For You, Gideon

Dear Gideon,

(can I still call you Giddy?)

I was never good at letters, but if anyone would know that it would be you. My fingers are frozen cold, I don’t know how to make a fire, and yet I’ve still managed to write a dozen drafts of this. My cat (yes, I got a cat…thought you’d find it funny) is currently hurling herself around in them. Should I just jump in as well and ditch this whole thing? I still don’t know where to start.

You always knew exactly what you wanted to say. And you never minded the possibility that your words might cost you a friend. God, sometimes I hated you for that (so did the chefs at crappy restaurants, my little brother, and anyone naïve enough to bring up politics in your earshot…) I was not given the luxury of a broken filter like you. Mine was always catching words I should have said. So please, just bear with me while I resort to the safety and non-commitment of parenthesis. I promise, I’ll get everything out.

After we finished school, I refused to leave the soft palms of adolescence. Only occasionally could you pull me out. Everyone was moving forward and you didn’t want to leave me behind. But I was too scared to move forward, and too scared to commit to life. Once death dug its claws into my father’s arrhythmic heart, my reclusiveness grew. I felt like half of a person before, and now it was as if I became a pebble stuck in someone’s shoe. I opted in for experiences that forged illusory moments of adulthood and stability: morning runs, our living-room restaurant nights cooking tender steaks and golden-crisped potato pancakes. We’d laugh from fire-escapes at drunk people falling into street side trash hills, and I’d wade in the waters of your calm. Adulthood is merely tricking yourself into thinking you have it all “together,” and I understood that fairly quickly.

The flourishing Spring months following my Dad’s death simply felt wrong. Things shouldn’t be so alive in the midst of death. It felt like one big misunderstanding that the world was moving along and didn’t halt on its axis. So on days that I insisted on staying inside, I’d watch you write in your little green notebook. I wasted the resplendent light of Sundays pacing back and forth, moving around furniture and nibbling on anxieties as you tucked yourself into its spine. I admired your wholeness, but I envied your stability. You must be going crazy by now trying to see where I’m going with this. If you’ve made it this far, thank you.)

Remember those get-togethers my parents used to hold in our cabin on Lake Hortonia? I had taken you there once or twice, but my mother decided to meet there the following winter. I’m still not sure why. Everything in February is completely inanimate. No family-canoes or cannonballs in the water. We were only in the company of the occasional goose and beer-bloated ice fisher swaddled in wool. The air felt low and heavy, and my Moms’ eyes were fogged over like the surface of the lake. A place that once carried sun-splotched memories of a blessed childhood now calcified the fraying ropes of my family’s relationship after loss. The way my Mom responded to her mortality was in highlighting my flaws. We were different people, really. And my insecurity drove her mad. She was filled with the anger of a woman that wanted to be eternally loved, and you could give that to me.

On that train back to New York, I spent hours rolling over the new dynamics of my family although it had already been a year. My Mom’s emotional departure. Feeling lost. Missing Dad. Wanting to run. I’d register all of this like swallowing rocks, until sleep crept over my eyelids and I succumbed to a limp, neck-twisting nap. When I awoke, maybe just half an hour later, there was a woman sitting right in front of me. Our train had stopped somewhere in New Hampshire, and the sun dipped shyly behind the connecting hills. She was ethereal; long-limbed, glowing, and stuck in an infinite gaze. As if it were still a dream, she pushed a notebook across the table. It looked exactly the same as yours, but with a black cover. I couldn’t tell you how old she was, or even the color of her hair. Everything about her felt like a fleeting image, a face reflected along moving water.

After I accepted the notebook, the strangest thing occurred. She stretched her mouth open in such extremity, like the gaping bell of a saxophone! The entire train car became a vessel consumed by this animalistic wail. One that I never thought I would hear in my life but struck some cord from deep within. An emotional, piercing scccreeeeeech and raaaahhhhh that crystalized your entire body before shattering it like a thin plate of ice.

Her screams were nearly lingual. No words were spoken, but the sound felt like a language. It translated to loneliness. Loss. Experiences of pain and hopelessness washed over my body like high tide stretching past a beach and flooding the hot street. The sound embodied the weight of being human and release of restriction. All of these feelings laid deep inside of me for years, but this was the first time they felt understood. She was handing me the notebook, not just as an act of strange kindness, but for some other reason that I knew would undoubtedly pull apart the fist of adolescence I was enclosed in.

Of course- we were in a fight, so I didn’t tell you about any of this. I was no longer emotionally available to love you, and we must have broken up just a few weeks later. Those days seemed to drag like a bicycle caked in mud. You were another person leaving me, but this time it was my fault. I told you I hated you. That’s fine, you’d respond. You knew I was too fragile for you to respond with biting words. So eventually, we peeled each other off of our lives like sticky band aids glued to scabs. Seven days once seemed like seconds in a dream, and suddenly they were indescribable: Sundays were Mondays, and the morning was nighttime. The sun was agonizing, worse than rainy days now.

As the worst winter in New York passed through, I was pushed like a misbehaving dog back into my cage. As much I as I wanted to close the fist of avoidance around me, my eyes continued to pull my focus to the notebook, and it begged for my attention.

I began writing in it through the darkest months and was so busy nestled in its pages that I barely noticed the horribly beautiful Spring bloom across the city. Every time that I flipped a new page, the stranger’s cry tightened around my skull before releasing its grip.

It would have been easier to have your support. But my true alone-ness resulted in hundreds of stories: poems about loneliness, new worlds, my own aberrant ramblings. The very last story I wrote (of course, it was about you) was submitted into a contest and won me a large, unexpected prize. You know that my Dad was an adventurer, and I now had the chance to be one as well.

I’ve seen the stretching Salt Flats in Bolivia, danced with drunken restaurant owners in the dipping streets of Hyéres, stayed on milk farms in the mountains of Austria, and harvested teas in the green waves of Singha Park (something he always wanted to do.) I bathed the old burns of my passivity in the warmth of Mediterranean water.

I fell in love with each new landscape, because, in its beauty, I would find my Dad: a thin-lipped smile tucked away in the mountains, and his booming laughter echoing through an empty sky. But on occasion, when I would sit silently for quite some time, I would see a glimpse of you.

I’m back here again. I’ve come full circle. Funny how life works. The lake looks exactly the same as it did when I was younger. (Maybe that’s one of the things we find most beautiful in nature, nostalgia.) I’m inside of the cabin, but my breathe is as thick as cigarette smoke, and my feet are now ice blocks.

I am determined to have this letter reach you, so I’ve written it in the little black book and sent it back to your old address. I believe that if it is magical enough to have done so much for me, that it might make its way to you. I know you’re mad that it’s taken this long (I’m hoping that you’re mad… rather than nothing at all), but I think now that you’ve read this you might understand. I am ready for you to understand now.

Have this black book. I am giving you a piece of myself that I will never take back, and a fragment of my heart that you can keep. Do what you will with it, you are the only person I have ever given it to.

The only thing that I ask is that, if you might read all of this and still find a little space in the corner of your heart for me, that you might meet me here. And we can build a fire.

M