This is my fourth attempt at writing this. Not because I cannot find the right words and not because I feel that you deserve any more special care than the next girl, but because whenever I get up to stretch my legs, the file is gone when I return to my computer. I didn’t save the file the first time, but when I found it was missing and was then forced to begin again, I saved it as "Letter to Erin" on my desktop. And then the pizza delivery guy rang my doorbell, and I was gone for only two minutes, but the file still vanished into cyberspace, into what I am growing to believe is actually a gaping blue world of love letters that never reached their mark. (Do not be mistaken. This is not a love letter.) And so I started over and renamed the file "Letter to Fanny" because I thought it would make this easier. I saved this letter to my desktop and a disk, but when I got up to relieve my bladder and put my plate in the sink, it had somehow transformed itself from bytes of information into molecules of water and evaporated into the atmosphere. And so here I sit at my computer. I will not be getting up from this place until I have written everything I need to write. I have superstitiously named this file, "In Case of Erasure, Please Return to Will Potts at 7681 Canal…"
      In my first letter, I started with the night you tried to commit suicide, and in my second I started with the first time we met, and in my third letter I started with the summer of our break-up, but this time, I will begin with the beginning of the end for both of us, which was (I am sure you will agree) the night we visited the soothsayer. The soothsayer, you insisted we call him: Felix Pickel, who no one would ever suspect possessed a mystic bone in his body. Felix Pickel, whose apartment was decorated in varying shades of mustard and lemon polyester, who wore a three-piece tweed suit with flip-flops and a baseball cap, who specialized in foreseeing when and how a person would expire. "Expire" was the word he used. Not die. Not pass on. I’m sure this has stuck with you as it has stuck with me, because you commented on it. "Expire makes me think of a dusty box of crackers hidden way far back on a shelf," you said. I nodded, but found the word fitting. I respected the idea that our bodies only had an allotted amount of time, a shelf-life so to speak. And so we—Cole and Stephanie, Fanny and me—waited in Felix Pickel’s jaundiced parlor to discover our expiration dates.
      Cole went first, drunk and laughing, and came back the color of the parlor. "When I’m seventy-one, I’m going to die of a massive heart attack," he said. "My grandpa just died of a heart attack two months ago. On his seventieth birthday."
      "Did you tell him that?" I asked.
      "No." He sat down next to Stephanie and put his hand on her wrist, the silver charm bracelet he’d given her for her birthday. We knew very little of her then. Cole had only just started dating her, and her friendship had been thrust upon us like a stepmother on a pair of petulant children. Do you remember how you made her cry? "You don’t have to do this," Cole said to her.
      "Don’t be stupid," Stephanie said. She returned from Felix Pickel’s kitchen unshaken. "Eighty-two. A fall downstairs on the way to the basement. The neighbors won’t find me for days."
      "That’s just unnecessarily grotesque," you said, but you smiled at me behind Stephanie’s back. It was your turn, but you wanted me to go before you.
      I sat across the Formica table from Felix Pickel. Did his eyes look like egg yolks to you too? It was as though his eyes had absorbed all the colors of his apartment. Maybe he was sick. Or maybe just carrying around all that death inside you expressed itself however it could. Yellow eyes. I didn’t know where to look, so I studied his tweed lapel. He inhaled deeply, once, twice. He was smelling me. Picking up my scent.
      "I’ll need to touch you," Felix Pickel said. "Briefly. Is that okay?" He stood up and placed his left hand on the back of my neck. His hand was surprisingly warm and soft, like a mother’s. I waited to see a vision of my death, but nothing happened. He removed his hand and sat back down. "You’ll die younger than your friends. Do you want to hear this?"
      "Yes," I said, but I wasn’t sure if I did.
      "You wish to know when?" he asked.
      "Yes," I said, before I could measure the consequences of knowing.
      "Forty-nine years, three months, and twenty days. Lymphoma."
      "Is it possible to prevent this?" I asked. "Now that I know?"
      "I don’t know," Felix Pickel said. "I am not a doctor. I don’t diagnose. I determine when a body will expire. With or without treatment, I do not know. Perhaps you would die even younger if you were not aware of this fact as you are now and did not seek early treatment."
      "Cancer," I reported to you. "Eighty-five years old."
      Don’t be angry at me for lying, Fanny, especially after the fact. It’s inconsequential now. Even less than inconsequential. A toothpick among giant sequoias. Would it have changed the outcome of that night, of that year, of your life? Perhaps, you think. Perhaps then I would’ve told you, and you would’ve been the one, and then maybe. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But every "perhaps" leads down a different road, and every road leads to the same dead end. Please put this page down for a moment and think it over. When you are done pulling your hair, come back to me. I am not getting up until I have finished this task.
      You went into Felix Pickel’s kitchen and came out laughing. "It’s too gruesome," you said. "Too awful." Tears sparkled in your eyes you were laughing so hard. You even refused to tell me later that night when we were on our own. I thought about confessing my little lie to you then to inspire you to open up to me. But I didn’t, and you didn’t, and so we lay in my bed and slid our hands under each other’s clothing and talked about superstitions and our favorite color jelly beans.
      And now I don’t know where to go next—the first time we met, or our break-up, because both events are the unraveling of the other. I noticed your mismatched eyes first—one blue, one brown. Did I ever tell you that this was what drew me to you first? Not your long hair, not your lacy camisoles and snug jeans. When I woke up that morning in your bed and found you at the mirror putting in colored contacts, I knew more about Fanny than I ever wanted to know. "Would you have still noticed me if both my eyes had been blue?" you asked. Yes. "But would you have still talked to me?" I don’t know. "Does your love depend on the color of my eyes?" Which is an irrelevant question, as inconsequential as my first lie to you, my only lie. We were not in love.
      That same day you told me your real name. Erin. You told me this while hanging upside down from your bed to try to make it into a joke. You told me you had tried to reinvent yourself in college. The blood collected in your head, as you tried to explain how lost you had felt, how insignificant, negligible, lonely, purposeless, empty, plain, dull. Your face turned pink, then magenta. Please believe me when I tell you that I tried so hard to reconcile my two girlfriends. Blue and brown-eyed Fanny. Blue-eyed Erin. I traced backwards our year together, unraveling it as I am doing now, to pinpoint who I was with on each occasion. It was Fanny who I met at the farmer’s market carrying sunflowers and a bag of asparagus. You had your crocheted hat on backwards and a rainbow painted on your cheek. And it was definitely with Fanny the first time we had sex. But perhaps it was Erin the next morning: insecure and brooding? Do you even know? I am almost certain I was with Erin the night we visited the soothsayer. If I was speaking to Cole, maybe I would ask him who you were the night you tried to commit suicide. Did you know that we are no longer friends? You are not responsible for our severed friendship, so don’t feel guilty. He was there, and I was not, and well. I want to stand up to pace the room, but I won’t for fear of this all disappearing on me again. Pacing sometimes helps me to sort things out, to shake the words loose from my brain. But now all these words are piling up in my head, and I guess I’ll just have to persevere.
      I lied again, my second lie to you, when I said at the beginning of this letter that you didn’t deserve any more special care than any other girl. And of course that’s untrue. Because if it weren’t, I would tell you right now that you were the sole reason Cole and I stopped being friends. Don’t cry. And please don’t try to call Cole to smooth out our friendship. It is something we are both coming to terms with. We can’t bear to be in the same room together anymore, let alone the same apartment. I haven’t asked him, but I know that he would do the same thing all over again if he had to, because he’s a good person, and even though I would never admit it to him, I would rather you had died than have him be the one to console you that night (because I am a very bad person).
      Almost a month had passed without us speaking. Days became weeks became bruises. And then you called. The first of March. And oh, I am so glad that the first letter I wrote you was deleted. What a blessing. What would you have thought? Maybe you would’ve read those first few unkind sentences about the night you almost ended it all, and thrown this letter away. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had. But you have the momentum of reading behind you now. Eyes speeding ahead snagging letters even if you try to look away. You have read through these other pages and endured their pain. So please stay with me for just a little longer. When you called, Kira from the video store was kissing my neck and her hand was on my fly. (Is it cruel for me to include these details? Am I trying to excuse or incriminate myself with these details?) You said, "Will, I need to talk to you." I said, "Who is this?" I knew it was you, but I wanted to hear which name you would use. "It’s Fanny," you said with a laugh, and I knew you’d been crying. "Can I call you back?" I asked. "I’m kind of in the middle of something." This made Kira laugh, and she nuzzled my cheek and slid her way down my body until her forehead was resting against my abdomen.
      You were very, very quiet, but I knew you were still there. After a moment, you said, "Felix Pickel was right."
      "What did he say?" I asked. And then, "Are you okay?" Kira stopped what she was doing, and looked up at me.
      "I’m fine," you said, when what you meant to say was, Nothing is fine and never again will be fine. "Call me back tomorrow, okay? I can tell you’re busy." And then you hung up.
      Before you reached me on my cell phone, you left a message on my answering machine, the answering machine that Cole and I shared. You said, "Will. This is Fanny. I need to talk to someone right now. Please call me back. As soon as you can." Cole didn’t delete the message so that I could listen to it when I got home, and I listened to it so many times that the message gradually erased itself. Your voice sounds the same—the same way you always sound, congested, like you have a cold, even when you’re healthy. And it sounds like you might laugh at any minute, like you’re drunk-dialing me and there are a pack of friends surrounding you cupping their giggles within their palms. And the words you chose were so plain. So insignificant, negligible, empty, dull. Would I have reacted the same way Cole did if I had heard the message first? Of course, I already know the answer to this question. I talked to you on my cell phone and you hung up. Kira and I carried on. And as Cole let himself into your apartment and found you ransacking your medicine cabinet, I was licking the hollow of Kira’s neck.
      You punched him, maybe so that I would not have to do it myself. Cole came home the next morning with a black eye. An indigo-colored bruise. The color of violence. The color of love, I later found out, but not soon enough. "What did you do all night?" I asked him. I felt like Felix Pickel, carrying all that death inside of me. "We listened to some cds," he said. "She talked. A lot. Drank some wine. I took all the pills with me. I’ll give them back to her eventually." He shrugged his shoulders and kept your secrets because he was a good person, so good. He knew how to save a life, while I did not.
      I have imagined what that night must have been like so many times, that I can play it like a favorite movie on the inside of my eyelids before I go to sleep. It has become more real and more important to me than anything that may or may not have happened that night. My legs are stiff beneath me right now, and I’m aching to stand, to look out the window at the construction workers outside, to regain my train of thought. I feel as though if I don’t stop where I am right now, poised in this moment, I will surely get it all wrong, and you will never understand why I am writing this to you, Fanny. Erin. But I do not want it to disappear. I am so afraid it will disappear. Therefore, I must save this one more time. "In Case of Erasure, Please Return to Will Potts at 7681 Canal…" Now I can sit back a little and study what I have written. Is it accurate? If not completely accurate, is it truthful? You taught me the difference between accuracy and honesty. Otherwise, how could someone as brutally honest as you be such a big fat liar?
      What did he say to you, Fanny? Not Cole, because that doesn’t matter to me. I know the kind of things he said and they are inconsequential to me as my lies and all the what if’s and maybes and perhapses that have littered this letter, which I now apologize for. I want to know what Felix Pickel said to you, although I think I can guess it. He told you that you would take your own life. Am I correct? And on March 1st, you believed his prediction was coming true. But what I need to know is did it become true because he said it, or was it true because you believed it? Don’t feel ashamed. There is a small space somewhere between my heart and my belly that believes I will die when I am forty-nine. That even as I write this, part of me believes that there are some mutinous cells in my body waiting to turn against me, and that no matter what I do, I will still not be strong enough or brave enough to fight back.
      When I found out who you really were, Erin, you told me that saying "I’m sorry" was never enough. That it was a waste of words, especially when the something at stake was as awful as this, and that I could take you or leave you. And I left you. So I won’t say that I’m sorry now, but I will tell you that I wish that I had been the one to stay up with you all night. I wish it was my eye you punched so that I had something real of you remaining, no matter how fleeting. I am going to print this letter and mail it to you now before it can fade away. It’s blurring and shimmering, swimming in and out of my vision, and I know that if I take my eyes off it for just one moment, it will be gone.