Spring 2023 Online Contest Winner: Personal Reasons

By Silas Jones 

My correspondence with CeCe occurred during an unusual phase of my life. For Personal Reasons, I had left New York City. I was living in another state, farther north, alone in an uninsulated beach house a half an hour drive from the beach. Because the house was located in the center of a thin spit of land, there were actually two beaches: a protected bay in one direction, and in the other, open ocean. The house was equidistant between the two. It belonged to a work acquaintance of mine. Technically, it belonged to his parents. All I had to do was feed their cat. Its advanced age had dissuaded them from dragging it back to the city at the end of the summer. If it cared, it didn’t show it. 

She likes it better out there, my acquaintance’s dad insisted the first time we spoke, the only time. It took me a second to figure out he was talking about the cat. He expected it to die peacefully, by the beach. Or half an hour away from it, anyway. His voice sounded loopy, as if distorted by its journey up the spiral phone cord. He explained how to conceal the cat’s medicine in its wet food while I twisted and untwisted the cord around one finger, watching the houses out the window. 

Besides the fact that I happened to be living in one of them, all the houses looked exactly the same: blue clapboard and white vinyl trim stippled to look like real wood. Houses with landlines and hot tub hookups and no hot tubs attached. Horseshoe-shaped driveways, single acre lots. Idyllic little prefab Kennedy compounds. Pretty much the entire development had been deserted since Labor Day, which was when I’d arrived on the scene, still tan from the final summer of what I’d already begun to think of as my Old Life. 

I started making preparations for my new one. I stashed the sailboat paintings and jars of foraged sea glass in the hall closet and vacuumed up all that summer’s sand. Only a few weeks after that, the temperature dropped and I began to understand what I was actually in for. My space heater was no match for the airy, open floor plan: kitchen, adjacent living room, lofted secondary living room. I had to tape opaque sheets of plastic up over all the windows. The light inside the house thickened. I spent entire days glued to the semaphore flag-patterned couch, thinking nothing and making no progress. I prepared snacks and consumed them. I considered going for a jog or for a drive. To motivate myself, I imagined the beach, the bay, the ocean’s groveling edge. Whenever anything got too close, the space heater beeped wildly and I’d look up to see the cat rubbing its knobbled spine against the hot spokes and pretending not to hear. The longer I sat on the couch, the more likely it seemed that I would be sitting on the couch forever. 

At the job I’d just quit, I’d been promoted twice. When I started, I wouldn’t have dreamt of renting a studio; by the time I left, I probably could’ve afforded a one bedroom. But I’d kept living with roommates. By the time I moved to the uninsulated beach house, I had so much money saved up that I didn’t need to work. Not that anywhere on the spit would have been hiring at that time of year, anyway. Everything nonessential was shuttered ‘til spring. The only open grocery store was on the inland side of a long, blue suspension bridge, even farther from the beach than the beach house was. 

I was on the bridge the first time CeCe called, the only time. I must have been driving home because if I’d been headed anywhere else, I wouldn’t have picked up. I cherished the first leg of any commute. Leaving the house, on the rare occasion that I managed to make it that far, never failed to fill me up with a reassuring sense of purpose. On the way out across the blue suspension bridge, I’d steal a peek at the white caps thronging below and think to myself, 

Now this is what they call a change of scenery! 

I’d rev the car to 70 and think, 

Now this is what they call change of pace! 

Sometimes I said it out loud, too. 

Striding down the dairy aisle, I felt incredible. I set intentions and bought things I didn't need. Occasionally, I was moved to shoplift. Capers, I wanted them. I would go home and make Pantry Pasta. I would jog, journal, enjoy a long soak in the master bath. I would try out the starfish-shaped jacuzzi jets. Alternatively, I could make a detour and visit the beach; I could visit one of two beaches. If I kept an eye on the gas gauge, I could visit both. If I was so moved, I could drive all the way to the tip of the spit, park my car, walk to the water's edge, and watch the wiggling seam where ocean overlapped bay. I could stand there until nightfall, toes dug into the frigid sand, huge, empty houses lit up behind me. 

By the time I got to the checkout line, I’d started to suspect I’d be doing nothing of the sort. It was hard enough not to peer over the sheer edge of the bridge as I drove back across it towards home, gray water flashing between its struts like the pages of a flip book where absolutely nothing happens. 

That’s when the phone rang. 

Hello? I said it at the exact same time my finger hit the button to accept the call and so, after a second of silence on the other side, I had to say it again, 

Hello? 

Hello? The area code was from my hometown but the voice was unfamiliar, accentless. Is this Carolynn? Said the voice. 

Caroline, I said, I go by Caroline, now. I swallowed the impulse to say I’d gone by Caroline forever. Really, I’d only made the switch that summer, using my imminent move as impetus, but I’d known for a long time I needed a change. The grocery bags crowded in the back seat mocked me; I frowned through the rearview. 

Oh, said the voice, seriously? 

Who is this? I asked. 

We went to highschool together, said the voice, I saw your post about a sublet? 

I found someone already, I said, sorry. 

As I decelerated off the bridge and into the swirl of cars circling the roundabout on the other side, I tried not to think about my Old Life, my old apartment, my small but light-filled bedroom. A friend of a friend was living there now. She and my roommate were getting along just fine without me, judging from the pictures they kept posting together. Probably, she’d be offered my spot on the lease. 

Oh, said the voice, damn. There was always traffic after the bridge, even deep in the off season. It had gotten so cold that the massive topiary at the center of the roundabout was wrapped in a protective layer of burlap. Before, it had been pruned to spell out the name of the nearest town; now, it was just a long brown shape in the grass. It was getting easier and easier to forget where I lived, why. 

Who is this? I said again. My name’s CeCe, said the voice, CeCe Leary. 

I said that I didn’t know anyone named CeCe, but I might’ve known her brother, Carter?

Haha, said the voice. It didn’t laugh, it actually said like, ha, breath, ha. You don’t have a monopoly on changing your name, it said. 

Oh, I said, blushing, getting hot, doing the math in my head and then adding, in what I hoped was a meaningful, compassionate tone, Oh. I knew I was supposed to spend the crisp beat of silence that followed formulating an apology for saying CeCe’s old name aloud; instead, I wondered what she looked like. Different, obviously, but how? I missed my exit but failed to notice until I was halfway around the roundabout again. I was aware I shouldn’t be thinking about her in this way, but once I’d started I found I was unable to stop. 

Do you know anyone else looking for a roommate? CeCe asked, finally, just as I crept up on my exit again. I took it this time and the rest of the drive was easy: left and then straight and then left again. 

I’m not currently in the loop on that kind of thing, I said. 

CeCe said she wasn’t either; she’d just moved back home. 

That’s cool, I said, trying to sound affirming. 

Ha, she said, it’s really not. 

Our hometown isn’t bumfuck, but it isn’t New York, either. It’s the kind of place people in New York want to be told more about, as in, 

Galveston, huh? Tell me more about that. 

I haven’t been back to Galveston in a few years, I said, hoping CeCe wouldn’t ask why because I wasn’t telling the truth, has anything much changed? 

No, said CeCe, except they tore down a bunch of houses on I Street and put in a new park. 

Wow, I said, I can’t imagine. I didn’t tell her I’d seen them laying sod when I was back last Christmas. 

It’s actually nice, she said, there’s a little fountain. 

After that, we drove together for a while, the sun already so low on the horizon that it looked like a faraway street light flickering on for the night. Of course, it only felt like we were driving together; in reality I was totally alone. 

Perhaps CeCe sensed this. After almost a minute of silence had passed between us, she asked what I was up to. 

Besides changing your name, she added, ha ha. 

I said something vague about enjoying a change of scenery. I said I’d been making a lot of progress. 

I failed to notice the ensuing gap in our conversation until a second before CeCe ended it. 

Progress? She prompted, progress on what? 

A bunch of stuff, I said. Creative stuff, self care, meal prepping, all that. CeCe said that sounded great. She’d been writing a lot of poetry.

Poetry, I said. 

Poetry, she repeated, and I felt inexplicably jealous. 

Can I read it anywhere? I said. I’d expected her to say yes, to list off a few online lit mags, the kind anyone can publish in if they submit enough times. I’d been into that kind of thing when I first moved to New York. 

Yeah, she said. What’s your address? 

When I started to recite my email, she stopped me. I mean, where do you get real mail, she said. 

This struck me as pretentious, but I told her anyway. It was hard to remember my PO box number because I’d only checked it once. Inside, I’d found a solid brick of catalogs forwarded wordlessly from my old roommate. Plus a postcard from my mom, who was spending Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the month in between with her long distance boyfriend, I don’t remember where. 

***

Within a week, a letter arrived from CeCe. Given how long it took mail to make its way down the thin spit of land to the single, short-staffed post office, that meant she must have sent it the same day we spoke. I would have called that desperate if not for the fact that I’d been checking my mail every day since our phone call, sure I’d find nothing but unable to resist the urge to look. 

On my daily drive to the post office (right, then straight, then right again) I stemmed the tide of my own excitement by imagining something really bad had happened since I left the house. Perhaps, a pipe had burst. Maybe, the cat had knocked over the space heater and burned the whole development down. The anticipation I felt as I scanned the darkening sky for smoke was rivaled only by the thrill of kneeling before my own PO Box. I imagined the scene from above; a flaming bangle swelling around an anemic wrist. I wiggled the mail key in its little lock. Probably, I reminded myself, the house was safe, the cat alive. Probably, the box was empty. 

I don’t know what I expected from CeCe but what I got was two pages of writing, typed out, printed, and then signed at the end by hand, CeCe Leary, like a bill becoming law. She began by apologizing for being weird on the phone. She hadn’t been. She congratulated me on my escape from Galveston, then backtracked. It was, in her opinion, not such an awful place to grow up, not the worst by any means. There are palm trees, at least. 

Before her unexpected call a week earlier, the only thing I could have said with certainty about CeCe Leary besides her old name was the fact that she’d emigrated from Ireland halfway through our sophomore year. Our high school had been large enough that the arrival of new students often went unnoticed but I remembered hers clearly. I think because I was excited to hear the accent which, when she finally spoke, she didn’t have. 

In her letter, CeCe’s voice was more Irish-seeming than in real life, funny and sad. She’d gotten a BA in Human Geography and spent summers doing internships. After college, she’d moved somewhere, then moved again and had a brief but serious relationship with a graduate student. Most recently, CeCe had gone back to Ireland to pursue her own advanced degree, then dropped out almost immediately and returned to Galveston, where she now lived with her parents. Everybody she knew there had long since moved away. When she wasn’t writing poetry, she was working at Deals and Steals with the same set of elderly, green-vested employees who’d watched us all grow up and learn to shoplift. She’d come out to her parents, but only very recently. She ended her letter with a barrage of friendly, personal inquiries that struck me as somehow at odds with the ponderous tone that characterized the rest of it. Had I liked living in New York? Why had I moved there in the first place? Why had I left? 

I remember sitting in the car for a long time after I finished reading, hands in my lap. It was late November; I had no concept yet of how much colder it was going to get. 

If I focus, I can still picture exactly the way the cat looked at me whenever I walked through that door, angular head protruding from between the upstairs banisters. It always waited at a distance while I served its food before gumming it down, assiduously avoiding the little, undissolved chunks of medicine I’d failed to mix in. This was all a part of the arrangement we’d developed, the cat and I; it didn’t take its medicine and I didn’t care. 

Standing at the seashell-tiled kitchen island, I read CeCe’s letter a second time. She didn’t specify the subject of her grad program nor the gender of the grad student she’d dated nor the city where they’d lived, but had written at length about the Dublin church she’d visited every day after class before she dropped out. 

Sometimes, she wrote, it's nice to try and look at the world directly, not thinking too much about memories. Other times it's better to see the world in all the color of an old experience. (Except she spelled it like, colour.) 

In front of the space heater, the cat began to lick itself, quit, curled up, and fell asleep. 

The ink in my pens often came out cold and slow but that night it was particularly bad. I ruined several pages of my sketch pad uncoiling white scribbles until the pen warmed up in my fist.  

Dear CeCe, I finally wrote, thank you for your letter, but where is the poem? 

Then again, maybe her letter was a poem. I began again. 

Dear CeCe, I wrote, thank you for your letter. 

I was unsure of how to proceed. I couldn’t answer her questions about New York without explaining my reasons for leaving and I couldn’t explain my reasons for leaving because I could hardly remember them myself. They were personal, I knew that. The longer I’d lived alone in the uninsulated beach house, the easier it had become to pretend that my New Life had built itself, like a storm cloud on the horizon. 

Of course, it hadn’t been like that at all. I’d made the decision to rent out my room and quit my job, the one I’d been so excited about after how-many-years spent freelancing. On my last day, I finally accepted my work acquaintance’s standing invitation to Happy Hour, then his standing invitation to his nearby apartment. 

Every weekend for the rest of the summer I’d gone to bars and parties and announced my plans to groups of friends and friends of friends. I made a big deal about my interesting decision to move somewhere new, just temporarily, just for a change of scenery. A change of pace, I’d called it, and watched as everyone’s faces melted into genuine interest. Deference, even. Nobody wanted to hear about Galveston anymore; everyone wanted to know more about the thin spit of land. Celebrities vacationed there, presidents. 

Don’t worry, I said, resting a hand on a near stranger’s shoulder, I’ll be back. 

I think I really need this right now. That’s what I said, tearfully, to the people who seemed truly sad to see me go: my work acquaintance, my roommate, the ex boyfriend with whom I’d briefly agreed to try and make things work before he found out about my work acquaintance. 

If you think it will help… they all said. In my memory, they all said it in unison. Of course, it didn’t happen like that. I had broken the news to each of them individually, excruciatingly, one by one. By the time I found myself writing my first letter to CeCe, I’d fallen out of touch with everyone. 

I didn’t tell CeCe about my Old Life except in the most general of terms, or by comparison; the air out here was so much damper than it was in New York, the sun set even earlier. I felt as though I’d lived in the uninsulated beach house my entire life, half an hour from the beach. From both beaches. I wrote about it as if I had, copying the rueful fondness CeCe had used to describe our hometown to scrawl out some inane stuff about my New Life. 

That time I’d been so distracted by the armchair I found washed up on the beach that I almost didn’t notice the family of dead porpoises scattered all around it. 

The Homemade Fudge Factory.

The bald grocery clerk with the Liberty Bell neck tattoo who’d caught me trying to shoplift blood red taper candles from the decrepit Home Goods Aisle. 

Girl, he’d said, shaking his head so the fluorescent lights reflecting in white stripes across its shiny surface seemed to strobe, what do you even want these for? 

I’d wanted to twist them into the narrow necks of old wine bottles then watch while they burned down, late into the night. For a long time, I blamed my unhappiness on their absence. 

I didn’t write that part down. 

I inquired more pointedly about CeCe’s poetry. Because I’d assumed she wrote about being trans, I thought this might prompt her to reveal something more specific about what that felt like, to be a girl. No, not to be a girl, exactly. I already knew about that. To become one. Before CeCe, I’d never been curious about that kind of thing. I’d lived in New York; of course, I’d met trans people before. But they’d all been trans for a long time by the time I knew them, a few even to the extent that I couldn’t tell at all, or couldn’t tell at first. I was aware that I wasn’t supposed to think about trans people in this way, but I did. I tried to imagine how they used to look, although I knew I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that either, maybe especially not about trans girls. 

With CeCe, I didn’t have to think, I knew. I could kind of remember glancing out the window of the civics classroom where we (the Yearbook Club) met and seeing them (CeCe and Rafa Guterson) across the street, sharing a cigarette right outside. Like they wanted us to look. Like, take a picture, asshole. Rafa Guterson had turned out okay apparently because I’d seen him several times in the city, twice on the train and once at an upscale cocktail lounge. He was always wearing a suit, me, a small dress. We’d made extended eye contact but hadn’t said hello, just like high school. That was in my Old Life. 

Like the first one, CeCe’s second letter arrived sooner than expected. The day it came the post office lady stopped me right when I walked through the door. 

Hey, she said, I have something for you. She was very short; when she smiled at me, I could see the fillings in her back teeth. She slid a standard size envelope across the service counter. Trapped beneath the scratched plexiglass top, a selection of stamps for sale: hummingbirds, lighthouses, Nineteenth Century Poets. 

You must be excited, the lady said, her voice tilting like a question. She’d been watching me check my mail every day for a week. I’d already started to figure out that the kind of people who live year-round on a thin spit of land are the same kind of people who get off on watching. 

***

The second letter was the exact same length as the first. CeCe thanked me for my prompt reply and said my new life sounded a lot like hers in Ireland: beautiful but kind of shite (shit). She’d looked at the thin spit of land on Google Maps. Had I been to the bridge where that girl died? 

She wrote a little more about her life. She went on a lot of walks, mostly in the neighborhood where we’d gone to high school, past places that had once held great significance to her and, she ventured, to me as well. As if CeCe had read my mind, Rafa Guterson’s name appeared in the third paragraph. Besides me, Guterson was the only person CeCe knew in New York City. (They hadn’t spoken in years.) Despite myself, I felt flattered. I always felt flattered whenever anyone from my hometown mentioned me in the same sentence as New York. 

The condensation on my car windshield had begun to freeze even though I’d only been parked for two pages’ worth of reading. Everyone who’d spent time on the thin spit of land in winter had warned me not to expect snow: some meteorological reason, something to do with the effect of the ocean or the bay, or maybe both combined. I’ve since forgotten. I remember the perpetual gray-brown of everything, the heavy, granulated frost. After I finished CeCe’s letter, I sat in the car, just watching the scenery and listening to the rhythm of the freeway. I sat there for a long time before I realized it was actually the sound of crashing waves, eerily amplified in the cold air. It was Christmas Eve eve. My friends were all at their parents’ houses or at their boyfriends’ parents’ houses. 

I was surprised to find the door to the uninsulated beach house, which I never locked, frozen shut. I tried prying it open, taking some breaks to pace back and forth across the treacherous porch. There was a big bag of green-tinged pet-safe rock salt in the garage but I hadn’t used it despite the texts from my work acquaintance's dad, asking, Checking In. Hazy through the plastic wrapped windows, I could see the boney silhouette of the cat pacing back and forth too, sometimes backlit by the orange blow of the heater, sometimes not. Through the trees, the freeway was an icebound river. In an hour, two cars flashed past. I was wearing a Tt- shirt. 

Eventually, I went around the back and broke a window. I figured, how much colder could the house even get? I figured wrong. That night, I wrote to CeCe in gloves. I wrote for several hours, no anecdotes, no coherent points. Just an endless, looping summary until the distinction between Old Life and New broke down to the extent that even I forgot for a second why it ever mattered in the first place. 

When I first moved to New York, I’d developed this serious journaling habit. At first, I’d been very intense about getting an entry down every day. Gradually, the impulse to read what I’d written outgrew my desire to write until I quit writing altogether. Still, I couldn’t stop myself, flipping farther and farther back into the past just so I could pick my way back through to the almost-present, as if doing so might tell me something I didn’t already know. Eventually, it got so bad I had to put all the journals in a paper bag, staple the top closed, and throw it in a garbage can on the street outside my building. Writing to CeCe that night reminded me of that. I remember being aware of myself getting carried away, sounding crazy. I remember asking a lot of questions that I probably had no business asking.

Once I’d finished the letter, I didn’t read it. I sealed the envelope and drew a picture of the cat across its glued-down flap in case I got the urge to peel it open on my way to the post office the next morning. 

Several weeks passed without a response. Occasionally, I considered calling her. I hadn’t saved CeCe’s number, but I wouldn’t have had to scroll back far through my call history to find it. It would have been equally easy to reach her online; she’d seen my post looking for a subletter so presumably we shared a few followers, Guterson at the very least. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.

***

During that first gap in my correspondence with CeCe my only company was the cat. Without medicine, it was losing fur fast. Clumps accumulated in every corner of the house and got in my food. On rare, clear days when the angle of the sun was correct, iridescent strands twirled in the current of cold air always pouring through the broken back window. I sat on the couch, or at the kitchen island, and tried to appreciate the gentle pace of my New Life, though it was starting to feel very old. Eventually, I gave up expecting anything more from CeCe, but I didn’t stop checking my mailbox. 

It’s your lucky day, the post office lady said, finally, waggling an envelope at me.

I snatched it and rushed out to my car, only to return to the counter a minute later, needing stamps.

CeCe’s letter was two pages, dated February 14th. A few weeks earlier, there’d been a storm so severe I’d actually called my mom when I saw Galveston in its path. She’d used the weather as an excuse to get out of dodge with her boyfriend, but she said she appreciated the concern and was happy to report that neighbors said the house looked fine from the outside. 

CeCe hadn’t been so lucky. Her bedroom had flooded, along with the whole first floor. She’d been busy helping her dad tear up carpet and underlay; dry wall like a fistful of cake. Insurance claims. For two weeks, she’d been sleeping on the couch. 

Also, she wrote, I lost your last letter before I even got the chance to read it. I’m sorry. 

I replied immediately, inviting her to come stay with me in the meantime. As soon as I sent the letter, I began to worry she’d actually take me up on it. To soothe myself, I visualized 

how far away we really were from one another, how expensive and complicated it would be to get from my hometown to the uninsulated beach house on its thin spit of land, how many things could go wrong in between. The nearest commercial airport was four hours away by car, seven by bus. By the time CeCe’s next letter arrived, I’d calmed down and come full circle; I was back to wishing she’d visit afterall. CeCe said maybe someday. 

For a while after that, we exchanged letters with militant consistency. During those months, the steady thrum of our communication was the only constant in my otherwise tuneless life. I felt like a cartoon kid in a treehouse, linked to no one but CeCe by a shivering cord strung tight between two tin cans. 

***

I started going to the beach (both beaches) just to have something to write to her about.

That time I’d seen two teenagers, So High On Something, poking mittened fingers into the crumbly yellow cliffs that flanked the ocean side, eroding them. 

Later, I spotted them again through the cracked window of the only other car in the lot: a Minivan, Girl On Top. Although I’d left my own car unlocked—everyone out there did, keys glinting on the passenger seat—I fumbled with the driver side door for a few extra seconds, drafting a letter in my mind. 

Besides writing to CeCe, I had nothing to do. Willfully unemployed and utterly alone, I was exempt from every normal obligation except those associated with the cat. Occasionally I’d wake up to find it looking up at me from the warm, warping strip of laminate flooring between the couch’s fringed edge and the space heater. 

It’s funny to think about now, but back then I believed it would last forever. It’s been so long now since I recycled the last of CeCe’s letters—even longer since she stopped sending them—that it’s sometimes hard to remember what she wrote about at all. I remember snippets. A birthday phone call from her ex, whose name I learned was Marianne. She and CeCe had lived together in Salem and then Portland, Oregon while Marianne finished a masters in library sciences and CeCe applied to the same kind of programs in Ireland. Like CeCe, Marianne appreciated the value inherent to any attempt to improve one’s quality of life, even if it didn’t  work, for example: CeCe’s decision to break up and move to Ireland. 

Dropping out halfway through the first semester had filled CeCe with a serene optimism she could only compare to coming out to her parents, which she’d done via an email in Dublin airport before boarding her flight home. At the end of a subsequent letter, or maybe even in a postscript, CeCe admitted she’d been manic when she’d sent it. 

Did I know what that felt like? I assumed she meant the optimism, not the mania. 

Yes, I replied, yes, of course I do. 

Perhaps because she could sense the depth of my secret curiosity, CeCe didn’t write about much else about being trans. When she did, it was about the hoops she was being made to jump through in order to access various kinds of gender affirming care or, more often, the hoops she was being made to jump through in order to access the therapy that was a mandatory prerequisite for insurance preauthorization for the gender affirming care. When she got on this subject, her sentences elongated and curled back on themselves, as if she were trying to simulate her frustration, or trick me into feeling that way, too. I thought of that poem I’d read in high school, the one shaped like an apple, and all the words are Apple, Bite, Worm. 

***

The weather got warm, and then it got cold again. One day I was taping another layer of cardboard over the broken back window and snagged my wrist long-ways on a shard of glass and it wouldn’t stop bleeding. There were red smears on all the light switches and the door knobs and the next morning, I left a red handprint on the white handle of the coffee maker’s glass carafe. I added two more to the steering wheel, at Ten and Two, when I drove to the post office later that afternoon. 

Jesus Christ, said the post office lady when she saw me, my fist wrapped in a blood-stained, beach-themed dish towel. What happened to you? 

Nothing, I said. I remember feeling like, in the City, no one would ever have asked me this. In the City, you can walk down the street with your whole chest cavity opened up, gushing, and no one will bat an eye. Of course, I know that’s not really true but back then, it sure felt like it.

The post office lady narrowed her eyes on me. She was clutching an envelope with my name on it. In CeCe’s handwriting, my name looked so good. Caroline. 

I’m good, I said, reaching out for the letter with my good hand. 

You’re going to get it all bloody, she said, not budging. 

I shook my fist at her, but that got me tired and so I had to lean momentarily against the leaden bank of PO boxes. 

Don’t touch that please, said the post office lady, you’re a freaking biohazard.

Obviously, I should have accepted her repeated offers to drive me to the hospital but I didn’t. Hindsight is twenty twenty and yes, it’s easy to say in retrospect that I made a bad decision. I drove myself back to the uninsulated beach house, drew a bath, and read CeCe’s letter neck-deep in salty, pink water. Later, I drip-dried at the kitchen island, sticky and naked with my dominant hand elevated uselessly above my head. My reply to CeCe must have been smeary and illegible, although of course I didn’t read it before sealing, stamping, and addressing the envelope. Exhausted from the effort, I slept deeply on the couch and awoke the next evening to a brisk knock at the door. 

It took a second to recognize the post office lady in her drab civilian clothes (I’d wrapped myself in a mermaid-print beach towel, thank God). Her single, oily braid had become a glossy, wild mane. She was wearing earrings, danglies. 

Oh, fuck me, she said. 

Standing up made me dizzy. 

Besides the bridge, I don’t remember much about the two hour drive to the hospital. I’d never seen the view from the passenger’s seat before. The sun was setting. It was so beautiful I got nauseous. Also, the post office lady kept looking over at me with concern, causing the mail truck to drift away from the median then swerve back across it. 

The hospital was decorated for Easter, which had either just happened or was about to. Not just bunnies and baby chickens, but also wreaths of palm and, in the small, white room where I woke up, a glossy reproduction of a painting of Jesus emerging triumphantly from the tomb. 

I had a lot of stitches and a puffy cast. The nurse must have called to tell the post office lady I was being discharged, because there she was, waiting in the lobby to drive me home and explain everything. 

When I’d failed to appear at the post office as usual she’d gotten worried and looked up the uninsulated beach house’s address on the PO Box application I’d filed a million years ago. 

That’s illegal, I said even though I’d already started to figure out that the kind of people who live year round on a thin spit of land are the same kind of people who don’t follow laws. The post office lady laughed, then got serious again and apologized for putting herself down as my emergency contact instead of my girlfriend. I didn’t correct her. She kind of seemed like a lesbian, which I guess would have explained a lot. 

She reached over to pat my knee, swerving the truck. She wanted me to know that she’d found my bloody most recent letter to CeCe on the kitchen island and sent it while I was in the hospital. Because of the post office lady’s kindness, CeCe’s reply came only a day or so after I got home. 

Caroline, CeCe wrote, are you okay? This is perhaps another example of a time when it might have been appropriate to break our analogue streak and reach out by phone, email, or DM, but neither of us did. 

***

Later that spring, I came to understand her decision. I don’t remember when exactly, only that the daffodils were up and the cat was already dead. By then, CeCe’s letters had become so disjointed that they were almost free verse, very difficult to follow. Apropos of kind of nothing, she’d written me a long, rambling screed about the internet, or online communication, or anonymity, or Chelsea Manning, or something. It was boring, she wrote, it was a farce, a psyop, it was fucking transphobic. This, she wrote (meaning the letter, I think) is real and cool. Ha, dot. Ha, dot. 

I kept that one a lot longer than the rest because it was the closest she ever got to sending me an actual poem. Also, it was a reminder of why I never called or texted after our correspondence stopped again—that time for good—around Memorial Day. I was almost relieved. The gaps between our letters had been growing steadily as the temperature climbed. Really, we were hardly writing at all. I don’t even remember anymore what her last letter said; I think the Internet one was next-to-last. She must have been spending a lot of time on Facebook and Craigslist, applying for sublets and jobs, because shortly thereafter, she moved to the City. 

Around the same time, I did too. Looking back, it’s easy to pretend like it all happened on time-lapse, like a shaky video of a new flower opening. That’s how I remember it feeling, at least. It was suddenly so easy; I convinced my mom to convince her boyfriend to give me some money, and I found a month-to-month situation. 

As soon as I’d made my decision to leave, the thin spit of land began to reveal to me her subtle pleasures. Everyone who’d spent time there in winter had warned me not to expect leaves on the trees until June at least—some meteorological reason, something to do with the effect of the ocean or the Bay, or maybe both combined. Before, springtime had felt like a threat. Now, it was a buzzing sensation. Yes, the trees were still leafless but the daffodils were all the way up: patches of yellow in every yard and gully and even way out in the woods, as if planted by a lunatic. I buried the cat in the soft goop of the neighbor’s leach field. Then, the trees bloomed. A million golden tassels. I’d never noticed tree flowers before. 

The road became crowded with bulky landscapers’ trucks weighed down with men and tools en route to the fancy estates farther down the spit. On one of my last visits to the grocery store, I passed a whole denim-clad crew kneeling on the circle at the center of the roundabout, pruning. Hunched over in the grass, they looked like old gravestones. 

Eventually, it got warm enough to peel all the plastic off the windows. A lot of paint came with it. I kept telling myself I’d repaint and clean up but I never got around to any of it. I got distracted; I could suddenly see outside. I pulled the cardboard off the broken back window and let the fresh air rush into the musty house. I sat on the couch, enjoying my coffee and writing. I didn’t yet know it would be my final letter to CeCe. 

When I marry rich, I wrote, I’ll make my husband buy me a place here and you can come visit. Ha, dot. Ha, dot. Down the street, I watched a family unloading a station wagon. To save money, they’d brought their groceries from wherever they were visiting; cartons of milk and see-through bags of colorful cereal, beer. 

When it finally came time to pack away the space heater I discovered a big, black char mark on the floor beneath it. I just couldn’t make myself care, not then and not later when my work acquaintance’s dad started sending emails with short, angry subject lines. Urgent, Damage, Itemized Costs. 

***

I’ve been back in New York now for several years and still, I’m always expecting to run into CeCe. Sometimes I find myself staring at trans girls on the train or staring at girls who I think might be trans. But then I’ll look away because I know I am not supposed to be doing that sort of thing. If she saw me, I’m not sure she’d even recognize me, but then again, who knows. 

Rafa Guterson recognized me just fine. It was crowded and dimly-lit, with bulbous chrome fixtures. I had gone there for no real reason, right from a long day at my new job, a better job than the one I’d had before. 

By total coincidence, my new boss grew up vacationing on the same narrow spit of land where I’d once lived, only farther down it, where the houses are bigger and more spaced out. He had a lot to say about it during my interview, about the beaches and the topiary. 

Whenever I cross that big, blue bridge, he said, I just feel so optimistic. 

Certainly, I said. 

Rafa Guterson was wearing a suit and staring at me. I stared back at him and, for the first time in years, for reasons I still don’t understand, I thought about the cat. It had died on the first real spring day, like that was the last straw for whatever reason. In my memory, I found it still warm, eyes open. Of course, in real life, I’d found it in rictus in the linen closet because that’s how cats like to die; off by themselves, where no one can see them. 

Carolynn, Rafa called out, loping towards me across the bar, is that really you?

About the Author:

Silas Jones is a writer originally from Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in The Drift, Joyland, and elsewhere. He is Hertog Fellow in fiction at Hunter College in New York City.