Love Letters to the Dead

In the second sentence of your suicide note you said it would be pretty easy to understand. It is and it isn’t. I mean, I get how it goes, what the story is and how it ends. Becoming a star didn’t make you happy. It didn’t make you invincible. You were still vulnerable, furious at everything and in love with it at once. The world was too much for you. People were too close to you. You said it in one sentence I can’t get out of my head: I simply love people … so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad. Yes, I understand.

I feel it, too, when I see Aunt Amy rewinding the answering machine, playing a Jesus-man message from months ago as if it were new. When I see Hannah running over in her new dress to meet Kasey, all the while looking over her shoulder at Natalie. When I see Tristan, playing air guitar to one of your songs, when what he wants is to write his own. When I see Dad, coming over to kiss my head before bed, too tired to worry about where I go at night. When I see the boy in Bio who fills the always-empty seat beside him with a stack of books. Everything gets in. I can’t stop them.

So yes, in a way, it’s easy to understand. But on the other hand, it makes no fucking sense, as you would say. To kill yourself. No fucking sense at all. You didn’t think about the rest of us. You didn’t care about what would happen to us after you were gone.

It’s been three days since Sky broke up with me. I couldn’t bear to see him at school the next day, or the day after that, so I told Dad I wasn’t feeling well and stayed in bed, burying myself under the blankets. When Natalie and Hannah called to check on me, I texted them back that I had the flu. I wasn’t actually sick, but I drank some NyQuil from the medicine cabinet and slept away the days. Dad cooked me Lipton chicken noodle soup every night when he got back from work, which is what Mom used to make me when I was home sick. It was so sweet, him trying like that, but it only made me feel worse. Tonight, when I was still loopy from the cold medicine that I didn’t really need, I asked him for a lullaby. He sang “This Land Is Your Land.” I closed my eyes and tried to travel in my mind to the feeling that I’d had as a kid when he sang it.

But I couldn’t go anywhere, except back to the night that May died. And to the nights before that—what it was like waiting for her to come back. There’s something wrong with me. I can’t say what it is.

I was frozen still when May fell. The policeman found me there the next day, just looking down at the water—that’s what they say. I don’t remember. When they asked, “What happened to your sister?” I didn’t answer. They found her body in the river.

Dad never pushed me, but Mom asked all the time, wanting to know what we’d been doing at the bridge, why we had gone there, why weren’t we at the movies like we were supposed to be. I think Mom was mad at me for not being able to explain. I think that could be why she moved to California and stopped being my mother. I think she thought it was my fault. And I think she’s right. If she knew the truth, she’d never come back.

One day just before she left, I remember Mom was wiping off the counter after breakfast. She looked up and said, “Laurel, did she jump?”

“No,” I said. “The wind blew her off.”

Mom just nodded back at me, her eyes teary, before she turned away.

After Dad went to bed tonight, I lay awake. I tiptoed down the hall and started to turn the handle of the door to May’s room. But then I turned it back. I was afraid, suddenly, of how I knew she wouldn’t be there. Of how quiet all of her things would seem, staring at me just as she’d left them.

Nirvana means freedom. Freedom from suffering. I guess some people would say that death is just that. So, congratulations on being free, I guess. The rest of us are still here, grappling with all that’s been torn up.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Amelia Earhart,

I keep thinking of you, having flashes of what it would have been like in your plane that morning before you disappeared. You’d already flown twenty-two thousand miles of your journey across the world, with only seven thousand to go over the nearly empty stretch of the Pacific. You’d meant to make it to a tiny island called Howland. From the air, its shape would be hard to tell apart from the clouds.