Distracted by the porn catalog he had gotten in the apartment mailbox that day, he almost missed the tiny, fragile envelope she'd sent to him. When he picked it up, he saw it was wrinkled near the edges, and spotted as with tears. Her handwriting was slightly more ragged than her usual curvy, swirling print. The tiny heart she always drew over the "i" in his last name was conspicuously absent.
Opening it up, he read the following:
my dearest John,
The flowers of our love had died under the hot sun of time long before you abandoned me. They had been left too long, too long in that searing heat of our last two years together. Dropped carelessly in the dry, arid sands of the desert of our life, they wrinkled and crumpled in a desperate but futile effort to survive.
But it was no use. The waters of affection had long since evaporated into the atmosphere of your silence. The brilliant red petals, each one a page in the story of our romance, fell away one by one until there was nothing left but the tiny bud of hope I still held. It clung to the stem of my thoughts for you, which was now covered in thorns of mistrust and denial. I thought you would remove those thorns for me, gently and tenderly, one by one. But instead you sharpened them and made them only more deadly and painful to any who tried to pick them up and rescue them to the cooling shade of peace and devotion.
So now they lay, withered and adrift in the sandstorm of this merciless world. The jackrabbits of forgetfullness will not eat them for me. The tumbleweeds of friendship will no longer carry them away. They sit half-buried in the sands of pain and hurt, wishing that the winds of sorrow will soon cover them completely. The cold, timeless darkness of sleep is all they can hope for. May it be eternal, for they could certainly not bear that wind and sand again without being torn apart and cast into the endless sky of hopelessness.
You have done this to me. I pray that the next rose you pick up will prick you with poison and leave you dying in the same agonizing, mind-rending misery in which I find myself.
-- Jennifer
He checked the back of the paper for any other words, but it was blank. Finally he crumpled the paper up with the envelope and stuffed them in his pocket before flipping open the catalog and heading back to his door.
At her present rate, he figured, he'd be getting another one the day after tomorrow anyways. Maybe later, if he remembered not to answer the phone.