Love Letters to the Dead

The boy and the girl beneath the trees, they will forever be frozen into exactly what they are just then—they will never touch lips, but they will never lose each other, either. They will be full of possibility, immune to whatever sorrow might follow.

It’s like that, almost, when you look at any picture. Like this picture framed on my desk in my room, of May and me as kids in our yard in the summertime. We are swinging on the swing set. I’m just starting to pump, still near the ground, watching her. She’s high up, right in the moment before she jumps. But she’ll never fall off. It’s just after sunset, so the air is still warm. We will stay where the sky is deep electric blue, never turning to night—a place beyond time that can’t be touched. When I sit at my desk and see the November sky purring with snow, it doesn’t matter. I am seven years old in the summer dusk.

But what I love most is the end of your poem, when the urn talks to us. It says this: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I keep trying to figure out exactly what you mean, but that sentence is like a circle. If beauty is truth, and if truth is beauty, they are defined by each other, so how do we know the meaning of either? I think that we make our own meanings, by putting ourselves into them. I put the moon over the street lamp into the idea of beauty, and I put the feeling of Sky’s heartbeat like moths wings, and I put Hannah’s singing voice, and I put the sound of my footsteps running after May along the trail by the river, chasing the sky. And then I start to circle back to the idea of truth. I put how May said her first memory was of holding me after I was born, and how she said she was proud when Mom trusted her to take me in her arms. I put the way Sky’s voice sounded when he said he wanted to be a writer, and that he’d never told anyone before. I put Natalie holding Hannah the night we slept in the barn. And I put when May whispered in my ear, “The universe is bigger than anything that can fit into your mind.”

Then I just go around and around. And I still don’t know how to make sense of the world. But maybe it’s okay that it’s bigger than what we can hold on to. Because I think that by beauty, you don’t just mean something that’s pretty. You mean something that makes us human. The urn, you say, is a “friend to man.” It will live beyond its generation, and the next ones. And your poem is like that, too. You died almost two hundred years ago, when you were only twenty-five. But the words that you left are still alive.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Kurt,

I was reading about you tonight, because I wondered what your life was like when you were a kid. You were the center of attention in your family, but after your parents divorced when you were eight, you were orphaned in a way. You were angry. You wrote on your wall: I hate Mom, I hate Dad, Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad, it simply makes you want to be sad. You said the pain of their split stayed with you for years. They passed you from one of them to the other. Your dad remarried, and your mom had a boyfriend who was bad to her. By the time you were a teenager, your dad had custody of you, but he passed you off to live with the family of your friend. Then you moved back to live with your mom. When you didn’t graduate high school or get a job, she packed your stuff into boxes and kicked you out. You were homeless then. You stayed on other people’s couches, or sometimes you slept under a bridge, or in the waiting room of the Grays Harbor Community Hospital—a teenager just becoming a man, sleeping alone in the hospital where you were born eighteen years before.

For me, it’s not as bad as it was for you. But I understand how it is when a family falls apart. Tonight is Sunday, the house-switching night. It makes the gloominess of the end of the weekend even worse, putting my things in the little Tinker Bell suitcase that I’ve had since I was eleven. Mom and Dad bought it for me as a consolation prize when they split up.

It was the summer before May started high school. She would turn fifteen at the beginning of the school year. I was going into seventh grade, about to turn twelve that summer. May and I had just finished the waffles that Mom had made us, and then she and Dad said that we had to have a family meeting. We went to sit outside, and although it was morning, it was already hot. The elm trees were raining their twirling airplane seeds. It was Mom who said it. “Your father and I don’t think we can be together any longer. We are going to take some time apart.”

It was hard for me to understand at first what this meant. What I remember most is how hard May cried. She cried like someone had died. Dad kept trying to put his hand on her back, and Mom tried to hug her, but she didn’t want anyone to touch her. She walked away, into a corner of the yard, and curled up. I pulled out one of my eyelashes and hoped that it would count. I didn’t even wish for Mom and Dad to get back together. I wished for May to be okay.

Later that night she said to me, in a voice that was flatter than anything, “I failed.”

“What do you mean?”