Love Letters to the Dead

I nodded that I would.

“My intention was to learn how to feel again like I felt when I was eleven and my dad took me to my first concert. The Stones. I wasn’t even into music then. But something about that night, it got into me. My intention was not to hate him so much that I can’t remember that feeling, and feel it again sometime.”

“What was the feeling?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Like loving something so much that you want to create it. I mean, not it exactly, but like you want to do something. I mean, I was eleven. I don’t know if I knew that then. But I knew that it was the best night of my life.”

I wanted to hold his heart in mine and to make a safe place for it. “You’re going to create something great. You’ll be an amazing writer.”

Sky smiled at me. “Your turn,” he said. “What was yours?”

“It was sort of long. It was about this John Keats poem that we read in English, the one that ends with ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ I’ve been thinking about what that means. And then, when we were writing stuff down, I thought I understood it all of a sudden. The intention said, ‘Truth is beautiful, no matter what that truth is. Even if it’s scary or bad. It is beauty simply because it’s true. And truth is bright. Truth makes you more you. I want to be me.’”

When I finished, I was waiting for Sky to say something, but he just looked at me for a minute. “That’s pretty,” he finally answered, “but I don’t really get it. I mean, what is the truth you’re scared of?”

I shrugged. I thought somehow he’d understand. I thought somehow those words would have been enough to tell him everything I couldn’t say. “I don’t know,” I replied.

“If you want to be you, you can tell me. I want to know you.”

I wanted to tell him, but the story seemed to start such a long time ago. It didn’t fit into my mouth. It didn’t fit into my brain, even. It started when I figured out how things could get broken. When suddenly May couldn’t protect me anymore. It started when knowing that was sadder than all of the things themselves. My thoughts were spinning away, and then it hit me. She’s gone. I tried to push the reality away, but it was so heavy, I could barely breath.

“Laurel,” Sky said, “talk to me. Stop disappearing. Tell me something. Anything.”

I was spinning again. I started going backward, everything from the past blurring into the present, and through it all was the worst guilty feeling. I had to make it go away. I had to find May.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you a secret.” I leaned into him and whispered, “I’m a fairy.”

Sky looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” I said. “Watch, then, I’ll show you.” I got up and climbed onto the low wall at the edge of the balcony. “Close your eyes, and I’m going to fly off of this.” I ignored the voice in the back of my head that said, Only your sister has wings. It made me mad.

“Laurel, get down from there!” Sky said, from what felt like the distance.

“No. I want to fly. I want to fly like May,” I said, and started crying.

Sky came over and grabbed me, pulling me off the edge. I tried to hit him. I tried to hit him and hit him, but he wouldn’t let me. He held me tighter, so I couldn’t move.

And when I stopped, when I went limp in his arms, he lifted my face and said, “Laurel, I can’t do this. I can’t be with you if you’re going to be like this.”

“Be like what?” I asked. “How am I?”

“Like your sister,” he said.

“You don’t know what she was like. You didn’t really know her.” I paused. And then I asked, more quietly, “How did you know her?”

Sky just shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “You need to go to sleep.”

I was so tired all of a sudden, and so scared, and so ashamed. I could feel everything that’s bad about me and wrong and everything that I know I shouldn’t feel, all of the ways that I am angry at her rushing toward the surface. I followed him inside and lay on the couch. He brought me some water, and then he told me, “I’m going to go home.” I got the worst sinking feeling, like I’d ruined everything.

“Please don’t leave me.”

“I’m tired,” he said.

“Sky,” I said, “Sky, May wasn’t like that. She didn’t do it on purpose. She was good. She wasn’t like me.”

He just nodded. “All right, Laurel.”

“You know how good she was, right?”

Sky squinted back at me, like he didn’t know who he was looking at.

“Say yes,” I said, frantic.

“Yes,” he said. But then he added, “She wasn’t perfect.”