Love Letters to the Dead

Sky stopped a moment. “I don’t know … There was this girl, this girl I knew. I thought he took advantage of her. And once I hit him, it’s like everything I was angry at just sorta came out.”


I nodded. This is strange, but in a way, thinking of Sky getting in a fight like that made him seem fragile. “I love you more,” I whispered, and then I was trying just to listen, to see if he wanted to say something else.

We kept walking through the night quiet. Through it and through it. But I couldn’t stop the feeling that was suddenly splitting inside me.

I said, “I’ve done bad things, too.”

“Like what? You forgot your homework?” he teased.

“No,” I said. And I think I sounded suddenly angry then. Because he stopped.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“I know she is, Laurel,” he said gently. “What happened?”

My chest got tight and heavy at once, and I started to feel spinny. I held on to his arm to stay up.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. You can tell me.”

But I couldn’t. We were driving back from the movies. And we stopped by the tracks over the river, off the old highway. And there were flowers growing out of the cracks in it. And now that I was thinking about it, I really couldn’t breathe. The river was very loud.

Sky was holding on to my shoulders. He was saying, “Laurel.” I tried to suck in the air, tried hard to get it into my lungs. Sky told me to watch my breath. So I breathed and watched it hanging on to the air for a while and didn’t think about anything.

“Laurel. Stay here with me.”

His face was clear, and all of the houses with their Christmas lights faded behind him. With his smallest hands he had opened a door in me, and I cried and cried. He held me there until I laughed a little. Like the whole thing was a joke. I wanted to forget all of it. We kept walking. Along the path of light, I saw every bulb come into focus only as we got close to it. And finally he said, he said it to me, “I love you, too.”

Yours,

Laurel





Dear John Keats,

I am looking out the window at the clouds cracking from cold, letting the silent sun in. Today it’s a new year. I bet in California on New Year’s Day, the air is velvet with warmth. I bet everything glows, and the palm trees stretch off the earth in a new morning yawn. Mom must be waking up there right now, in her new life. And I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but I hope that you’ll get it. I hate her for leaving me.

When we were younger, Mom used to have New Year’s Day tea parties for me and May and May’s friends. I never invited my own friends, because I loved belonging in May’s world. I loved how May would smile at me and drop sugars into my tea. Mom made sandwiches cut into perfect triangles and scones that she served with miniature jellies, which she would take from diners and save up for us. There were always more jellies than we needed. We never ran out of any flavor, not even raspberry. I can’t get those jellies out of my head today. Maybe my mind is holding on to them because I don’t want to think about everything else.

Last night, we all went to Kristen’s house for a New Year’s Eve party. Not a big party. A just-for-us party. And it started off perfect. Kristen lives in the foothills, up by the road where Sky and I drove that first time. You can see the city lights from there, spreading out below you like stars on the ground. Her parents are still in Hawaii, so we had the house to ourselves. We made New Year’s punch, with cinnamon After Shock and cinnamon sticks and apple juice and red food dye. It might sound gross, but it was delicious, and we all got blushed from it. Now that we’d done the rest of the break with families and all, New Year’s felt like it was a holiday made just for us.

After a while, Kristen wanted everyone to sit in a circle and give our New Year’s intentions. She knows about Eastern philosophy, and she said that when you set an intention, you can create transformation. Like the universe will listen. So we all got these papers she picked out especially for us. Mine had stars, Tristan’s had music notes, Hannah’s had horses, and Natalie’s had a design that looked like brush strokes. Sky’s had a design that looked kind of like fish and kind of like sperm, or at least that’s what Tristan joked. Sky was not really keen on this whole part of the night, since he doesn’t much like things that have to do with talking about feelings around other people. But when I watched him writing down his intention on his paper, he looked serious, like he meant what it said. The plan was we could read what we wrote out loud or not, and then we would burn our papers in the candles that were lit in the center of the circle.