Dear My Never,

This is my half-hearted goodbye,

The other half wants to still try,

Remembering words that you said

He finally gets up after Karen curses under her breath as he tosses in bed for the fifth time, trying to will his mind to shut down so he can sleep. She mumbles something he can’t understand after he tells her he will be down in the lobby, but he feels it isn’t worth asking her to repeat herself. They both have a big day tomorrow, at least one of them should get some rest.

He could blame his late-night jitters on the corporate interview he has tomorrow. No one would blame him. A big promotion in an even bigger city, going up against his girlfriend, leaving everything he knows behind for the second time in one year. But even if he tried to blame it on the interview, he knows that’s only a small part of why he can’t sleep.

There's one too many people in Scranton.

To say that Pam hadn’t crossed his mind before Karen had made her comment would have been a lie. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was just him running away again. If New York was just Stamford 2.0 and this was another lame attempt to get over Pam. His mind had been going in circles since she gave her speech at the beach. He had hoped that was her own casino night confession, but by the time they pulled back into the Dunder Mifflin parking lot, he had analyzed every word she had said at least three times. The words “best friend” and “having fun” loomed over him, even as he tried to focus more on “called off my wedding because of you” and “I miss you” and “I didn’t care until I met you.” He couldn’t risk misinterpreting anything again.

He drops into one of the seats in the lobby, leaning back and closing his eyes.

He likes Karen. She’s good for him; pushes him to do bigger and better things, calls him out on his bullcrap, wants what’s best for him, even if he doesn’t always know what that is. She likes him too, and he had to admit that it was nice to feel wanted for once. Well, wanted for more than just a best friend.

He shakes his head and opens his eyes, stopping his train of thought. Although that night in May still hurts him more than he would like to admit, he has come to realize he wasn’t entirely fair to Pam either. He won’t fool himself into thinking she couldn’t have had any idea, but he knows she wasn’t expecting to receive his whole heart that night and have to make a decision on what to do with it. He has wondered countless times if he had gone about it differently somehow, if she would have changed her mind. If she would have accepted everything he had given her, if she would have let him kiss her again. But the reality was that she didn’t. She chose Roy, turned him away. She called off the wedding, never told him. She grew as a person, grew into who she had always wanted to be, who he always knew she could be, without him and he had to just watch from the sidelines. And now he’s possibly moving to New York with his girlfriend, finishing the chapter in the book that was Jim and Pam.

As he stares across the lobby, watching the front desk attendants yawn as the hours grow later, he wonders if their story deserves one more page. After getting a piece of paper and a pen from the front desk and a Gatorade from the vending machine, he grabs a magazine off of the coffee table in front of him so he can write on his lap.

Pam,

I am currently sitting in a hotel lobby in New York, less than twelve hours away from an interview that could change my life. For better or for worse, I’m not entirely sure yet. The raise would be nice, the experience would be great, but I’m only diving deeper into the world of selling paper, which I never wanted to do. But maybe this is my chance to become my own version of Fancy New Beesly. To grow and become stronger and accomplish things I may have thought were impossible. Turns out I didn’t evolve as much as I had hoped I did while I was in Stamford.

And maybe New York will be no different. Maybe I’ll find a new Dwight (who are we kidding, no one could ever replace Dwight), maybe I’ll still drink grape sodas, maybe I won’t ever be able to fully stop the pranks, but I have to try. Because if I don’t, then I’ll be stuck as a paper salesman with no future. So, I’m letting go. I’m letting go of my job, of Scranton, of you. Everything that I’ve held onto for the past eight years, believing with blind hope that one day I could have it all. Or, even if I couldn’t have it all, I could at least have you.

But I guess it’s too late now. You’ve moved on, I’ve been trying to, and I’m hopefully about to take the next step towards where I need to be. I never told you this, but I am so happy that you have taken charge of your life. I always knew you could, and I think deep down you knew you could too. Above everything else, I have always just wanted you to be happy, so I hope you are. I hope you find the person who is everything that you were to me, and you never settle for anything less. You deserve the world, and I know you’ll get that for yourself.

I don’t know if you will ever read this. Maybe I’ll give it to you one day, maybe it will sit in a drawer for years until I get rid of it, I haven’t decided yet. But whether or not you ever read this, I hope you know how much you have meant to me. I guess we just never got the timing right.

Yours Truly,

Jim

He stuffs the letter into the bottom of his bag after getting back into his room, the decision to give it to Pam or not to be made another day. He slips into bed and wraps his arm around Karen, but she moves away from him, so he turns to face the other way. As he falls asleep, he can’t shake the feeling of someone else, in a periwinkle dress and hair pulled up, wrapped in his arms.