Love Letters to the Dead

He laughed. “I love that.” It was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Well, no need to wait for college, right?” He turned to Hannah and said, “Are we going to do a song together, or what?”


Hannah got a spark in her eyes. This was maybe going to be the first time that she would sing for people, other than me or Natalie. She swallowed and nodded. We followed Tristan as he went to get his guitar and set it up in the living room and pulled up a stool for Hannah to sit on. “What do you want to sing?” he asked. Hannah wiped her palms on her dress and thought about it for a long minute. She said, “‘Sweet Child O’ Mine,’” which was all of our New Year’s song. Tristan grinned and started right away with the first strings of the guitar that vibrate through your body. Hannah’s voice shook for a moment, coming out quiet, but as she kept singing she got louder and louder, until the song was pouring out of her. She looked at Natalie as she sang. Tristan looked at Kristen as he strummed the guitar hard and mouthed along with Hannah. And I looked at Sky.

I grabbed his hand and whispered under the music, “I really want to kiss you.”

He took my face in his hands, and it was a different kiss than it’s ever been. I didn’t feel like a light that he was crowding toward anymore, like a street lamp, or even like a moon. I felt like we both had the sun inside of us. Our own ways to stay warm. So when our bodies came together, it was the hottest thing I’d felt.

As Tristan and Hannah got to the end of the song, we all bounced up and down and shouted along, “Where do we go now?” Hannah was beaming, and Tristan played the end again. I can’t describe how it felt, being there right then, so close together, on the edge between who we were and who we wanted to be.

Sometimes when we say things, we hear silence. Or only echoes. Like screaming from inside. And that’s really lonely. But that only happens when we weren’t really listening. It means we weren’t ready to listen yet. Because every time we speak, there is a voice. There is the world that answers back.

When I wrote letters to all of you, I found my voice. And when I had a voice, something answered me. Not in a letter. In a new way a song sounded. In a story told on a movie screen. In a flower shooting through a crack in the sidewalk. In the flutter of a moth. In the nearly full moon.

I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth. I know you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.

Yours,

Laurel





EPILOGUE


Dear May,

I had a dream about you last night. I watched you walk on the tracks, your moonlit arms balancing you like thin white wings. I saw you turn to look back at me. I felt your eyes catch mine. I saw you fall. And I saw you hovering there, midsky, like you were standing on air. I kept begging myself to move my feet. But I couldn’t. They were stuck. I kept thinking you were waiting for me. There was still a moment. If I could just walk forward, I could reach out and take your hand and pull you back across the tracks to the land. But my body was frozen. I tried with all my strength, but lifting my foot was as hopeless as shoving a mountain. It was the most awful feeling. I was in a panic, trying to get to you.

Then I heard you whisper, “Laurel,” as you turned your back to me. “Look.” And that’s when I saw it. I saw you take your wings out. I saw them, paper-thin but stronger than anything, glittering like water. They weren’t broken. They were carrying you into the sky. You got smaller and smaller, until you turned into a pinpoint of light, same as a star. And I knew you were there. And everywhere.

When I woke up, I went into your bedroom. Aside from your clothes that I borrowed (but always put back) and your Nirvana poster I tore off of the wall (sorry), everything was just where it was the last night we left for the movies. I sat on your bed for a moment. And then I took some of your Mexican candles to burn in my room, and your collection of seashells that I wanted to spread on my desk. This time, I wasn’t afraid of moving things and making new places for them. My room is pretty much the same as it’s always been, too, ever since you moved out of it when you got to high school. And I want it to be more like who I am now. I want it to have some pieces of you, together with other things, like the Janis Joplin record Kristen gave me before she left for New York, and the heart that Sky carved me for Christmas, and the glow-in-the-dark stars that have been there since we were kids.

When I was looking on your bookshelf, I found an E. E. Cummings book. You had a bookmark in it, the one you’d made yourself in third grade. May was written in blue glue glitter, laminated over. I read the poem you’d marked, and really, it was so beautiful I started to cry. I loved the whole thing, and the last line was perfect: i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart).