a continuation of a place to return - Laur Brown - read it first
“Yours forever,
Madison”
Theodore Hill held the letter Madison had written in trembling hands, unsure whether to cry or scream. She hadn’t been subtle, Theodore turned into Thomas and Maddie into Maggie; she had written the story of the two of them, their young love, and then …
and then she had continued. And she was totally wrong.
She wrote about his dreams, the ones he used to tell her about when they had first met, the ones where he rode off into the sunset and his family and friends heard about his exploits through the telegram and stitched together news clippings and rumors. The call to the western frontier he had felt ever since hearing of the roads west and the great American frontier. The depths of the Grand Canyon and the peaks of the Sierra Nevada had called his name, and though he strained his voice, he’d never felt them hear his response, he’d needed to get closer.
Those dreams of the world one-hundred and fifty years gone but which echo still in the geysers of Yellowstone and the mountain meadows of the Rockies. He had told her of those dreams.
He had told her about the excavation business, the toll he had seen it take on aging father as he shouldered more and more work, never complaining, never stopping to rest, working through the night in the down times and hardly catching a breath even in the boom. It wasn’t the future he dreamed of, but it wasn’t a duty he truly resented either, and he was not so resolved on the unknown that he would abandon his family or what had been built over generations.
The thing that bothered him most about her letter was how, even though she was so observant, absolutely meticulous in her attentions, she hadn’t noticed that the occupation of his idle thoughts had drifted East into her little apartment on campus and the home in the North where Maddy lived.
Despite keeping her eyes wide open, she’d never noticed that her pull was stronger than the gravity of Vegas, Portland, and Denver combined. Her love was worth more to him than the plains of Kansas and the rainforests of Washington. He had his desires; he wanted to go West; he wanted to do his duty; but more than anything else, he wanted her.
He didn’t want her in twenty years, after he’d had his adventures and she’d had a husband. He wanted her now and he wanted her forever.
He started writing.
Madison Gray was busy, typing away at her last paper of the semester, trying to quiet the roar of thoughts that had threatened to overwhelm her as the days ticked down until the start of the summer and Theodore left. She had said her piece, but she knew that Theo wouldn’t understand it. He was too wrapped up counting the cost of gas to make every last mile count on the road West to read between the lines of the letter she had sent him; he probably hadn’t even read it.1
She understood. She knew that people left. She forgave his wandering heart, and had made peace. When the letters stopped coming, she would go on. It would hurt, but that’s how endings went.2
She hated goodbyes.
When she got the envelope, she was confused. It was although she’d never seen it before, it was addressed to Theodore and stamped on the front, it said “return to sender.” Opening it, she found her own story, neatly folded, with a second sheet of paper addressed to her. Eyes blurry, she slowly read the words.
“Dearest Madison,
Despite what you may think, my love for you runs deeper than the ruts of wagon wheels washed away in the midday rain. You might not ask for a promise, but I’ll give you one anyway: there will never be another letter you send me that will be returned to sender. There will never be a day when you can’t answer the question of where I am; and if you ever dare to try and ‘marry a man when the time feels right,’ so help me, I will come running up mountain peaks, over oceans, to the stars and planets if I must, to take back the woman that I love.
Always and forever yours,
Theo”
And they lived happily ever after.
Think not dear reader that this was the end of their adventures. Theodore would indeed see the West, he would behold the majesty of Pacific waves pounding California beaches and the mystic cliffside dwellings of the Pueblo. He would see the land that he had yearned for like so many Americans before. But he would do it, first with a string of tin cans clanking on the pavement as he drove down that long-considered road,3 and later, with a family which he and Maddy can barely begin to imagine starting.
Footnotes
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And if he had, he probably just fed it into a chatbot and asked for a simple summary and a nice compliment to send her about it ↩
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While Margaret might have believed in beginnings, Madison knew better than to hope that something that started wouldn’t eventually come to a painful end. The best she could do was to cherish the good times while they lasted. ↩
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Ironically, this would hurt his gas mileage pretty significantly ↩