The Email

when life dreams dispel

To send or not to send, that is the question.

Leo lit a cigarette. The smoke curled up around the blackened nail of his forefinger and drifted over to the sink. Unfinished, his email sat in the middle of the screen, the cursor dispassionately pulsing in the empty space above his initials.

“Dear Erica,” it said, “so nice to hear from you after all these years. I am fine, working, the kids visit sometimes. Anna is 28, Dennis - 26, both with master’s degrees now. Here is a shot of us in Pienza, Italy, where Romeo and Juliet was filmed. You taught me to play the tune, remember?

LTD”

Erica, his first love. Two short weeks at a mountain summer camp. Not a good dancer, a bit geeky and old-fashioned, he worked hard to make her notice him, but when he brought her a bouquet of violets from his climb to the snowy peak, her gaze was deeper than the lake they weren’t allowed to swim in.

At the end of the summer, her family moved to the city and his first letter followed her. The blue envelopes stamped their passage through adolescence as they mended their hearts broken by others with the safety pin of their epistolary relationship. A few visits kindled it up, but the letters weren’t enough to keep the fire going.

Last time he saw her, was shortly after his wedding. She was about to start her Masters in Juilliard. He was about to become a dad.

Leo scrolled to her email. At the end she said:

“Alex is a designer. He’s a busy mind, but we’re good together. Tell me more about yourself, what do you do? You’re probably a professor by now, discovering stars and galaxies. ”

Such an easy question – what did he do? His answer, re-worded and edited since he got her email last week, didn’t make sense anymore. Only his initials at the end did: LTD. As in Limited.

For God’s sake, what’s in a name? He almost got a degree in Nuclear Physics. Almost read the complete works of Shakespeare.

He hunched over the keyboard.

“You ask about my work. I am HDTO of EU RHA,” he typed. “Off to Salzburg tomorrow. If I’ve got time, I’ll visit the Mozart Museum, thinking of you.

Cheers! LTD.”

There, he told her. The abbreviation looked good, it carried weight. Everything got abbreviated these days, as if the world had no time for words. Not telling the truth was a lie, but not spelling it out? Was that a lie too?

All the worl’d a stage… Leo grabbed the mouse, ready to stab SEND in the middle. The arrow hesitantly flickered, overlapped by the image of Erica.

He’d watched her on YouTube — solo, with orchestra. The way she closed her eyes and leaned over the piano, so serene, so complete. If music be the food of love… Her name was longer now, hyphenated. Erica Cohen-Gardener, the guardian of his dawn dreams, an ECG of a life that had somehow flatlined.

In the dusk outside, the snow stilled the world cold and resigned. A flake of cigarette ash fell on the keyboard. His ID card was on the table, under his keys. A blank expression, receding hairline. Leonid Tikhonov Dubrovsky. Heavy Duty Truck Operator, European Union Road Haulage Association.

The arrow slowly moved to DISCARD.

Click.

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The piano cover of Nino Rota’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ theme is perfromed by Riyandi Kusuma

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash