She asked about the shoebox again in June.
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They were sitting on the balcony after dinner with the window open and the sounds of the city drifting up from the street below. The children had been there that weekend and had gone back to their mother's that afternoon. The apartment was quiet.
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She had not brought it up in two months.
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"I'm ready," she said.
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He looked at her.
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"Are you," he said.
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"No," she said. "But I want to be. That's the same thing, maybe."
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He went inside and opened the closet and took down the shoebox and brought it out to the balcony and set it on the small table between them.
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She looked at it for a long time.
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"You kept it," she said.
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"I kept it."
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"Fifteen years."
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"Fifteen years."
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She put her hand on the lid and did not open it.
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"You don't have to open it," he said.
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"I want to."
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She opened it.
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The letters were in order. Twelve of them, tied with a rubber band that had started to perish, on lined notebook paper in blue ink.
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She took out the first one.
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She read it slowly. It was four pages long and it was about a homeroom teacher named Mr. Ono who was very old and very slow and who she had decided to hate. She had written that in September of her fifteenth year. She had written it in a room in a house that no longer existed.
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She read the second one. And the third.
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She read all twelve.
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It took her an hour and a half. He sat across from her and did not say anything and did not watch her read. He looked at the city.
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When she finished she put the letters back in the box and closed the lid.
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"I wrote those in three different houses," she said. "And then I moved to a fourth house and I lost your address and I didn't write again."
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"I know."
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"I thought about it every month for five years."
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"I know."
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She looked at the box.
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"Can I keep them," she said.
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"They're yours."
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She picked up the box and held it in her lap.
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They sat on the balcony until it got cold.
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"I want to tell you something," she said.
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"Okay."
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"When I was twenty-two I was in Turkey. I was working on a documentary about people crossing a border. I was there for four months. In the third month I saw something happen that I've never told anyone about."
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He did not say anything.
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"There was a family. A mother and two children. They were crossing at night and the mother was carrying the younger one and the older one was walking. The older one was maybe six. It was cold."
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She looked at the city.
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"The older one fell. And the mother couldn't carry both. And she had to decide. In that moment she had to decide which one she was going to carry."
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She paused.
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"She picked up the younger one. And the older one stood up and kept walking."
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She looked at her hands.
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"I was filming. That was my job. I was filming and I did not stop filming and I did not put down the camera and I did not help. I stood there with the camera and I filmed it."
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Ren did not say anything.
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"That's why I can't stay anywhere," she said. "That's why I don't put things on walls. Because I know what I am. I know what I did. And I know that if I stay somewhere long enough, I'll do it again."
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He looked at her for a long moment.
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"You were twenty-two years old and you were carrying a camera and you were told to film," he said.
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"That's not an excuse."
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"I'm not giving you an excuse."
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"Then what are you doing."
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He looked at the city.
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"I'm telling you what I see," he said. "I see a person who was twenty-two years old and in a war zone and who did what she was told and who has been punishing herself for eleven years. I don't know if she should be punished. That's not for me to say. But I know that she has been leaving every place she's ever been because she thinks she doesn't deserve to stay. And I know that she is here. And I know that she has been here for nine months. And I know that she bought a print in March and hung it on a wall."
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She did not say anything.
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"That's what I see," he said.
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She cried.
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It was the first time he had seen her cry. She had not cried at her mother's funeral, or at the wedding, or at the film festival. She had not cried in the eleven years he had known her, or in the twenty years he had known of her.
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She cried on the balcony for a long time.
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He did not touch her. He did not reach across the table and take her hand. He did not do anything except sit there and look at the city.
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When she stopped she wiped her face with the back of her hand.
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"I'm sorry," she said.
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"You don't have to be sorry."
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"I'm not apologizing to you."
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"Okay."
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She stood up.
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"I'm going to bed," she said.
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"Okay."
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She picked up the shoebox and went inside.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpoEZ1uJz7q
and then Add to home screen.