Goodnight to My Thoughts of You

by Chelsea Rotunno

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  True Love

  Second semester started a week later. It would be my final semester in college. Just four more months, and I’d have my bachelor’s degree.

  Even though I was busy reading, writing papers, and working for The Clause, I made time to hang out with my new friends. I remember feeling like I had finally found the sort of friendships that I had been longing for my whole life: friends who made me laugh, included me in everything, and accepted and loved me no matter what. Friends who would never talk behind my back, who were smart and loved to read, and who valued honesty, wisdom, and truth.

  Jenny and I would go to Charlie and Jack’s apartment late at night, and the four of us would joke around, watch movies, and eat spaghetti. Once we stayed up all night giving each other foot massages while trying to figure out a riddle:

  There are two doors guarded by angels. One door leads to hell, and the other leads to heaven. One angel always tells the truth, and the other always lies. You don’t know which door is which nor which angel is which. What is the one question you can ask either angel to be 100 percent certain which is the door to heaven?

  “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me! I will figure this out!” Charlie said. He was determined to get the answer, and by morning, after talking through the logic all night long, he got it.

  One night I called Charlie to see if he could come over. When I got his voice mail, I realized that it was Wednesday, and he was working with the junior high group at his church. I decided to leave him a message.

  “Hey Charlie, it’s Miriam. Just wondering if you want to hang out tonight. Give me a call, OK? Bye!”

  Then, just to make him laugh, I called back and repeated the same message two more times.

  He didn’t call me back, but when I arrived at my apartment later, I found Post-It notes all over my bed, my door, the whiteboard, in my shoes—everywhere—saying, “Hey Miriam, call Charlie. He wants to hang out later.”

  That night Charlie brought his guitar over to my apartment. He played some songs for my roommates and me, including a new song he was working on called “Goodnight.” It was a slow, emotional song with a country sound.

  Goodnight to my thoughts of you

  They’re all I have, my thoughts of you

  And I know you won’t stay

  I know you won’t stay

  I wish I could steal one waltz with you

  We’d waltz in rags among flowers

  But I know you can’t stay

  I know you can’t stay

  My roommate Jocelyn knew how to play guitar too, so Charlie taught her the chords to the song.

  “Do you want to learn to play it?” he asked me.

  “Sure,” I said. I had tried playing my sister Gretchen’s guitar when I was little, but all I could remember was that it made my fingers hurt.

  “Do you know how to play G and C?”

  “No. Can you teach me?”

  Charlie sat behind me and helped me put the guitar strap over my head and place my fingers correctly on the strings.

  “This is G. This is C. This is D. And you strum with this hand, like this.”

  “Wow, it’s a lot easier than I thought.”

  From then on, Charlie came over a few nights a week to teach us songs on the guitar. Our favorite was “Goodnight.”

  “Teach us the words to the chorus!” Jocelyn begged.

  “I’m still working on it,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder if the song was about me. My roommates were convinced it was.

  “He likes you, Miriam,” Jocelyn said later that week. “I’m sure of it. What do you think about him?”

  “He is such a great friend. But I’m not attracted to him like that.”

  One night Charlie brought me some chai tea at The Clause office while I was working late.

  “That guy likes you,” my co-workers said after he left.

  “No, he’s just a nice guy. He does stuff like that for everyone.”

  “Right.”

  When he gave me a care package before I left for Corpus Christi for an English conference, my sister Anna was convinced as well.

  “What was in the care package?” she asked when we were chatting over the phone.

  “Chocolate chip cookies, cookie cutters shaped like Texas and a guitar, ceramic ballet slippers, and a CD with his favorite worship songs.”

  “He loves you,” she said. “Do you realize that?”

  “Um—what makes you think that he loves me?”

  “Miriam! Are you blind?”

  One day in February I stopped by his apartment while he was working on an art project. When he opened the door, he had that huge smile on his face. His hands were speckled with paint.

  “What are you working on?”

  “It’s just a project I’ve been wanting to make.”

  “For class?”

  “No, actually, it’s just for fun.”

  “Only you, Charlie! No one else does art projects instead of homework. Can I see it?” I asked.

  “Sure, come on in.”

  He led me to his room and showed me a large colorful painting of a man’s face and a woman’s face, looking at each other. The man was painted in oranges and reds and the woman in blues and greens. The man, who was shorter than the woman, had his hand poised as if to hesitantly touch the woman’s lips.

  On Valentine’s Day, I was very surprised to find a letter in my student mailbox. It was written on watercolor paper in brown calligraphy.

  Dearest Miriam,

  I can’t help but think back to my freshman year when we met for the first time in the library. Then I think of the amazing times we have shared together recently. I have seen such a light in your life like no other, and I don’t just say this; I really mean it when I say no other. God is so very powerful and magnificent they say. Well, I have seen him so evidently manifested in your life. You shine with the love of Jesus when you talk, when you just sit and hang out, when you dance around, when you simply walk by sometimes. Because of that very fact I want to tell you that I think you are a beautiful woman. I didn’t know what it was back at the library, but all these things I see now, I saw back then intuitively. Your passion is empowering to me. Your gentleness is humbling to me. And I have to say I sincerely love our friendship. You are very special to me.

  Happy Valentine’s Day,

  Charlie Castagnoli

  It was the sweetest letter I had ever gotten in my life.

  Charlie and I continued to hang out. We’d run through the sprinklers on the football field at night and stay up late having philosophical conversations. One night at my apartment a few weeks after his grandpa had passed away, he seemed sad and frustrated.

  “I don’t believe true love exists,” he announced.

  “Is it because your parents are divorced?” I asked.

  “No, I think that no matter what a person wants, they can’t control their own heart or the heart of another person. I’m actually writing a story about it.”

  “Really? I want to read it! Can I read it?”

  “It’s not quite ready yet. It’s a play. There is a simple man who loves an older woman, his best friend, with all his heart. But he knows he can never have her. The woman loves another man, a tall handsome guy, and she marries him. The simple man becomes a missionary and devotes his life to God, never loving another woman. Even though he finds her again when he is old, she doesn’t want him, and he is alone forever.”

  “That’s beautiful—and depressing,” I said. “I’ve had my heart broken before, but I still think true love exists.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, what if love is not about the other person loving you back? What if love is something that shapes us because of what we give, not what we get in return? What if God wants us to love people until it hurts—and then continue to love even more? Or what if love is something that grows?
My mom told me that even though she has not always felt love toward my dad, she stayed with him and realized that love is shown in different ways. It is not always a feeling; it becomes something deep. It is something more and more beautiful as time goes on. She said that when people get divorced, they miss out on that aged love, the ‘we made it through the hard times’ kind of love.”

  Then I read him two of my favorite quotes from Mother Teresa: “True love is love that causes pain, that hurts, and yet brings joy. That is why we must pray to God and ask him to give us the courage to love.”

  The second quote was written on a greeting card I had found at Vroman’s Bookstore: “I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, only more love.”

  “That’s a lot to think about,” Charlie said. “But I still don’t believe true love exists—for me.”

  “Yes it does, Charlie. Don’t give up yet; you are only 21.”

  I decided to write a poem for Charlie and surprise him by printing it in The Westwind Literary Magazine.

  It’s OK to feel love for someone

  To love patiently

  To ache with love

  And remain paused

  Aching

  It brings character

  Like suffering always does

  Like hovering in the pain

  Of loss

  Stagnant in divorce

  Out of control of others’ souls

  Hovering in knowledge of malnourished children

  In pain

  In pain we remember them

  In cowardice we forget them

  So pain is OK. Verity comes with pain

  And love and joy are more thick and pure,

  Shalom more whole

  After pain fulfills her purpose

  So love, love

  Rest there

  Expect the ache that makes it patient love

  Pause and let the ache be real to you

  Until it is no longer a shock

  That love would be

  So thick

  And whole

  He responded with another poem, which he left in my student box.

  I will love

  I will wait

  Because the waiting

  The suffering

  Is necessary

  Love

  Love twice more and forever

  I have touched that love that is beyond pain

  And it remains

  So thick and whole

  I will love

  Love twice more and forever

  So longingly I love

  And it’s waiting love

  And it should be

  The next week when I was editing the paper, I saw that we were printing an article about dating relationships. Next to the article was a photo of Charlie being pulled in two directions by two female students.

  “What the heck is this?” I said out loud.

  The caption read, “If only Charlie Castagnoli were 5 inches taller,” and the girls were saying, “I want tall Charlie!” and “No, tall Charlie is mine!”

  You girls are stupid! I thought. It’s foolish not to like a guy just because he’s short. I love Charlie just the way he is.

  A few days later I was walking through my apartment, and I had an epiphany. I stood at the kitchen table for a moment and sort of prayed. Someone—maybe it was an angel of God or maybe God himself—whispered a secret to me, and I listened: Whoever marries Charlie will be a lucky girl.

  I want to be that lucky girl, I responded. A new respect for Charlie grew in my heart, along with an urgency to make sure that no one else had him but me.