The title
The title can refer to the justice the narrator achieve when she ignores his last message. He is through the whole story described as the Irish poet, and she used to be. But when she thinks about her life she realizes that she is happy with her life, and she is not willing to risk it for an old high school dream. She thinks that breaking up her family to go out and seek herself, would be a sin. And only poets can live happily with a life of sin. So she disappears without a word, just like he did.
It is possible to get over a broken heart, but how do you react when your old high school boyfriend tells you that he still loves you? It is a question of choosing between your ordinary life and family or following a long lost dream. The dream can also be a way of escaping reality, and not living a routine mint life. That it why it is attractive. The letters also released an unknown wildness and irreverence in her
Jed Cunningham is the narrator’s former boyfriend from high school. They started going out when they were sixteen, and he left her two years later, to go to Ireland and be a poet. When they were at high school he was never a part of the herd and he was not able to fit into the crowd. She describes him as the coolest of the cool, and he created his own fashion and everybody followed it. The narrator cannot understand why Jed Cunningham would log on the Friends United website, because she remembers him as a person who did not look back, a person who lived for the day.
In school he was a fantastic writer and wrote letters to her, which unleashed an unknown wildness and irreverence in her. He used to smoke like the poet he was, not with his cigarette cupped into his hand like the other boys.
In school, the teachers did not like him, they feared him. They said he did not have respect for their authority. The teachers could not understand him, because they were used to shape the students but Jed was already formed. He was very intelligent and he had great success at A levels. The narrator describes him as and old head on young shoulders.
Jed’s dream was to be a poet, and when he was eighteen he moved to Ireland. He did not want to be what was expected of him, he wanted to follow his vision, even if it meant leaving his girlfriend and disappointing his parents.
Now he describes himself as grown old, dull and sad. He lives alone in a remote place by the sea with his dog, because he and his wife broke up. Jed says, he still is in love with the narrator.
The narrator lives a very typical live in the country with her husband, their two children, two dogs and a cat. She sits at home in her office and writes articles, and hopes for fame. She is not sure what fame will bring her, but she wants the success, which made Jed leave her. She lives a quiet and normal life; she has grown up and grown mature. When she sits at home, she does not care how she looks. She wears clothes which are to tight and socks in open-toes sandals.
In high school she was known as the Chinese wrestler because she was chubby. She was and is clever, and Jed was the first one who met her intellectual. Through Jed she found a wildness she did not know, but since he left her she has lost the wildness. She does not drink and she is afraid of letting go because she is scared of the person who might come out. She has ignored her feelings to the state where the only feelings she has are banal and unsurprising.
Jed and the narrator had a very special relationship. They were together for two years and she loved him very much. He was the first who met her intellectual and he could make her laugh. He wrote her fantastic letters, and when she was with him she felt a wildness and irreverence she had not known before. She describes their relationship as an adult love affair among children. They were very close and they completed each other perfectly, as “two sides of the same coin.”
They never made love, and the narrator thinks it would have ruined the innocence of their relationship if they did. Their friend did, and is sure that if he had asked her, she would have done it too. She describes the two years they had together as living in a crazy parallel universe, like living in a bubble. She felt it was a bit like being a child again.
Diana Appleyard, the author of the short story, has chosen to write in a very ordinary language, which reflects a very ordinary narrator.
We hear the story from the main characters point of view, but the story is told through an all-knowing narrator. We hear a lot about her thoughts and her memories about school.