I Love You. I’m Sorry. Please Come Home.

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Name three sentences that can cover up all manner of sins better than these:

I love you. I’m sorry. Please come home.

Those were the last three Jamie Willis ever said to me.

I can still hear the inflection in her voice. I can still hear the fear. I can still feel the way her sighs spit out through the speaker on my old, shitty phone, as if on cue. She ran through the first two sentences quickly and perfectly. Like, she knew that was the most important thing to say. I’m sorry. I love you. She knew she needed to get that out of the way. Then she paused. Took a deep breath. I wondered if she’d been crying, then, and I still do.

Please come home.

Jamie never really gave a fuck about what people had to say. She wore depression on her sleeve, and slept her way through senior year. She followed obscure religions. She wrote weird song lyrics on her backpack. She wore sweatshirts, a lot of the time, and sweatpants too. She fought back against the teachers. She fought back against her mother. She fought against each and every form of authority we encountered as teens. She dyed her hair black, not because it was cool, back then, but because it matched her woefully fake apathetic attitude towards anything resembling the redheaded father who went and died before they had time to even spend three cognitive fucking years together.

Her words, not mine.

I, on the other hand, was the polar opposite.

I listened to everything my parents told me. My grades were kept high for fear of punishment. I struggled in Math, particularly Geometry, and Physics too. But my strengths were enough to outweigh the negatives. I made the Dean’s List. I participated in after school activities. My dad aimed for college, or even a university, if one was stupid enough to offer a scholarship.

His words, not mine.

Those goals came crashing down the moment we met.

We started dating during senior year. We became serious that fall. My teachers said I lacked motivation in the second quarter, and my parents said she was a bad influence. I knew better to agree with the former over the latter. It had nothing to with her influence. I loved her. Nothing in my world seemed more important than Jamie. Her struggles became my own. Her anger become mine. Her depression became mine. Nothing else inside or outside that stupid school seemed more important than keeping Jamie satisfied.

We graduated by the skin of our teeth in the summer of 2018.

We moved in together that July.

We went to Community College in ’19, and we tried to manage dueling jobs on the side. We didn’t see each other much, besides in bed, then. Jamie always called me her ship in the night.

That’s around when we started to fight.

It turned out, to our disappointment, that two people working minimum wage jobs could barely afford the rent in our largely affluent hometown. Our credit card bills stacked up. We took out loans to pay back loans. We worked even more to get by, and our time together started to decline.

Her depression worsened again in the Winter.

I wish I hadn’t ignored the signs.

‘

One morning, Jamie found me at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal, right before my 8 A.M. class. I could see the lack of sleep painted under her eyes. I could tell that morning had been a rough one. Nonetheless, even through the struggle, she still tried to fix me some eggs and a few slices of bacon before I left. I begged her not to.

She caught me with a strange question just as she slid the fresh plate in front of me.

“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to die?“

Jame thought about her dad, a lot, when she was depressed. Nothing I said ever made it better. So, I just shrugged.

She continued.

“I think it hurts. At first. And then it’s like going home. It’s like walking down a long tunnel into a big house with all of your old friends, and you never have to leave, or work ever again. You just get to stay there forever. That’s not so bad, right?“

She smiled and looked over at me over a freshly poured cup of coffee. Then she covered up a fresh batch of tears.

“Jamie… please, not today.”

I hated that attitude. I hated the nihilism. Maybe it was the migraine about my class, or the lack of hours at my job, or the overall stress eating away at my liver. But for whatever reason, I snapped back. I wish I hadn’t.

“I don’t have time for this. Everything is drowning. We’re sinking. We’re dying. We’re working too much. We can’t afford our bills. We can’t afford this apartment. The only thing we can do to fix that is work and more work. So what do you expect? We are doing everything we can to survive.“

Jamie sniffed over the freshly made eggs. Scrambled, with crispy bacon, just how I liked.

“My mom told me once what his last words were,” she continued in a sob. “She wanted to talk about some stupid gossip thing in the news. He told her didn’t have time.“

I slammed the table. Slightly.

“The heart-attack happened an hour later. In his office. At his desk.“

She snatched my cup and got up from the table. Then she got her coat and got ready to leave.

“Is that the last thing you want to say to me, Scott? You don’t have time?“

She finished her accusations in a rush and marched for the front door.

“No,” I called out over her shoulder. “Jamie, no, c’mon…“

I followed her to the door and tried to hold it open. But she shut it in my face.

‘

I felt awful the moment she left. I paced back and forth like an asshole and cursed myself for the stupidity. I knew I fucked up. I knew I overreacted. I thought about buying flowers. I thought about taking her out to dinner. But only one feeling gave me comfort over the overwhelming guilt in my gut. I needed to talk to her. I needed to talk to her right that second.

So I called her.

The moment she picked up the phone I spit out a rapid combination of apologies before she could even say anything.

“Jamie, I love you. I’m sorry. Please come home.

She laughed. The sound seemed obscured alongside her tears.

“Promise me we’ll end every future fight just like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that. I love you. I’m sorry. Please come home.”

I paused.

“Okay. I love you. I’m sorry. Please come home.

And so she did.

‘

I worked, through that day, without paying the argument much mind. There had been many fights like it before. Sometimes the couples who love each other the most fight the most. Sometimes, if it’s healthy, occasional fighting is the only way for a relationship to survive.We told each other that often.

What neither of us could possibly know was that Jamie would not survive that night.

A snow storm devastated the Jersey Shore. The weather people never saw it coming. Jamie’s infinitely safe Infiti hit a rough patch of snow on the Parkway, during her commute. She collided with the highway divider at a high speed. She ricocheted off the wall and into oncoming traffic. Several different cars hit her on the driver side, and she died, probably immediately; before the paramedics even arrived.

I identified her body myself.

It remains the most traumatic experience of my life.

‘

I never quite moved on.

I stayed at our apartment that night, and for many nights after. I know that’s not healthy. My parents begged me not to. My friends begged me not to. They didn’t understand why. But I wanted to be alone. I wanted to be with Jamie. It’s probably better things worked out that way, because sometime around ten, I received a phone call that became that remains the strangest of my life.

I can still hear the inflection in her voice. I can still hear the fear. I can still feel the way her sighs spit out through the speaker on my old, shitty phone, as if on cue. She ran through the first two sentences quickly and perfectly. Like, she knew that was the most important thing to say. I’m sorry. I love you. She knew she needed to get that out of the way. Then she paused. Took a deep breath. I wondered if she’d been crying, then, and I still do.

“I love you. I’m sorry. Please come home.“

‘

Jamie has called my phone every Friday night for the past four weeks. She doesn’t saying anything else. She doesn’t need to say anything else. Just… come home.

And I don’t know how to tell her the truth.

I don’t know how to tell my mom that I’m not ready to go.