Three Years Later: A Letter
By Elizabeth Hemp
To Enya
I
met you in a different country than the one you call home. It was your second time going there, but my first, and I spent the whole trip trying not to compare my experiences to anyone else’s. You didn’t know anything about that, not then. Afterwards, we came back to your homeland, where I also lived, and suddenly, somehow, we were in a friend group. We hung out every day with Alicia, and your mother called us The Three Amigos, and I discovered being friends the American way involves copious amounts of food. That was the beginning. In the middle you realized you liked me, and I realized I liked you, and everyone else thought it was an easy choice for us to start dating. They only thought that because they didn’t see my utter terror at the prospect of being tied down to a single place, trapped in a relationship that had the potential of being part of a forever small story. Nobody else thought of it that way, especially not you. When I tried to explain, you just looked sad. I remember how we lay on the hood of your car, warm metal under our skin, and we stared up into the evening sky while you asked me to please stay. I held your hand that night, but I didn’t make any promises. Three months into our dating relationship, my heartland was lost to me. My parents decided to change continents, so we all went back one last time to pack up and say goodbye to the country we had loved for seventeen years, and 15
Among Worlds
you went too. To this day, I still don’t know why you agreed to go. But you did, and in our third country together you spent ten days drowning in the flood of my memories, holding my hand while I sobbed about things I couldn’t even hope to put into words. You were gentle, steady, calm, and kind. You were my stability in that time, the one piece of my life that stood still and was predictable. Even if I lost everything else (and it felt like I did), I knew you would still love me.
“ I didn’t know how to be loved, or how to stay, or how to be tethered to such a small story. You didn’t know how to wait for someone who was so clearly lost.” That trip with you changed my life. You entered into the complexity of my identity, held the shattered pieces of my history, and loved me all the same. You saw the things I had sworn to never let anyone see; you took all of my complicated emotions and held them with gentleness. You taught me it was okay to be myself. You were able to engage my history and my present simultaneously, acknowledging both as valid. No one had ever shown me that before, and even if they had, I wouldn’t have believed them. But because it was you, I believed it. There will never be enough words to make you understand what a precious gift that time with you was.
