Love Letters to the Dead (23 page)

Dear Elizabeth Bishop,

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I’ve done it. The days feel transparent, like I am walking through that kind of barely yellow sun coming through a shield of clouds—too thin. Empty light. It doesn’t land.

Sky broke up with me three weeks and one day ago. After school this afternoon, me and Natalie and Hannah and Kristen were in the alleyway. They were smoking and talking. I wasn’t listening. I was just looking at the flecks of late January snow, swirling in the yellow street lamp. The sky was glowing the way it does right before it’s going to get really dark. I was holding Sky’s sweatshirt that he’d let me borrow one night when we snuck out. I’d started wearing it to school back then and had joked that I’d never give it back. Now I never will. I finally pulled it out of my locker that day to take home and put in the back of my drawer where I keep memory things that make me sad. But it was snowing and I was cold, so I put it on. It smelled like him.

At that moment, Sky came out of nowhere down the alley. He looked startled to see me. He said, “Hey,” and kept walking. I looked down because my eyes were filling up with tears, but I didn’t want him to notice. When he passed, I whispered, “Hi,” and watched his back. I loved him still and hated him all at once.

Then I saw. He stopped under one of the streetlights and put his arm around her. A girl with blond hair and big boobs that were bursting out of her shirt, which was super tight and pink with an anarchy symbol on it. She was only wearing that tee shirt even though it was snowing out. Sky took off his same leather jacket and put it around her. And they kissed. With his hands under the jacket. I knew I shouldn’t look, but I couldn’t move my eyes. My throat clenched so that I could barely breathe.

The girl saw me watching and pointed toward me, but before Sky’s head could turn, I looked down. The next thing I saw, she was leading them off into this old yellow car, a cool car, and big enough to have sex in, I’m sure.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to jump in front of the stupid yellow car. I felt like I could burst into flames.

Hannah said, “He’s an absolute asshole, Laurel. Do you want me to kill him? Because I will.” Kristen offered me a cigarette, which I usually don’t smoke, but now I did, if only to find a way to suck something in. I asked Kristen who she was, and Kristen said her name is Francesca, and she graduated last year, and she works at Safeway. While they tried to make me feel better by talking about how I’m so much prettier and cooler and nicer than her, I thought of her running people’s ice cream and chocolate milk and hamburger meat and Jim Beam through the checkout line, and then running out through the snow in her uniform, where Sky would be waiting in his truck to take her home. And I thought of your poem.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (
Write
it!) like disaster.

Write it. Write it. Write it, Laurel.

Yours.

Dear Jim Morrison,

I played “Light My Fire” last night and tried to wake myself up from the fog I’ve been in. I bounced around my room a bit, but it didn’t sound like it used to in the car with Sky, or at the Fallfest park, because I kept thinking about how they found you in a bathtub dead. Cause of death: unknown. It’s hard not to know.

In the picture of you, the famous one that’s on all those tee shirts and posters and stuff, your eyes are fierce. They burn into us, calling us forward and pushing us back at once. Your arms are out, making you into a cross. Your chest is bare, vulnerable, but strong like an animal’s. I read about how when the Doors were recording an album, you would only sometimes show up to the sessions, and when you did, a lot of the time you were drunk. There would be piles of chicken bones and apple juice containers and empty rose wine bottles everywhere. And sometimes you’d yell at people. It’s sad when everyone knows you, but no one knows you. I am guessing that you might have felt that way. They see what they want you to be. And if you wear leather pants, and have a beautiful body, and drink lots of expensive wine, and if your voice sounds like the edge you strike a match on, then these things are blocks that you have given them to build the person they want.

I thought May was what she wanted to be. I thought she was free and brave and the world was hers, but I’m not sure anymore. Jim, I want people to know me, but if anyone could look inside of me, if they saw that everything I feel is not what it’s supposed to be, I don’t know what would happen.

Right now I am in Algebra. I think Evan Friedman is sort of playing with himself again. Britt is staring down into a compact she has hidden in her lap, trying not to look at him. They are broken up for the second time.

It’s been five weeks and two days since Sky dumped me. I would like to say that I am getting over him, but obviously I am not. Sometimes after school I walk the long way to the parking lot around the track and I see him making out with Francesca near the bleachers, or getting into her car. I want to run and scream at him. I want to pound my fists against his chest as hard as I can, and I want him to put his arms around me and hold me so that I stop. I want him to kiss me again and make it clean. But now he’s behind the thickest glass wall, like no matter how hard I ran at it I couldn’t break it. I could only shatter myself.

Francesca is awful. She wants to beat me up. Yesterday, when I walked out of school through the alley, she was standing at the end of it with two other girls I’ve never seen before. When I saw her, I started moving fast with my head down, just wanting to get past, but they circled around me.

Francesca said, “I saw you watching Sky and me.”

My heart was about to spring out of my chest. I was trying hard to keep it in, because I didn’t want it to land on the asphalt at her feet, next to the golden ring someone had dropped in the crack. And I really didn’t want to cry.

“Let me tell you something, little girl,” she said. “He doesn’t want you anymore.”

It wasn’t fair of her. I knew he didn’t want me. She didn’t know how badly that hurt. I hated her. I could feel the tears burning in the back of my eyes, but I couldn’t let myself cry in front of her. I couldn’t.

So I said, “Don’t you think it’s a little lame that you still hang out at the high school?”

Her face turned red and she said, “I’ll kick your little ass. I’ll kick your ass so hard, no one will recognize your pretty little face.”

I had to think fast. My body felt swervy and my brain was connecting all of these dots that shouldn’t connect. But one thing I knew was she is bigger than me by far and definitely could beat me up.

So I said, “Why don’t we play a game instead?” I pushed past her and walked out into the street. I called back to her. “It’s called the dead game. Whoever lasts the longest when a car comes wins.”

I lay down and closed my eyes. I heard a car coming from a ways away. I heard it getting closer, though it was not that close yet. I could last much longer.

I heard her say to her friends, “Oh my god. This girl’s a total freak. Let’s get out of here.” And I knew then that I’d won. I knew that she was scared of me now, instead of the other way around.

I heard the car getting closer. And then I heard Sky’s voice out of nowhere. “Laurel! What the fuck are you doing?!” he was shouting.

I rolled out of the way in time and I ran and I ran, and I remembered the night I got good at the game. May had always been the best, the bravest. Carl was almost as good as she was, but not quite. And Mark was just behind him. I had been last. As soon as I’d hear a car turn down the block, I’d want to run. I’d try to wait an extra second, but when I got up and pulled the blindfold off, I’d see the car was still so many houses away and feel stupid that I thought it was about to hit me. I knew that Mark would never love me because I was afraid, and they could all see that. I thought if only I could be fearless like May. If only I could be flushed and daring and beautiful in the twilight like she was. I thought if I wasn’t such a wimp, then it would all be different. He might love me back.

Then something changed. It was after May started taking me out with her to the movies. We were playing the game, and I lay down for my turn. I felt a new kind of quiet. Like nothing could touch me. Waiting, just waiting for the car to come. And when I heard it turn down the block, I wasn’t scared of anything. I could hear exactly where it was. I didn’t need my eyes. I could see the street, the car traveling. It was in front of the Fergusons’. The Padillas’, the Blairs’, the Wunders’—I knew just how close and just how far. It came in front of Carl and Mark’s. I heard May screaming, “Laurel! Get out of the way!” But I didn’t need to go yet. I waited one last second. Then I rolled and ran and saw the car whizzing right by. When I walked up to the sidewalk, May said, “Laurel! What’s wrong with you?!” She looked really scared. The way I was always scared for her. I thought Mark would be proud. I thought we’d high-five. But he was white as a ghost. May hugged me.

She said, “Don’t ever do that again!”

“But I won, right?”

May said, breathlessly, “Yeah. You won.”

After that, I don’t think we ever played again. And after that, I knew that Mark would definitely never love me. I’d changed.

I heard Sky’s voice, echoing after me.
What the fuck are you doing?
I just kept running, faster than I knew I could, sucking the cold air into my lungs. Down neighborhood streets, through the shadows cast by crooked tree branches, past the houses in a row that seemed like they would be safe inside. Until all I could hear was myself breathing, as loud, it seemed, as an ocean.

Luckily for me, Aunt Amy was late to pick me up, so by the time I ran back to the parking lot, she wasn’t there yet. Sky and Francesca and those other girls were gone. Aunt Amy felt bad for being late, so she asked me if I wanted to get fries. I did. And then I wished I could go home, home where Mom would be making enchiladas for dinner and May would be setting the table, folding the napkins into diamonds like she would.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear Kurt,

You had a daughter, and now you’ll never get to know her. You won’t see what she’s going to be when she grows up. You won’t be there to make dinner together when she comes back from the pool in the summer smelling like chlorine. And when she rides her bike with no hands and flies over the handlebars, you won’t make it better. You won’t be at her chorus concert, with all the other parents on the sweaty gym floor, watching her face when she closes her eyes and lets her voice out. You won’t watch her walk through new snow in your backyard or lie down to make an angel. You won’t see her fall in love for the first time. And if her heart gets broken and she curls under the flannel sheets she just washed and cries, you won’t hear her. When she needs you, you won’t be there. Don’t you care? How could you do that to her?

Do you know what she’ll have instead of her father? Your suicide note. Did you think of that when you wrote it, that those words would shadow her whole life?

You wrote that you have a daughter, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. You said that terrified you, because you couldn’t stand the thought of her growing up and becoming like you were.

But did you think about the fact that when you wrote those words, when you took your life, you stole the innocence you loved her for? That you forever changed her heart full of joy? You were the first to do her harm. You were the first person to make the world dangerous for her.

I don’t know why I’ve written you all these letters. I thought you got it. But you just left, too. Like everyone does.

I walked into May’s room tonight, once Dad was asleep, and I tore your poster off the wall. I tore it to shreds and I threw it out. And I sobbed until I couldn’t sob anymore. And now, that particular poster is gone forever. And I’m sorry.

It can’t be undone. We can’t put it back, and we can’t bring you back to life, and I hate that. And I hate you for it, too. There, I said it, I do. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wonder if your daughter has forgiven you, because I don’t know if I could.