Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [126]
I can’t stop thinking about Driver, the MILF’s kid with “modulation issues.” I’m sure you escaped this diagnosis only because it hadn’t been invented yet. I can totally see this kid madly spinning around in circles as a way of trying to calm himself down because he can’t handle all the noise and hubbub of the classroom. And the wilder and faster he spins, the more out of control he feels. It’s a self-defeating coping mechanism. But he’s four. He doesn’t know any better.
Since I’ve known you, you’ve been spinning and spinning and spinning into all these various personas, and none of this self-exploration and experimentation has given you a sense of peace. I’ve known you for six years, intimately for four, and I still have no idea who I’m in love with. When we first met six years ago, you were Marcus Flutie, notorious burnout and sly defiler of underage women. After a mandatory stint in rehab, you became Marcus Flutie, sobered-up genius whose rebellious history made you all the more intoxicating to an unsullied goody-goody like me looking for a little corruption. After a few semesters at the un-accredited Buddhist college in California, and a few months at the experimental school in Death Valley, you became Marcus Flutie, non-sectarian practitioner of Vipassana meditation.
This minimalist philosopher is less or more the person who knelt on the floor and asked me to marry him last week. But I understand that being here in this new place will inspire you to shape-shift into somebody else, someone unknown to me right now: There will be a fourth coming of Marcus Flutie. Followed by the fifth. And the sixth. And so on. How can I possibly promise to love you FOREVER when I don’t even know who you’ll be by the time you get this notebook? Who is at the heart of Marcus Flutie? What is the essential part of you in every new incarnation?
Is that what you’re trying to find there, on the floor of your closet? You want to be still and quiet and look inward, and I fully encourage you in that quest. But I’m afraid that you’ve twisted so far inside yourself that I can’t help you find the way back out. And I’m not willing to go in there with you. Maybe there’s someone else out there who will. Someone who isn’t necessarily a better woman than I am, but better for you right now.
That’s one thing that hasn’t changed in a week: You, Marcus Flutie, are still an all-or-nothing proposition for me, and as much as I’d like to tread that middle path with you, I don’t know how. (You must have seen this yourself, or you wouldn’t have considered breaking up with me.)
I was just reading this study for work about how the happiest couples are those who sacrifice their own wishes so their partners can achieve their dreams. It makes perfect sense. And yet I know I’m too young, that we’re too young, for me to live my life only as it relates to you. If you had asked me to marry you the night you first told me about your acceptance, I would have embraced Princeton as part of a larger plan that involved me. I probably would have reacted differently.
I might have even said yes.
Alas, you didn’t ask me then. You made plans for your future without me in mind. And that’s okay. But how can you now ask me to arrange my life around you?
seventy-nine
The train is pulling into the Princeton station.
And so I must bring this notebook to its abrupt end with a page or two left to spare.
I have to get up, get off, get going. I have to move, move, move before the doors shut, before this train reverses itself, before it returns me to the place I started from.
Oh, please forgive me, Marcus, for indulging in one last extended metaphor.
(I know you will.)
September 15, 2006
* * *
My dear Jessica,
Not only do I forgive you, I thank you.
I know that sounds odd under the circumstances, but I’m grateful for what you’ve given me. As difficult as your notebooks were to read at times,