I am twenty years old and I am writing the first letter.
Not the last one I have a long way to go before I understand enough
to write the last one. But Elena told me to write. And I have found, over the
three years since the treatment ended and Dr. Okonkwo confirmed what
Elena had promised that I would live that the writing is the thing. The
thing that makes the living feel fully inhabited.
The treatment took seven months. The difficult week came in month
three, as predicted a week of fever and uncertainty and two nights in St.
Agatha's where the monitors made sounds I'd rather not remember and
Cael sat in the chair beside my bed holding my hand with both of his and
did not leave. My mother was there. Priya was there. Margaret drove three
hours and sat in the waiting room reading medical journals. Maya brought
snacks that none of us ate and talked, in her brisk, unsentimental way,
about everything except what was happening, which was exactly what we
needed.
I got through it. I came out the other side.
Elena knew I would.
There is a particular freedom in being believed in by the dead. They
are past the point of needing to manage your expectations. They have no
stake in protecting you from disappointment. When Elena said I would live,
she said it with the absoluteness of someone who has checked and
confirmed it and has nothing left to be cautious about. I have thought about
that confidence every day since I read it, and it has become, over time, a
kind of structural belief load-bearing, like Margaret said. Something I stand
on.
Cael plays piano now. He plays in our apartment we are together in
the unambiguous, permanent way, in an apartment on the east side of
Orvane that we chose for its large front windows and its proximity to
Weatherfield Books. He plays in the evenings, after dinner, when the light
goes that particular deep blue of winter nights in Oregon. He plays the
Chopin Nocturne, and other things he is writing something of his own now,
something slow and complicated that he says doesn't have a name yet. It
sounds, when I hear it from the kitchen where I write, like a letter in music.
Like something being said across a distance.
Priya is in her second year of medical school. She needed me two
years ago in a way she did not ask for and I was there, because Elena had
told me to be. We have not discussed how I knew to be there. Some things
are better held than explained.
Maya is in Portland. She visits on alternate weekends. She and
Margaret have struck up a correspondence that began as informationsharing and has become something more an intergenerational friendship,
built on shared love of Marco and Elena and the particular competence of
people who are not afraid of difficult truths.
My mother has been going to dinner with Margaret on Thursday
evenings. She has, in the past year, begun telling me about her days the
way people tell each other about their days when they have decided to be
known. She said to me last month, quietly, over the dishes: 'Thank you for
telling me I was brave. I've been carrying that ever since.'
Elena knew I would say it to her.
Borges the crow is still in the oak tree. I have come to believe he is
more symbol than crow at this point, which I say with affection.
The first letter I am writing is to someone I can barely see yet a
shimmer at the edge of what's possible, like something moving in peripheral
vision. A young person, I think. Someone who will be in pain and need a
map.
I don't know their name. I don't know the shape of their life. But I
know the shape of what they'll need because I needed it, and Elena saw me
clearly enough to provide it, and now I am learning to see.
It comes in flashes. Brief, incomplete, like light through water. A face.
A room. An oxygen machine humming in a particular key.
I am not afraid of it. Elena was not afraid of it, and I carry her in me
her lungs, now repaired, still hers; her compass on my windowsill; her
handwriting in the letters I have read so many times I have memorized them
the way you memorize music, not word by word but by feel.
I am writing to this person I can barely see because Elena wrote to
me, and because love, when it is strong enough, becomes structural, and
because I understand now what the letters were: not prophecy. Not magic.
An act of will. A decision made from a dying woman's desk to reach across
thirty years and give someone she loved the thing she didn't have: a map, a
compass, a voice saying You will get through this. I know you will. I have
seen it from here.
I am picking up the pen.
I am writing forward.
"Little Mirror
You don't know me yet.
That will change.
I'm writing to tell you that the next few months are going to be the most important
of your life.
Not because of what you lose. Because of what you find.'
E