Three Years Later, a Text

The message came in while I was at my brother's watching the game. I didn't recognize the number at first. Then I did, because it's the kind of thing you don't forget even when you've done a pretty good job of not thinking about it. "Hey Marcus. Random, I know. This is Priya. Don't worry, not a weird thing. Just wanted to say something and then I'll leave you alone." I put the phone face-down on the arm of the couch. My brother said, "Who's that," and I said, "Nobody," and he said, "You went white." Here's the context. Three years ago I went on four dates with Priya. Four good dates. She was funny in a dry way that made you feel like you'd passed something when she laughed. On the fourth one she told me she was thinking of moving to Denver for a job and asked what I thought about that, and I understood she was asking something else, and I said, "Cool, Denver's cool," and drove home and never texted her again. She sent two messages after. One was "hey, you alive?" and the other, a week later, was just "ok." I read both and didn't answer, and I told myself that was cleaner. Which is what you tell yourself. I picked the phone back up at halftime. "I moved to Denver. I've been here almost three years now. I'm engaged, actually, to a guy I met at a climbing gym, which is the most Denver sentence I've ever typed. Anyway. I was going through old stuff on my phone and I saw our thread, and I realized that when you stopped answering I was hurt for about two weeks and then I went and took the job. And if you'd said the thing I wanted you to say I might not have. So. This is a weird thank you. That's all. Be well." I read it three times. My brother's kid was climbing on me trying to see the screen. I typed, "Priya, I'm really sorry about how I handled that," and deleted it, because it made the message about me. I typed, "Congratulations!" and deleted that too, because it was chirpy and she'd have hated it.

What I finally sent was: "That's really good to hear. I was a coward about it and I've thought about that more than once. Congrats on the guy and the mountains. Genuinely." She sent back a picture. Her and a tall guy with a beard on top of something, both of them squinting. Then: "The omelettes at this altitude are terrible btw. Never move here." I laughed out loud on the couch. My brother looked over. "So who is it?" "Someone I was a jerk to." "And?" "And she's fine. She's better than fine." He nodded like that was the end of it, and it was, mostly. But I sat there through the third quarter not watching the game, thinking about how you can do the wrong thing and it can still land somewhere okay, not because of you but in spite of you, and how that doesn't get you off the hook but it does let you breathe. I still have the photo. I don't know why. The guy looks nice.