Alicia,
Do you remember how it was before things fell apart? How we had a car, and a house five blocks from downtown, and we thought that we were the richest people in the world? How the streets had been paved and not cracked, and how when you walked out the door you could hug your neighbors, and they’d beam at you in the most wonderful way before you left for work? How Ms. Dee’s freshly baked bread smelled on a winter morning, and you could buy extra knowing you’d have a home to tuck it away in? How the heart of town used to bustle with people on a warm afternoon, how we could just saunter up to the ice cream parlor and talk to old Jim, who would tell us stories of traveling abroad to faraway countries like Japan and France and India? How we used to talk about traveling to those countries before settling into our careers, back when a career meant something? How young and naive we were. How foolish, I guess.
Alicia, do you remember the things we used to say to each other? We used to tell each other that we’d raise a family together, that we’d die together someday. You used to say you’d never settle to be a housewife, and I’d say I’d never settle to be an office drone, and we had that big dream of selling pottery by the beach and we’d save enough money to make it happen someday. You used to say that politics was stupid, and so were taxes, and we had laughed before things crumbled, and I used to say that we’d die before we ever got good healthcare. And even when we were starving, you clung to my hand as we climbed through all those wreckages, crossed all those rivers, and believed in us even when I had lost hope. I wish it all could have happened, somehow, even though we both knew it would never happen.
Alicia, your hair used to be so beautiful. It cast a spell on me from the day we met down by City Hall in San Francisco, before it was graffitied and overrun by thugs, and your hair had been full and obsidian and sparkling against the late afternoon sun, not cracked and matted and falling out, and it had looked so wonderful against your plain yellow dress. And I had bumped into you in a hurry, and you had said there’s no hurry, and we had talked and talked until the sun turned a warm red and finally dove into the sea and still, even after the sun was long gone, we couldn’t take our eyes off one another. Do you remember that, Alicia?
I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you or our unborn child, dearest. I tried so hard to scavenge food for us out of the withered fields, find scraps in abandoned homes, and it still wasn’t enough. Your skin was so pale, and your cheekbones so hollow, and your eyes. Oh, your beautiful brown eyes. They held so much anguish. I wish it didn’t have to be you who bore the burden, I wish it had been me somehow, I wish things could have been better and food hadn’t run out and we hadn’t been forced to leave town out of hunger and we hadn’t gotten lost in the wilderness and I hadn’t had to leave to forage and the snow hadn’t come and sucked the warmth right out of you and Rupert, I wish it had been me who had succumbed to the earth and not you, light of my life. But I know that you would have wished the same for me, and fate made me bear the burden of living. So I have to keep walking--even though it’s so hard to keep walking without you--even though there are days I feel like I can’t go on. Maybe one day happier days will return, and I’ll show people around me your heart locket, and tell them I loved an angel, lovely and kind and joyful, and fate was cruel but our love was as beautiful as it was short.
Forgive me if this letter never reaches you. I promise I’ll keep it safe until the day we meet again.
Yours,
George
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What Nobody Warns You About Growing Up
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