The next few pages were blank. Joyce thought that was the end—until she found another entry, dated years after the last one.
And was the last entry in the journal.
[February 2nd, 1947]
I wonder how you have been, Margo.
It has been years, and yet your name still finds its way into my thoughts as though no time has passed at all. I do not know where you are now, nor what kind of life you have lived since then.
Perhaps it is better that I do not know.
Life after I left you was… not easy.
For a long time, I did not know what to do with myself. I had thought that leaving would bring some form of clarity, or at the very least, relief. It did neither. I carried you with me regardless... your voice, your presence, the things I never managed to understand.
I tried to move on.
I even left music behind.
I thought that if I distanced myself from it, if I abandoned the very thing that tied me to you, then perhaps I would finally be free of it all.
I was wrong.
Then the war came.
I do not think I have ever known a darkness like that. It swallowed everything so completely that, for a time, I stopped thinking of the past altogether. Survival has a way of narrowing the world into something small and immediate.
It was during those years that I met someone.
I called her Poppy.
You would not know her. She is nothing like you.
She is not remarkable in the way the world would define it. There is nothing about her that would draw a crowd, nothing that demands attention the moment she enters a room.
And yet, she brings light with her...
In a time where everything felt dimmed, uncertain, and fragile, she remained… steady. Warm. Unafraid to feel, unafraid to speak.
She tells me what she thinks.
What she feels.
Even the things that are difficult to say.
At first, it unsettled me...
I had grown so used to what was left unsaid, to the spaces between words, to the distance that could exist even in closeness. To have someone stand before me with nothing concealed, it felt unfamiliar.
But slowly, I began to understand.
With her, there is no guessing.
No reaching for something that slips away the moment I think I have grasped it.
She is simply there.
And I can reach her.
I think… that is when I realized something I had not allowed myself to before...
I never truly knew you.
Not because I did not wish to, but because you never let me.
Even in the moments where you seemed closest, there was always something held back. Something just beyond where I could follow. It was part of what made you who you are, what made you so impossible to forget.
But I mistook it.
I thought that distance was something I could cross, given enough time, enough patience, enough feeling.
I was wrong.
With her, it is different.
I do not have to wonder who she is.
I do not have to question what she feels.
And before I realized it, she had found her way into my life… and into my heart.
Not in the same way.
But in a way that is quieter.
Warmer.
Real.
I do not know when it happened.
Only that it did.
I want you to know something.
What I felt for you has not disappeared.
I do not believe it ever will.
It remains, even now, as it was then, unchanged, unmoving, something I cannot rewrite or replace.
But I have chosen to leave it where it belongs.
In the past.
Buried, not because it was meaningless, but because it was too much to carry forward.
I will not look for you.
I will not ask what became of you, nor will I allow myself to wonder too far into the life you may have found.
If you are happy, then that is enough.
Truly.
As for me…
I think I have found something I can hold onto.
Something I can reach.
And this time, I intend to keep it.
This will be the last time I write like this.
The last time I write to you.
Whatever remains of you in these pages… will stay here.
Goodbye, Margo.