She told me she kept all the letters.
She still has them, maybe in a box somewhere
Under the bed, the pages yellowed and fading.
And maybe they promised that when they were old
They would sit down and read them together
And laugh at their younger selves and how
She still can’t decipher his handwriting
After all these years.
And he’ll imagine the scribbles into the words
He wrote in a fit of long distance love
And read them aloud to her in the same voice
He used to proof-read
Before he sealed them with a kiss
And put them in the mail
Twelve-hundred miles
Louisiana to Upstate New York.
He was from down south
A rebellious, liberal genius
In a world of bigoted racists
Living in another frame of mind.
She was from New York,
Another time, another life,
But the same frame of mind
As the boy she met by some bizarre coincidence
In the city of angels
Which may or may not have guided them
Which may or may not have wished them on
Which may or may not have taken him away.
They met once
But it was enough
To keep those handwritten letters flowing back and forth
Across states, passed along by people oblivious
To the potential that they held in their hands
Getting heavier with each crossing.
Addresses changed, parents’ homes to college dorms
Just as far away, but just as close to their hearts
As they had been in high school.
And when they met again, they felt their last letters in their hands
And realized letters weren’t sufficient any more
And the packages of potential, carried across states by strangers, finally passed
From hand to hand
As hand and hand connected
And pulled them across states
To meet in the middle at an alter
And vow to never part again.
Papers piled on top of letters,
Two new birth certificates, two children’s drawings
As indecipherable as his handwritten scribbles
But just as meaningful.
And she looked on as the boys grew up, two of the only angels
That she ever believed in.
Because who can believe in angels
When they take one of yours away
The one you met in their city
The one who flew letters across miles and miles
Just to lift your spirits
Into a kind of heaven that few people ever know
Until it’s taken away
Too young to die
Too young to leave her
Too young to leave his kids
Who are old enough to feel the grief
But too young to fight it.
And they cry as the doctors unplug the machines
Leaving the broken mind to float away
And she comforts them
Because she knows no comfort herself
And she doesn’t know what else to do with herself
Except get her kids ready in the morning
And go to work with the fake smile she’s keeps forgetting to take off before she goes to bed
Because now there’s no one there to remind her.
And she still has the letters, sitting in a box under her bed
Yellowed and crumpled.
She told me she hasn’t gone through them.
But why would she,
When she now has no one to help her decipher the scribbles,
No one to sit on the bed beside her, an arm around her shoulder
To recite them from memory
As if he wrote them yesterday.
No one to laugh as she looks over the reading glasses that she never needed
Twenty years ago
And whisper in her ear
That the decade old, faded, unreadable pencil mark
Still meant “I love you”
After all these years.
A true story about my friend's parents. They met in high school. He died of a stroke this year at age 43.