I was seven when I got my first written letter. It was written by my father. It was written from prison. From the colourful drawings under each of the written pages, he was trying to appeal to the mind of a little girl.

I was twenty-three when I told him about my father. More the absence of my dad than anything. Him being Amir. When I showed him the photo of my father and mom in college posing in front of the magnificent mountain of Canada’s Wonderland, the first thing Amir said was that we looked alike. I said “I know,” but he clarified. He meant my father and I. 

I didn’t. 

And I don’t. 

I was invited as an afterthought. Huddled behind a group of people with laughter exaggerated by wine, I nurse my own glass. The corner of the party is a lot more comforting than the rest of the bar turned engagement party. Take the moody lighting out of the venue and it is just a silly bar that probably housed creepy regulars and underaged girls on its best night. 

The wine is expensive. My expertise on wine ends at the fact that it makes me feel closer to Amir and always did in our little apartment on Bathurst with a leaky faucet, but what he let me taste then was not as good as the glass the server poured me an hour ago. But this is not the kind of place to feel close to Amir in. It’s the place where I bring a gift (I did not) and wish my ex-boyfriend and his girlfriend a happy life together (I refuse to).  

“My engagement party is gonna be just like this, holy shit. These fuckers are rich!” one of the women in the huddled circle speaks over the music. She’s only-half right. Amir is nothing but an average earning journalist but her parents clean up. 

Her.

She.

I won’t say Her name.

It was indisputable that I would feel embarrassed if I came here. Wearing this cheap dress I bought for this exact party that added nothing to my confidence when I tried it on again this morning. Just to make sure. Still I was perturbed about looking like my father. Even in a dress with arguably-slutty hip cut-outs, I can see his face in mine, in my nose, in my widow’s peak. I hope Amir doesn’t see it.

Those years back, I argued with him that my resemblance lay with my mother. Her round face and bright smile, but he just tilted his head.

Looking at the letters then, they were straight forward and talked in future tense more than present. He talked about all the places a seven-year-old would want to go with a father. What could a man say to his kid about what prison was like? Not what he told me at fifteen, that junkies snuck powder in toddler’s diapers and through lover’s kisses. The handwritten letters were written sloppily, like he was in a rush. Sometimes I had to get mom to read me a sentence or two where the pencil’s lead smeared.

I’ve had three glasses of red wine and two champagnes when Her best friend taps her glass with a heavy-handed knife. It clunks more than clinks.

“We’re gonna do speeches now, everyone, so come up if you wanna share a funny story or make a toast!” 

The Up she’s referring to is the front of the venue where Amir and She sit at a long table alongside his folks and Her mother and father. Her parents are white and very neat looking. Her mother’s too skinny and Her father’s tall and oddly quirky looking and definitely can’t see judging by the drastic magnification of his thin rimmed glasses. Her mother is predictable, but Her father… Her father makes me squint a bit.

The toasts are fine. Recognizing Amir’s friends feels embarrassing, but watching him laugh and sway and tip his head back is worse. 

I don’t remember the exact days and hours we were together. When people ask me or I bring him up without prompt, I say two and some years. In those days his smile had never been this tight, this cramped in the walls of the bar at capacity. 

People clap and hoot, but his mouth is so contrived I have to look away at some parts, focus on the bloody drink in my hands.

“You wish!” was what he said when I remarked on looking like my mom before he called my mom’s college picture hot. Back then I playfully hit him. Back then he giggled and his ears tipped up. They don’t here. They don’t move an inch.

“More wine?” another server asks me, and I remember I’m in public. Standing in the crowd while Joseph talks about the time Amir almost caught a Blue Jays ball in April. He leaves my presence out of the story, but I laugh with the crowd at the memory-turned-tale. 

He skips over the part where I spilled my coke on Amir’s lap from standing up too fast at the prospect of a home run and he had to leave in bright, blue bird covered sweatpants. Instead…

“He spilled his drink like all over himself and had to buy some blue bird pants from the kiosk! Imagine!” Joseph looks at everyone. “Button down on top and a blue jay on his ass! You looked like an idiot but you never took life too seriously.” He just went with it. “I love you bro and I hope you carry that spirit through your marriage.”

When I look back at the two of them, Amir’s looking at me. Not really looking, just at my shoes. I’ve never seen anyone stare at a pair of scuffed Mary Janes with such a sombre look. When She rubs his shoulder and rests her head on it briefly, only quickly does he steal a glance at my face before putting on a smile for the other guests. His audience is pleased. 

People move to the front of the crowd, with a wobble in their step and a drink in hand ready to spew the story they remembered in the midst of someone else’s speech. Peaking over the heads of friends and family, I look around for the black and white uniform of the glass fillers that float around events like these. 

As if sensing my quiet desperation, bubbly liquid fills my glass. The waiter smiles at me and disappears faster than he came. An angel.

I am not the only one in my position. The more the drinks flow the more the crowd sways, not as sturdy as they were two and a half hours ago. 

Her delicate hand clutches onto Amir’s shoulder for dear life as they talk to the people they’ve known for years. The longer I stay, the more the point of an engagement party flies over my head. Other than the practice of screaming to the world that two people have something that their friends can’t find, I don’t see a need. 

The brick wall becomes a soft pillow to rest my head on for I don’t know how long and Amir’s shifting eyes as they pass me by isn’t enough ammunition to leave my position. But the light squeeze of his shoulder She performs on their way by almost is. 

I didn’t come here for that. To argue.

Especially not with his mom whose looks have been searing into my cheeks since I got here. They do now, right into my eyes.

I’ve always been good at ignoring her. Now is no different with her unapologetic scowl and Joseph’s stride toward me. I sidestep him to the back room where I think our coats were hung. I throw my jacket on on my way out of the party.

The crisp air isn’t kind when it hits my face and makes its way up my nostrils and down my throat when I realise I haven’t said a word all night. 

When I was thirteen, my mother told me men were a means to a repulsive end. I was thirteen, fifteen, seventeen and all the years that followed with my head in my work until someone I couldn’t manage to ignore stepped into me. She would be disappointed in me now, seeing me on Amir’s couch under the dim light of his lamps. 

It was warmer than the subway ride here. The train was filled with the men she warned me about. I’m sure I could find some semblance of Amir in any of them, but there is no reality in which they don’t resent me for forcing the mannerisms of another man onto them. There is no point in starting.

I tuck my naked feet up under me and smooth out the wrinkles of my dress. 

The objects that used to lay in this apartment before don’t have a place here anymore. The absence of my vase and paintings left the place soulless. It’s peculiar to see a white wall where a painting was, to see a white corner where a vase lay. More peculiar that they’ve been replaced with nothing. No other influence rests in the place I slept in only months ago. 

I already know they don’t live together from the mouths of friends of friends, but still, when he opens the door I expect Her frame to follow his. 

When he opens the door and sees me he sighs and closes it behind him. There’s a light pause before he carries on taking off his jacket.

“Where’s she?” I ask, not moving from my slouch on the couch.

“With her parents,” he walks to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water. He nearly closes the fridge before pouring me a glass of my own. He rests it on the counter between his place and mine.

I get up and walk to the counter. I drink the water I’ve needed since 7 p.m. 

He watches me drink it, “I wasn’t sure you’d come to the dinner.”

“Oh, yeah?” I walk back to the purse I threw down and come back, placing a single key on the counter.

“Thank you.” His eyes are too sad. He makes his way over to the foyer closet, placing the key in a jacket pocket. My body refuses to let me go all the way to him, so I settle for leaning on the foyer wall. 

He comes to me and leans the same way, just looking at me.

“I thought I’d know what to say when you got here,” I say because it’s true. My mother told me of the times when she begged my father to come back to her. The yelling and pleading it took. I can’t find it in me. 

He stands with a tired but interested look and I have nothing to say. I thought I’d know how to feel when I got here, that the emotion would pour out and he would see that I am capable. But, nothing.

“You don’t have to return the key,” he says at his shoes.

“It isn’t appropriate for me to keep it. This should be reserved for her now.”

Her.

“But you’re here anyway,” he says.

“I’m not ashamed,” I say.

“That’s fine,” he says. 

“I thought you’d kick me out,” I say.

“No, you didn’t,” he says.

I chuckle, my head in my hand, “No, I didn’t.”

“What do you want to say,” he takes a step in, moving my palm from my face. What I see on his face is nothing of what I expect. Some hope buried under his fatigue. 

“…I don’t know.”

He sighs and shakes his head. Stop looking at me like that.

He shifts back a bit, so I touch his arm, then fingers, then hand until I hold it.

He sways in and out as if about to kiss me.

I can’t take my eyes off of you. Please kiss me.

Be with me, Amir.

I love you.

I reach behind me. I start to unzip my dress because I don’t know what else to do. When I think he reaches behind me to help, he stops me instead and zips the cheap zipper back up.

I was twenty-seven when Amir asked me to marry him and I stammered. I was twenty-seven and a quarter when we broke up and I was twenty-eight and a month when I wrote my first letter to him. A desperate attempt at redemption. Our ending was no fault of my own was what he’d said, but I knew it was a lie. 

When I read him my father’s letters, his eyes glossed over like they do now. His throat clears in an attempt to keep the tears at just a gloss. I lean my head on his shoulder and hug him and he hugs me back, no issue. He sighs for the third time tonight.

“Why won’t you come down here to me?” I say. Meet me down here and we can see eye to eye like we used to. He’s climbed just too high.

I lied earlier. I’m ashamed when I pull away from him and don’t give him the decency of looking him in the eye. As I take my time in picking up my coat and bag and slipping back into my heels, my gusto to have come in the first place has worn off. 

I cannot possibly be here. If I am then it might be the saddest thing in the world. Then he, then She, then they are everything and I am and always have been absolutely nothing. A means to an inadequate end.

I expect his door to slam when I leave, but he just stands in the hall watching me. When I turn the corner, and press the elevator button, I don’t get in. I let the mechanical door slide open and close and lean on the wall, quiet tears in my vision as I wait four minutes and thirty-seven seconds until I hear his door finally close.