The Stomach Ache.

In a box under a bed in the guest room of an old farm house in Iowa rests four years of correspondence this woman has had with a man she never knew. Years and years of wishful thinking and deep confessions are written between the lines of platitudes and benign conversation, and each letter ends with a simple yet touching, “Until Later.”

She adored this person she had come to know through these old-fashioned means of persuasion, she spoke about him to her closest friends with the warmth that precedes musings of lost loves. She was anxious for his attention, and imagined the thought and purpose he put into each of his letters over the years. She wanted most of all to know what he was really feeling when he wrote to her. And she would tell people in her most honest of moments, “I feel for him something that is so rare and frightening to me, and how can it be? We’ve never even met.”

But to him, she was something he kept to himself.

He lived alone and worked hard, he had several close acquaintances but few he confided in for anything. His self-sufficiency came before his need for confessions to anyone. Before long his own feelings were a blur to him, his movements were mechanical, his rituals the sole defining part of his life. Before long he was finding himself saying things to her he should never say, because first and foremost, he didn’t mean it.

When he said he wanted her what he meant was he wanted someone. When he asked what she had done the night before what he meant was he was curious of the rest of the world. When he said he didn’t know what would ever make him happy anymore, what he meant was he didn’t know if she could.

Before long she started to understand that she was nothing more than a placeholder for him. This was her biggest fear in life, to be an interchangeable object of affection for someone who didn’t even know what affection was. But it had happened sometime between years two and three and carried into the beginning of year four, when he first stopped asking her what she had done the night before.

Soon the letters stopped coming. One day she felt a pain in her stomach so dull and aching it could only have been caused by a beating in a bar fight, or the bruising of an ancient battering ram. It ached so badly that she took out the last letter she received from him and a map of the entire Midwest and she began to drive to the return address on the envelope.

Days past until she could find it and then one day she saw the street address clearly marked on the side of an old brick building. She wandered to the front door where she read a poster hung by an official department of some sort that said only, “CONDEMNED.”