To the Girl at the Diner on Brown Street

It’s warmer than usual here today and the humid air is making my hair puff up like that of a person who has stuck a fork into an electrical socket. Im halfway through the book I told you I would be finished writing a year ago but better late than never! I wonder how the weather is by you. Is it suitable for sitting outside and cracking open a good book on the balcony like we used to do? Or is spring stubborn again this year? The family I am renting a room from does not have air conditioning, no one here does. It doesn't bother me as much as you would think. It reminds me of your mother yelling at us that we don't need to turn on the AC yet and pushing open the window in our 14th-floor apartment. Letting all the not-so-sweet smells of the Brooklyn air fill our bedroom. Here the air smells fresh and there is always an aroma of something delicious being cooked up. Though It doesn't compare to the smell of a stack of pancakes from the diner on Brown Street. Or the sweetness of your smile as I sat across from you in our favorite booth and ate them. Or the smell of a cup of diner coffee fresh out of the pot being poured by our favorite waitress. Here the coffee is absolutely exquisite. A perfectly pulled double shot of espresso with a creamy brown foam on top is brewed for me every morning by the mother in the house. It makes the taste buds on my tongue dance, but I would still take a cup of that hot garbage water over it any day. I guess that's just the true New Yorker in me. We sit outside at the little wooden table and take in the view. She bangs down two espressos in the time I finished my one and is always quick to ask me,” Un altro”, another one? If I drank as much espresso as her the next piece of mail you would be getting from me would be an invitation to my funeral. After I died from a catastrophic heart attack. Come to think of it, that is probably the only letter you will ever get with my name on it again. Maybe one day I will send you all the letters I have written to you since I left. Though I probably never will because of the guilt and regret that is sewn into the casual life updates that I address to you. “To my beautiful girl, from my favorite diner on Brown Street… I have seen the city where the streets are made from water, you would love it here! To my beautiful girl from the hole-in-the-wall diner on Brown Street… The view of the endless vineyards out of my train seat window is not nearly as beautiful as my view of you from my side of our little booth. To the incredible girl from our run-down little diner on Brown Street… one more year until graduation! You will be such a good professor, no one I will meet in this lifetime will ever be as intelligent as you in my eyes.” I wonder if you kept the letters that I wrote you when we still lived together in that beautiful little apartment that I used to call home. All of the I love you’s on sticky notes and the poems on pages torn out of my infinite journals. Or the napkins from the diner on Brown Street that I would write my favorite things about you on. A ****** quality napkin with a single sentence or a single word that was bouncing around in my head as we ate our breakfast together. “ I love the way your nose scrunches when you laugh” or “ I love you despite the ten sugar packets you put in your coffee”. I'm telling you, you need to cut back or you're gonna get diabetes! Do you still have them all in that little box under your nightstand? Or did you choose to erase those memories from your mind and rip them up into tiny little pieces? Or burn them in a fire? I like to think that you still write letters back to me like you used to. My wishful thinking is that I will return home from the trip that I have extended a million times and there will be a pile of letters addressed to me, from you, my girl from the diner on Brown Street where we made promises that we knew we could never keep. That the only reason I haven't heard from you in so long was because I never sent you a letter with an address where you could reach me. You tell me all about what I've been missing. How college has flown by and you are picking a grad school and you are still determined to get your Ph.D. That you have won the fight with your mother and you can turn on the air conditioning whenever you want because you pay rent too! That you finally got your license so I won't have to drive you everywhere all the time. That you miss me too and you have kept all the notes and letters from before I up and left and you read them from time to time to remind yourself how much I love you. And that you forgive me for fleeing the country in fear of a life that I thought I didn't deserve. And you would ask me why I would fly all the way across the ocean and drink such exquisite expresso when they have perfectly good hot garbage water that just needs “a little bit” of sugar at the diner on Brown Street? And that If I would have just sent my first letter and explained myself to her, that I wouldn't be traveling the country that I have always dreamed of alone. That she would've gotten up from the booth in our subpar diner on Brown Street, where I like to imagine she is waiting for me now, and hopped onto the next plane to whatever tiny town I was in. I seal the letter in a fresh envelope and address it to my greatest love... to the girl who is no longer sitting alone in our little booth at the diner on Brown Street.

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