“Any message you want me to relay to Jim?”
Her heart starts beating hurriedly, like it’s the end of the world and it crawls up into her throat as she catches a breath because it suddenly feels like everyone is watching her, her, her.
Tell him I miss him, I miss him everyday. Tell him I wish he didn’t leave. Tell him I made a mistake, that I didn’t mean what I said, that I’m not ever going to marry Roy, or anyone but him.
“Um…”
“‘Um...’ Okay. ‘Um,’” says Michael mockingly, making a joke out of something bigger than he could imagine, bigger than the convention he and Dwight were headed to, bigger than any word he could find in a dictionary, bigger than all of his jokes put together into this one.
“‘Um…’” mimics Dwight, his grin giddy and light.
“You got that? Write it down,” jokes Michael as they merrily leave the office.
Tell him that I want him back here, at his desk, because I miss the way he makes me laugh. Tell him that I started art classes because of him, that he makes me the person I’ve always wanted to be. Tell him I wanted to leave Roy sooner but couldn’t, just couldn’t, because I didn’t know how.
She won’t do that, she won’t say those words because she has learned to ignore the big things and let them go unsaid. The big things, like him leaving on her that night, and how she kissed him back and thought Is it true? It can’t be, it can’t be. Then he said, You’re still going to marry him? And she shook her head, tired of and dizzy with trying to convince herself of anything other than the fanciful dream she believed since high school; they are different people now (but she couldn’t help but realize how oh so, so, wonderful his lips felt).
They have learned to avoid each other at all possible costs, even a four-thousand, eight-hundred and thirty-six dollar one that he paid to start up again, fresh and free in Connecticut. She did not pay nearly as much, in the literal sense. She paid with soundless tears, restless nights and a promise to herself that she will allow herself to suffer just like this until she learns to treat herself and “the ones she loves” with more respect.
She finds herself staring at the door as if he would come through it, as per her wishes, his arms open, his eyes wide and his lips shaping words along the lines of I had to come back, I just had to come back for you.
Michael and Dwight make their grand exit and she wonders if he will ask about her. Maybe he wants to know how she is doing, how her life has been since he has left, but oh wait, does he know that she isn’t engaged anymore? Or, should the question be, does he want to know?
She wants him to want to know.
She wants him to know how hard it was for her to end a ten year relationship, one that was almost bound to the sacred institution of marriage.
She wants him to know that she didn’t go to work for two days because she couldn’t even imagine what it would be like without him there, what it would be like without laughing or smiling or feeling that weird pang inside her chest whenever she remembered that she was engaged, that she shouldn’t flirt like that or be too close to him.
She wants him to know that she cried until her eyes were sore, until her hands shook with an inexplicable fury, how she had to clench her teeth to stop herself from shouting How could you do this, just out of no where tell me all of that, how could you expect me to change my life when you didn’t even give me a chance, how could you move away and not think about what you were doing to me?
She wants him to know that Roy’s family treated her like dirt when they heard about the ending of their engagement, that she felt like an outsider in a family she could almost call her own.
She wants him to know how disappointed her father was, how her mother had to order him to honey, please, calm down because he was fuming over something that did not concern him (Doesn’t concern me? He had bellowed. How does this not concern me? We are the ones who had to pay for the damn wedding in the first place!)
She wants him to know so much, so, so much about how she has changed for him, for what they could have been, even though she kinda-sorta knew all along that he was going to move away no matter what.
Just…just tell him that I love him.
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She has a date tonight but doesn’t really want to go. Her, Ryan, Kelly, and “the date,” because that’s what she has been referring to him as, are going to meet at some new place in downtown Scranton, some Indian-fusion restaurant.
She hasn’t been on a first date in a while, in almost a decade, and when it’s put like that, the pit in her stomach multiplies by nine.
It’s a date, just a date, and I shouldn’t treat it like life and death.
When her doorbell rings two minutes after seven, when it should have rung at seven promptly, she whispers to quiet of her apartment, “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
--------------------------------
It’s over, finally, and she can easily say that the date went horrendously. But she’s relieved, very, very relieved that it’s over, and that she can take off these work clothes and spend the night with Jay Leno and a bowl of ice cream (it turns out the Indian-fusion cuisine wasn’t to her liking).
She wonders what he is doing, right now, at this very moment, miles away in an eternity so aloof from her own that it makes her wonder if she ever knew him anyway, if he was a figment of her imagination, someone she made up to focus on something other than what she was faced with daily.
And it isn’t like she has ever been afraid of falling in love with him, because, most noticeably, she kind-of sort-of did. But she has been afraid of allowing herself to try something new, to find a new Pam within what she already is.
And yet.
The truth of the matter is that to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. A certain feeling like the surreptitious, chill that rushed through her lungs when he left for the night or the heat that rose from her toes like an oil spill whenever she glimpsed at him glimpsing at her.
Tonight, as her eyelids fall like feathers over her hazel irises and her breathing slows to match the beat of her heart, she realizes that she has learned to live with the truth.
Not to accept it, but to live with it.
--------------------------------
Tell him I’m so, so sorry, that I never wanted this. Tell him I regret my decisions, and everything, everything. Tell him he’s all I ever wanted, ever, and that I was wrong to doubt that even for a minute.
Tell him I miss him, I miss him every day.
Story Notes:
Disclaimer: NBC owns these characters, no matter how many times I find myself wishing that I did.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Inspired by Ingrid Michaelson's Sort of, which I'm pretty much obsessed with right now.
Takes place during and around The Convention, Season 3.
Takes place during and around The Convention, Season 3.
Chapter End Notes:
I'm such an angstaholic.
