Love Letters to the Dead

But I’m not starting at the beginning. This was Sky and me breaking up. His voice kept getting carried off by the wind. I was looking at the birds in their trees, thinking of how fast their hearts beat and wondering if their fast-beating hearts keep them warm. I might sneak out right now just to get to cry out loud.

When I came home from school today, our second day back from break, there was a letter taped to the gate with my name on it. It was a strange thing to find, but I knew it would be from Sky. I sat down on the bench outside and tore it open. I think part of me was still hopeful, in spite of myself. And it started out like a love letter, too, the old-fashioned kind. All about how I am different from other girls. And so special, et cetera. And even about how he loves me. He said he decided to leave a letter like this because he hasn’t been sure what to say to me in person. He said that all he’s wanted is to know me, but on New Year’s he realized that neither of us is ready. He said that I have to take care of myself, and he can’t take care of me. He said, You’ll be much happier, without me.

When I read that, it was like I landed with a slam in the world that I had been trying not to live in—the world where he was really leaving. It’s a lot like something you said in your suicide note. You said that your daughter’s life would be so much happier without you. I can tell you that you are wrong. It’s a terrible excuse from someone who can’t bear to be around. It’s a bad way to make yourself feel better when you know you are leaving someone who doesn’t want you to go. Someone who needs you.

After I read the letter, I lost all sense. I had to see his face. So I got up from the bench and started to walk to his house. I brought my phone and kept trying to call him. When no one answered, I walked the whole two and a half miles, crying all the way.

I knocked on the door. I wasn’t seeing straight, until his mother answered, in her frayed satin bathrobe, a bun coming undone in whispers. Her face shocked me, and I stopped sobbing. It was so soft, the way she looked, and so kind. Her eyes said she understood everything. But before I could get a word out, Sky came. He said, “Mom, go inside. I’ll be back in a little bit.” He shut the door and stepped onto his porch, now decorated with sparkling plastic snowflakes.

I had had so much in my head, but suddenly, there was nothing to say. Sky’s body was tense, and his eyes didn’t want to look at me. Finally he said, “Come on, I’ll drive you home.” So I followed him, and on the way to the car, he said, “You understand, right? You can’t come here anymore.”

That’s when I started crying again. I cried the whole way back in his truck that smelled like thousand-year-old leather. His truck where we first touched. Your voice was playing low on the stereo. Aqua seafoam shame …

When we got to the golf course near my house, I said, “Stop.”

He glanced over at me like he didn’t want to, but I said it again. “Sky, stop!” Then I said, more quietly, “I just want to go on one more walk. You can’t just never talk to me again.”

So he parked. And we got out. I remembered the golf course with the geese and the time we fell down laughing there. The geese were gone and the leaves were gone, and there were just the blackbirds now, shawling their trees. The tears wouldn’t stop. I wanted to find him.

“You said you love me,” I said.

“I know.” I could see Sky’s face start to freeze over.

“Then why would you leave me?” I shouted.

“I don’t know. I can’t watch you like this. Sometimes it’s like you disappear. It’s not just that you cry so much. It’s that you cry and I don’t know what you’re crying about. And you won’t tell me. I can’t fix it.”

I was sinking. All I could do was cry harder. The thing is, Sky was right. I wondered if I could have told him, if he would have stayed. But I knew it was too late. The damp was under my clothes. The moon in its almost circle shape was under the clouds. When I looked up at Sky, I couldn’t see his face. Just a shadow.

There was something shattered in me, and now he saw it. No one could fix it. I had tried to be brave like May, to be bright and free and a bolt of stars, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t. He’d seen it. He had opened the door to the underneath part of it where I was just her little sister, who couldn’t save her or anything. Bad and wrong and it was all my fault.

All at once, the blackbirds flew off the trees. Like there was a thing that told them when to go. To some secret place in the sky, before they would have to come back down and find new trees. I think I went with them, but I wasn’t sure if I would ever land again.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Kurt, Judy, Elizabeth, Amelia, River, Janis, Jim, Amy, Allan, E.E., and John,