Farris was not a gregarious individual who readily enjoyed the company of others but the three days in solitary were rough even for him.  Being locked in with only your head could be devastating. Unless you were a uniquely disciplined person without some distractions you were going to run the same loop of events over and over; frames or scenes might vary a bit each showing, you might be a touch more stoic, noble or heroic, you might rationalize, justify or deny but whatever version was played the results would be the same; you would be locked-up, your fate to be determined by others.

Farris kept seeing the letter in his loop; his declaration, always lying on the kitchen counter next to his keys and change.  Each morning as he left for work he either, rushing about, pretended to forget and left it on the stained, gold-flecked Formica or picked it up and with a quick nod of his head like he had just remember its existence and with a stretched grin of renewed intention rushed out the door secure in the knowledge that he would indeed be putting it in the mailbox at the end of the drive.  But each afternoon for  a week, two, three weeks the letter berated him from his car seat as he left work or from the kitchen counter when he returned home, its’ stark, rectangular whiteness growing more dingy and smudged day by day; a fitting metaphor for his spineless resolve.  A vagrant thought of the letter during his busy workday was enough to cause his heart to thump uncharacteristically and an expression on his face, which if anyone noticed, would have caused concern.  Its wording, an erratic marathon of hours, had put substance to a promise he had made only to himself, a promise on which, he admitted, again, only to himself, that he never thought he would have to act.  Farris never doubted that he would mail the letter but he did not know when.  After work he smoked, drank beer, watched TV, read Faulkner, Heinlein, Hemingway or the Atlantic Monthly or rode around with Joe, smoking, drinking beer, listening to whatever Joe chose to play and relishing the night and the warm fog of music and intoxication in the slow, soft ride of Joe’s old Chrysler.  They cruised the back roads riding for hours without feeling the need to speak much less spill their guts.  Joe had his own turmoil which he chose not to share.  Farris knew his friends’ soft spoken voice and gray eyes which blatantly revealed every emotion he felt made him particularly attractive and vulnerable to women.

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