The text came just past midnight on a Sunday. It was from Josh– of course it was from Josh. We had been friends since childhood, and now that we went to the same university, the two of us were basically inseparable. He texted me at all hours of the day, and I almost always responded.

I need your help.

I closed my laptop, the assignment I had been working on momentarily forgotten. Professor Abraham’s creative writing class could wait.

Sure, what’s up?

The gray bubble appeared immediately, but it was a long time before I received a response. Finally, a single sentence. I want to ask Mindy to marry me.

I dropped my phone with an audible gasp. Sure, Josh and Mindy had been dating for years, and sure, they seemed to be so perfect for each other that spending time with them made even my perpetually-single self feel like I would eventually find someone, but still, this was a big decision.

You sure?

I don’t know. I love her, and I can totally imagine spending the rest of my life with her…

I could picture him now, sitting at the desk in his dorm, surrounded by stacks of textbooks and folders, anxiously typing into his phone. Josh texted with one finger, like an old lady– I always teased him about that.

I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t.

But I’m worried, came the response. What if she says no?

Don’t worry. You and Mindy were made for each other. Trust me, she’ll say yes.

There was a long pause. I thought that Josh had gone to bed in the middle of the conversation, but his gray bubble reappeared. I’m just worried we’re too young. None of my friends are even thinking about marriage.

I thought about it for a moment. Your life doesn’t need to follow the same path as anyone else’s. Do what you want.

Thanks. A brief pause, then another text. I think I will.

The next day, Josh stopped me as I left class.

“Do you have a minute?”

“This about last night?”

He nodded. “Let’s go to the cafe.”

The school cafe’s food was notoriously expensive, so few students actually bought food there, but it was still a popular place to sit, talk, and work. Josh and I took a table at the back.

“You’re still going to ask Mindy?” I asked once both of us were settled.

“Yeah. I did some thinking last night, and I know that this is what I want.”

“You sure?”

Josh nodded. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

“You and Mindy are perfect for each other. She’ll say yes. I know she will.”

“Thanks.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

“So why did you want to talk to me?”

“Oh! Right. I need you to help me figure out how.”

“How to ask her?”

Josh nodded.

“God, I don’t know. Take her to a nice restaurant, pop the question during dessert?”

“Too boring. I want something she’ll remember.”

“You’re asking the wrong person, dude. I’ve literally never been in a relationship that lasted longer than a few months. I want to help you, but I don’t know how.”

Josh sat up in his seat. “You can write for me.”

“What?”

“She’s been sending me letters, every now and again. Through the snail mail. They’re really gorgeously written, too– she pours her heart and soul into them. I’ve always wanted to send her one back, but I’m not good with words. You are.” Like me, Mindy was an English major. Josh was studying microbiology and was terrible at writing.

“I don’t know, man. You really think my single self will be able to write a decent love letter? I mean, it’s not just about writing skills– it’s mostly the feeling, you know? And you’re the one who has that.”

“Then how about… how about I give you the feeling, and you write the letter? Like, I tell you everything you need to know, and you base your writing off of that? Just like when you interview someone for the newspaper.”

I was still a little skeptical — a newspaper article was a far cry from a love letter– but I pulled out my phone, started a recording, and put on my reporter-voice.

“This is Alex Nicholson, interviewing Josh McCulloch about why he loves Mindy Hart.”

“Right.” Josh stared at my phone. “I love Mindy because… she’s perfect. I really don’t know what else to say.” He laughed.

“Come on, Josh. I need something more. I can’t just write “you’re perfect” on a piece of paper and mail it to her.”

“Well, it’s true. I don’t know what else to say.”

“How about you start when you guys met?” Josh nodded and took a breath.

“I’ve known Mindy since high school. We met at a school concert– she was in the chorus, I was in the band. My trumpet playing wasn’t anything special, but Mindy’s voice… Wow. She had this gorgeous solo, and when I saw her afterwards I just had to tell her

how amazing she sounded.”

“Did you have a romantic interest in her then?”

“Not at all. But then the next year we had a couple classes together, and then we became friends, and from there, it just kind of… happened.”

“When did you know Mindy was the one for you?”

“By the time we graduated, the two of us had been dating for about two years, and I knew it was more than a casual high school romance. But it was really the gap year that cemented it for me.”

After high school, Josh, Mindy, my then-girlfriend Sophia, and I took a gap year and travelled across the country in a converted school bus. Sophia and I broke up in Colorado, making the rest of the trip fairly awkward for the two of us, but that trip really strengthened the bond between Mindy and Josh. Even though Mindy ended up at a college three hours away from us, every other weekend one of them made the drive to the other. It honestly impressed me, that they were both willing to drive six hours just to spend less than twenty-four with the person they loved.

“What, specifically, during the gap year made it clear?”

“You were there, so you remember– we weren’t exactly travelling in style. We were broke-ass students, on an old school bus with no insulation or AC, and half the time we had no idea where our next meal was coming from. But Mindy somehow made it fun. I’d honestly…” he trailed off.

“You’d what?”

“This is gonna sound cheesy as hell.”

“Good. Say it.”

“I’d rather be sharing a fifty-cent can of cream of mushroom soup with Mindy than eating without her in the best restaurant on earth.”

“I’m definitely using that. Word for word. See? You’re good with words. You just need a little push in the right direction.”

Josh smiled.

“Let the record show,” I said, “That Josh McCulloch is grinning like a massive idiot.”

He laughed, then, and reached across the table to hit my shoulder.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s get back to Mindy.”

“Right. Mindy is… she’s honestly the greatest person I’ve ever met. She’s brilliant, and funny, and so, so fun to talk to. An hour with her feels like two minutes. I’ll never get tired of her company, her stupid jokes, her loud-ass donkey laugh that she hates but I think is the most beautiful sound in the world…” He stopped and looked down at the table in front of him.

“It all comes back to what I said at the beginning.

She’s perfect. Well, maybe not perfect for everybody.

Not everyone can understand her weird brand of humor, or has the patience to listen to her rants about late 19th century literature. But I have the exact same brand of humor, and I love to listen to her rant, even when I have no idea what she’s talking about. I love Mindy, man, everything about her. She’s perfect for me.”

I shut the recording off. “That was… incredible. I can’t believe you think you’re bad with words.” Josh shrugged. “I just said what I felt. Like you told me to.”

“Well, you did a damn good job. I have plenty of material for the letter. Unless you don’t want me to write it anymore. In my opinion, you should tell her what you just told me.”

He shook his head. “I still want a letter. Something real I can give her. Something, I don’t know, physical.”

“That makes sense. I’ll see if I can crank something out tonight– shouldn’t be hard, with everything you’ve just given me.”

“Thanks, man. I really owe you one.”

I sat on my bed that night, laptop on my lap, phone open to Josh’s recording. I sighed, listened to it one more time, and began to type.

Dear Mindy, I wrote, then erased it. In all the  years I had known him, Josh had never started an email to a professor with Dear, let alone one to his girlfriend. A typical message from him generally consisted of whatever message he wanted to get across, nothing more, nothing less. The problem was, how did I transfer that direct bluntness that was so much of Josh’s voice into the nuanced and emotional world of a love letter?

I settled on a simple opening. Mindy,

Then I stared down at the almost-blank screen.

What else to write? Best to start with what Josh had started with, I guessed.

I met you at a concert back in high school. Do you remember? I’m sure you do.

I deleted the entire sentence. It sounded too breezy, too informal– which was what Josh sounded like, to be sure, but not what a love letter was supposed to be.

From the moment I met you, I knew you were the one.

That wasn’t even true– he had told me as much.

Now I was just regurgitating common romantic phrases, the exact opposite of Mindy and Josh’s spontaneous, unorthodox, beautiful romance. I didn’t want to write just any letter of love. I wanted something that expressed the emotions Josh had shown me that day, at the table in the back of the cafe.

You are the perfect one for me.

That was what Josh had been driving at during our conversation, the final statement that summed up all that he had said, but somehow, in cold, sans-serif text on my computer screen, it just looked less real. It was real when he said it, that I knew for sure, but how to put that into text?

Suddenly my phone buzzed with a text from

Josh. I picked it up.

I’m going to visit Mindy.

My brow wrinkled in confusion. Now? But it’s nearly ten on a Monday.

Now. Our conversation helped me realize how important Mindy is to me. I can’t wait another second.

OK, I wrote, not knowing what else to say. Then, a few seconds later, I sent another text: Do you still want the letter?

Yeah. Just send it to me when you finish. It’ll be a nice surprise once she says yes.

I sent him a thumbs-up emoji, followed, a moment later, by Drive safe.

I woke up late the next morning, since my first class wasn’t until noon. Upon checking my phone, I noticed an abnormal number of texts and missed calls. I tapped on the first number that appeared: Josh’s mother.

The phone rang twice before she picked up.

“Oh, Alex, I’m so glad you called.” She sounded like she had been crying.

“Mrs. McCulloch! Is everything all right?”

“It’s… it’s Josh. He was driving late last night, Lord knows why, and… and…” I could hear the tears fighting their way into her voice. Finally they overpowered her. “There was a crash. He was… he was dead when he arrived at the hospital,” she said through her sobs.

I took the phone away from my ear. This couldn’t be happening– could it? I had just spoken to him, just seen him gushing about Mindy over a table in the cafe…

“Are you still there?” said Mrs. McCulloch’s voice, faintly, through the phone. I hurriedly returned it to my ear.

“Yes, yes, I’m still here. I’m so sorry, ma’am.”

“They didn’t find anyone at fault. It was a country road, at night, and neither of them were paying close enough attention…”

There didn’t seem to be any good response to that, so I waited until she spoke again.

“Since you and him were so close, maybe you know why he was out there so late?”

I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “He was… he was going to visit Mindy.”

“Mindy.” Mrs. McCulloch spoke her name with regret in her voice.

“Does she know?” I asked, softly.

“Yes,” whispered Mrs. McCulloch. “But someone should go visit her. Make sure she’s doing okay.”

By someone, I understood that she meant me.

“I’ll get right on it, ma’am,” I said. “Just have to send a few quick emails to my professors, explain why I won’t be coming today, then I’ll be on the road.”

“Drive safe,” said Mrs. McCulloch, and I could tell how strongly she meant it.

I texted Mindy after I parked my car to let her know I was coming, but she still seemed surprised when I knocked on her dorm room door. Her eyes were rimmed with red and she was wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, a far cry from her typical everyday attire of upcycled dresses and brass jewelry.

“Hey, Mindy,” I said when she opened the door, then immediately felt stupid. It felt like too everyday and generic a thing to say, but then, what should I have said? Mindy gestured wordlessly for me to come in and closed the door behind me.

The first thing I noticed about the room was the darkness. There was a blackout curtain over the window — I knew Mindy needed complete darkness to sleep, but she usually pulled the curtain back during the day — and none of the many small lamps tastefully scattered across the room were on. Most of her stuff was as meticulously neat as it had always been, but her bedsheets were twisted, a set of pajamas was thrown across the floor, and there was a stack of dirty paper plates on the dresser. Mindy walked silently to her bed and sat down on it, and after a moment of uncertainty, I sat across from her, on the bed of her blissfully-absent roommate.

“What are you doing here?” asked Mindy after a few minutes of silence.

“Josh’s mom told me to come check up on you…”

“Well, you’ve come. You’ve checked. You can go home now,” she said bitterly. Then she leaned back into the mattress. “I’m sorry. Of course I’m grateful you’re here. It’s just… why bother? It’s not like there’s anything you can do.”

“Maybe there is,” I said. Mindy looked doubtful, but I continued. “Did he tell you why he decided to visit?”

She shook her head. “He texted me at about ten, telling me he was coming. I thought he was insane. But he said he had a surprise for me.” She looked up for the first time, into my eyes. “Do you know what that could have been?”

I nodded. “That day, he had asked me to write a love letter. From him to you. He felt bad that you had written him so many and he had never returned the favor.”

“I told him it was fine. I told him they were a gift, that he was under no obligation to write any for me, that I knew how bad of a writer he was and that I would never expect him to do something like that.”

“I don’t think it was an obligation or an expectation or anything of the kind. I think he just wanted to give you something beautiful, something that came from his heart.”

Mindy nodded, staring down at her outstretched fingers on the colorful quilt.

“Anyway, I told him I’d need to do an interview first, to get a feel for what I would be writing about. He agreed. It was a great interview, too– he said some amazing things about you, some stuff I never would have thought he could say. But I had a lot of trouble writing the letter. Nothing I wrote really sounded like him. It wasn’t in his voice.” Mindy nodded again. She was a writer — she understood how difficult it was to get a good voice in writing, especially when it was that of a real human. “I never actually finished the letter.

But I didn’t need to. Because what I was looking for — Josh’s voice — it was right here.” I took out my phone and opened the recording. My voice came from the speaker.

“This is Alex Nicholson, interviewing Josh McCulloch about why he loves Mindy Hart.”

Mindy edged closer to my phone, scooting forward on the bed.

“Right. I love Mindy because… she’s perfect. I really don’t know what else to say.” Neither of us were prepared to hear Josh’s laugh emanating from the speaker, tinny and muffled but his nonetheless. Mindy reached forward and took the phone from my hands.

“He always used to tell me I was perfect. I used to laugh at him, tell him he needed to come up with better adjectives.” She held the phone up to her ear, just in time to hear him say, “Mindy’s voice… Wow. She had this gorgeous solo, and when I saw her afterwards I just had to tell her how amazing she sounded.”

“I still remember that solo. I could sing it again right now, but I don’t think I will. I don’t know if I ever will.”

“Did you have a romantic interest in her then?” asked my recording-self.

“Not at all,” replied recording-Josh. “But then the next year we had a couple classes together, and then we became friends, and from there, it just kind of… happened.”

“It’s interesting to hear him say that,” said Mindy. “Because I was head over heels the moment I saw him.”

I put a finger to my lips. “This is the best part.”

“This is gonna sound cheesy as hell,” said recording-Josh.

“Good. Say it.”

“I’d rather be sharing a fifty-cent can of cream of mushroom soup with Mindy than eating without her in the best restaurant on earth.”

Mindy smiled sadly. “Do you remember that cream of mushroom soup? It was fifty cents a can in that convenience store in Kentucky, so we filled the whole bus with it. Man, I was so sick of that stuff by the time we finally ran out.”

“Let the record show,” recording-me said, “that Josh McCulloch is grinning like a massive idiot.”

“I can picture him,” said Mindy softly. “Grinning like a massive idiot.”

Then recording-Josh’s voice got serious, and Mindy fell silent. She listened with her eyes closed as he spoke. “Mindy is… she’s honestly the greatest person I’ve ever met. She’s brilliant, and funny, and so, so fun to talk to. An hour with her feels like two minutes. I’ll never get tired of her company, her stupid jokes, her loud-ass donkey laugh that she hates but I think is the most beautiful sound in the world… It all comes back to what I said at the beginning. She’s perfect. Well, maybe not perfect for everybody. Not everyone can understand her weird brand of humor, or has the patience to listen to her rants about late 19th century literature. But I have the exact same brand of humor, and I love to listen to her rant, even when I have no idea what she’s talking about. I love Mindy, man, everything about her. She’s perfect for me.”

I’m not sure when I looked back up at her, but when I did, her eyes were still closed and there were two symmetrical tear-tracks running down her face.

My phone slid to the floor with a muffled thump as she let herself fall backwards onto the bed. I rose from the bed and stooped to pick it up.

“So that’s the reason he was coming to visit me, so late at night? To tell me all that?” she asked.

“Not entirely.” Mindy opened her eyes and looked up at me. “He wanted… he wanted to ask you to marry him.”

Mindy’s eyes widened. She got up and walked toward the window.

“Are you all right?” I asked, before kicking myself for asking such a stupid question.

“I need a minute.”

“Of course. I’m so sorry you had to find out like this.”

“It’s not that,” said Mindy. “Or, it’s more than that. It’s–” she broke off and was silent for a long moment.

“It’s that if he had asked me… if he had made it…” there was another pause before she spoke again, so quietly that I could barely hear her, “I would have said no.”

“Oh.” There seemed to be no good answer to that.

“It’s not that I don’t love him. I do. Or I did.” Her voice broke. “It’s just that… We’re too young, you know? We’re just kids. And I don’t know if I’m ready to make that kind of commitment. And I don’t want to do it too early, and make the wrong decision…” she toyed with the edge of the curtain. “I wouldn’t have told him no. I would’ve said I need more time, ask me again in five years– and maybe in five years I would have said yes, but I’ll never know. Because we don’t have five years. We don’t even have now.”

Maybe, if I had been studying psychology, or even if I had been slightly more emotionally intelligent than I was, I would have known what to say in that moment, but I had no idea. So I sat, uncertainly, on the edge of her roommate’s bed, watching her.

“And maybe it’s ridiculous,” she whispered, “but I feel like this is all my fault. He was coming to talk to me, to propose to me, so I’m at least a little bit responsible. And the fact that I wasn’t going to accept makes it worse.”

“Mindy, no.” I stood and walked over to her as I spoke. “You can’t possibly blame yourself. For any of this. He was the one who decided to drive late at night, he was the one who wasn’t paying attention on the road… No matter what you might tell yourself, you are not responsible for the decisions he made. And whatever answer you might have given… it doesn’t matter. What happened happened, and it would have happened no matter what you said.”

Mindy nodded. “Thanks. Even though I haven’t managed to internalize all that… I’m glad you said it.”

She turned to the window and edged the curtain open, just a crack. The light from outside was weak and cloudy, but it illuminated a slice of the darkened room.

–WP–

(Published November 2019)