evenwhen it’s scary.
And if I mess it up—if I get scared and run anyway—I promise I’ll come back. Eventually. When I’m ready.
Because Levi is the kind of person worth coming back for.
I hope thirty-year-old me is brave enough to keep this promise.
Love,Past Delilah
P.S. If you’re reading this and you DID run, it’s okay. Just don’t run again. Third time’s the charm, right?
I laugh through my tears, because seventeen-year-old me was apparently a prophet.
Third time’s the charm.
Or the final heartbreak.
Mom comes back an hour later.I’m still at the table, surrounded by memories, the tape clutched in my hand like a lifeline.
“There’s a tape,” I say. “He made me a tape. A song he wrote. We didn’t have anything to play it on when we buried this, so I never heard it.”
Mom sits down across from me. “There’s a tapeplayer in the attic. Your grandmother’s old boom box.”
“Of course there is.”
“Want me to get it?”
I look at the tape. At the faded label that saysFor Delilahin Levi’s terrible handwriting. At the promises we made when we were young and stupid and brave in all the ways I’ve forgotten how to be.
“Not yet,” I say. “I need to...process.”
