"She Writes You Letters"

She Writes You letters

Olivia Fantini

This is the summer you learn to cry in transit, driving to the bus station, riding to the blue line, transferring to the green, then the red, and over the Charles looking out at the sailboats and thinking about her and how unhappy you are but how happy you believe the two of you might be. You don’t have the words for what is happening to you—it took me a long time to find them for us. You will later remember this as the worst summer of your life; but before that, back when all you could do was love her with a fistpounding insistence that ricocheted through your whole body, she bought a stamp book of famous authors and copied their quotes onto the backs of envelopes for you.

I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox —William Carlos Williams

From the all-girls camp a time zone away, sunburnt, bugbitten, chap-lipped and rope-burned, she sketches a map of the place for you. Another counselor shares your name, and whenever she hears it, something happens inside of her that she can’t explain. She is sitting on the dock in the blue flannel shirt she says still smells like you. A loon pops its head out of the water not ten feet from her, and she interrupts her sentence to describe its black and white grace. She wishes you here. She misses your mouth and the way your breath comes slow and heavy just before you fall asleep.

You read her letter inhaling the heady heartfuls. The first time you kissed, months ago, you said, Just this once—because she wasn’t coming out and you weren’t going back in—but then you couldn’t stop kissing. Afterwards both of you laughed at that, the idea that you would ever stop wanting each other. Between your bodies lived an inevitability, pulsing and warm and alive. You think you might marry her someday, though gay marriage is illegal in the state where you first told her you loved her.

Build with love. With love like lion-eyes / with love like morning rise.

—Gwendolyn Brooks

Her camp is out in the woods, ancient beautiful trees, a lake, no cell reception, only the one public phone in the counselors’ lounge. She does not call you often, though you both ache to talk to each other. All summer she only ever has five minutes during which you can hear girls talking in the background and her overly polite voice saying I’m well, how are you? She ends half-finished conversations suddenly, doesn’t say I love you too, doesn’t say much of anything at all.

You try to be understanding; you are starving for her; these phone calls are empty handfuls. When your friends criticize her for this, you blame the situation, the camp, the public phone. She will leave, and it will get better. You spend two weeks looking forward to her day off when she will at last be able to talk in private on her cell phone in town. When it finally comes, she is too busy keeping up appearances in front of the other counselors to call; and you are too ashamed of how ashamed she is of you to tell your friends. You’re punctured. You understand everyone needs to come out in their own time.

You can’t blame her, so you blame yourself. It’s a trap you are perpetually stuck inside. For a long time, I’ve been angry with you

for not realizing sooner, but that’s the same trap isn’t it, just me blaming myself.

The Trojan War / is over now; I don’t recall who won it.

—Joseph Brodsky

In the mess hall one of her campers says she doesn’t understand why gay people are protesting for marriage equality when all they do is go off and kill themselves. She isn’t there, doesn’t hear, but is told later, after the dirty plates have been made clean, smear of ketchup, comb of fork tines erased into stainless steel and steam. For a moment she is standing in her parents’ kitchen with a knife at her wrist again and everything is dark, shimmering, still—she is not alone in the kitchen, there are many others—a shared memory inside which all depressed queer girls hold the same knife, have the same wrist, stand together in the same breath-held blackness.

You have not been in this room, but you have stood with your ear pressed to the wall; you have screamed at its locked door. You have accepted razor blades in the squish of your palm to throw away, you have walked partners to therapists’ doors and thought you were doing okay, that they were the only ones who needed help.

She was only thirteen, she writes of the camper. Because a letter is a one-way street, you cannot ask her how old she was the first time she picked up that knife. You were seventeen the first time you kissed someone who wished they were dead. She says kids need to be educated, can’t be held accountable. Paragraph break. New subject.

You reread this letter many times but never find the right words for what it is you need to say. Your heartbreak won’t help her. You never think about what will help me.

Sundays too my father got up early / and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, / then with cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

—Robert Hayden

This is the summer you are always working. You volunteer at a women’s center where one day a woman walks in black and blue and another woman stands and screams at her for going back to him again, you walk around the block on your lunch break feeling light-headed and helpless, then go to your shift at the rock wall at the YMCA where you make the knot with the rhyme about the train and check children’s harnesses and catch them when they fall by accident or leap on purpose, then off to the tall yellow house on the hill to babysit for the boy whose father died in 9/11. You are always in motion. You say it is because each of these jobs pays minimum wage, but your parents are paying for the trip abroad in the fall. What you needed that summer was movement. It is easier to be upset in action—hands wrapped around a sun-hot steering wheel, eyes tracing a child’s hand and footholds on belay—it is easier to look elsewhere. You never sit down alone. When you are still, in bed or on the T, you are summoning her to you or imagining yourself away.

What would you have found if you had stopped and sat quietly inside yourself? Maybe you could have looked at the glass of a dark subway window and seen your reflection, met your own sun-sunk eyes instead of imagining her face looking back at you. You might have done something different then. You might have realized the things that used to make you happy no longer do. Later, you will learn this is a sign of depression, but this summer you are always and never really in your body, stuck in a reality you are constantly refusing.

A tornado closes the airport on the first day of second session. Bored waiting for campers, she circles with the others beneath a copse of pines as they talk about the counselor at the boys’ camp across the lake who quit five days into the summer because he couldn’t take it. She digs a toe into the dead pine needles and twists the silver ring she spins when she can’t breathe—before she came out to you on a night bridge over black-running snow-swallowing water; the cold-pierced morning you told her you felt something, the choke before she said, throat stumbling, I can’t stop thinking about you; the night you told her you would wait for her to be ready and lie to everyone until then. Beneath the trees the counselors speak too loudly, gasp-laugh, voice a bruise, boy a story. Gay. Bi technically, but you know . . . Flick of finger, empty hand, Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just. A shared look, eyes move around the circle meeting and meeting—she does not blink.

The whole conversation lasted maybe a minute, she writes, then there is a long blank space on the college-ruled notebook paper— nearly the width of your pointer finger—and in its blankness she is tongue-dry, blinking; then, I didn’t say anything. Each word is small and off balance, leaning out over an edge, letters slanted forward and looking down. And for a moment I was seriously questioning whether I could do this (come out ever). A thick inky slash where you can still feel the pressure she put into the pen. Olivia, she writes, and the O of our name is the largest letter on the page, but it is still a closed circle, an escape-less thing. I love you and I do want to be with you but She writes over the final line and into the margin, words scribbled sideways, shrinking, splotches of blue ink until there is no more room left on the paper.

Do you remember the dream where she came to visit, and you kissed her in public, and she fled into a thick crowd that suddenly materialized, and you pushed through the mess of bodies, sobbing

and calling for her to forgive you? When you woke up, you were so upset. You called and got her answering machine and didn’t know what to say—how to tell her what you needed without making unfair demands. The weave of the rug chafed at the tip of your finger as you traced its repeating pattern. When you finally summoned your voice, the machine cut you off. You pressed two to rerecord. You summarized the dream and brought a hand to your lips, spit-wet from crying, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. This is just so hard and I— The robotic voice asked if you were satisfied with your recording. You pressed two again. You didn’t know what it was you were even trying to say to her. Finally, you said you missed her, you had a dream about her, you hoped to talk soon. You hung up and cried. When she managed to call you back, she had misunderstood; she thought you were talking about a sex dream. She wanted to hear all about it. She was pressed thin and wanting comfort. You gave her your nightmare as gently as you could, but she couldn’t hold it. She said she had to go. You hung up and wished you had never called her.

You can stop editing yourself away now; stop squeezing the truth out of the story. Just tell me what happened. All of it.

You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white, / Barely daring to breathe or achoo.

—Sylvia Plath

Your college roommate has come to visit and spotted your father’s bows and arrows, and he has blown up balloons and staked them to the ground in the back yard for you to shoot. You give her the over-the-shoulder quiver and show her how to lace the arm guard. You are humming The Lord of the Rings theme song and taking turns aiming for the red globes when you hear your phone ring inside. You sprint up the carpeted stairs, arrows chunking in

your hip quiver, and find her clipped voice on the other end. She can’t do this anymore. She doesn’t have time to explain. Your latest care package is already in the mail. Outside, your roommate hits a balloon, and it snaps through the air. Over the phone pressed hard to your ear, she says, I have to go. You hang up and descend the carpeted stairs on numb legs. You are heartbroken and also, though you might not allow yourself to see it, I know you are also relieved. You walk back to the arrows and balloons and the wet grass that gives beneath your feet, and you do not tell your roommate, so you don’t have to see the look on her face a week from now when you tell her you’ve gone back to the girl who treats you this way. You knock an arrow and draw the bow. Your arms shake. Your eyes narrow. Another snap slices through the air.

Three days later, on her night off, she calls. She got your care package and read the letter you asked her to throw away. She still loves you. You already know this. You need her to apologize; instead, she dissolves. She can’t understand why you still want to be with her. She is a terrible person, she says, for what she does to you. You would be better off without her. She is crying, and because she is the one crying and feeling bad for herself, you think you cannot cry or feel bad for yourself. You comfort her. You tell her why you love her, because you still do love her. You tell her she is a good person, because she still is a good person. You forgive her, put her back together, get back together and in doing so disassemble yourself. She ended things because of the homophobia all around her, and can’t you forgive her for that? There isn’t enough room for both of your suffering, so you cover your mouth. You are good at this. You know how to take care of yourself, so it’s okay if she doesn’t.

I know you love her, but you hate her too, don’t you? You just don’t let yourself know it. You hate the part of her that is always

discarding you, always angry with you, always running from you. You tell yourself these things come from her fears, and so they should be forgiven—they aren’t real. The real her, you decide, is the one who makes you long country music playlists and winks at you through the sneeze shield in the cafeteria and whispers with trembling desperation, I love you so much, and I want you so badly. But both of them are real. Both of them are her. And the real you loves and hates her, the real you chooses her and cannot escape her.

Don’t neglect your own agency, the real you chooses not to escape her.

Together you summersault forward; time spin-swims. There are jolts of happiness, too. Electric zinging through your spine: her grainy smile on Skype, a sketch on the back of a letter, the soft belly of easy jokes, the warm curve of her husky voice that you want to curl up and sleep inside. Each of you spend that summer trying—in the sweat heat, in the chest churn, in the noise that blurs and blurs and blurs into a kind of silence. There is never enough time to mend all that’s been broken.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost

—Elizabeth Bishop

On the last letter at the end of summer, the stamp is Elizabeth Bishop and, on the back, “One Art.” Neither you nor she knew that Bishop wrote this poem for a woman who broke her heart, but I know. It is the shortest letter she sends you, a slip of pink construction paper torn unevenly and folded in thirds. The writing begins in the center of the page and then arcs up into the corner; though there is so much space left below, though there is no

margin for her to crouch inside, she creates one. In her cramped hand she writes, I’m [scratched out] extremely busy . . . I love you. But [scratched out] if we need to talk about anything . . . She has a terrible eye infection. Camp needs her everywhere all the time. She hasn’t slept more than five hours this week. On the back of the paper, written all by itself, Sorry I’m awful at taking time for us. You’re on my brain constantly. On the inside flap of the envelope, she has sketched an airplane, her landing at Logan, two stick figures thick from being traced and retraced—your embrace, a car driving off and at the end of a squiggly road NOT the end. Dream of a trip to visit you she will never take. Please don’t give up on me.

Broken sunlight filters in through lush tree branches falling on the scrap of paper in my hand. Ten years later I can still remember the way the world harmed her, and how she turned to you, and how she turned on you.

Maybe a healthier person would have fallen out of love with her as a means of self-preservation. Is that how love works for other people?

I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. You thought I came back for her, or for the truth, or for myself, but I came back for you—to see you properly for the first time, your sun-sunk eyes, your sleepless skin, your wilted lips, the teeth that you grind at night in your dreams, and your high-tide heart. I came back to sit beside you and take you in; I came back so you would not have to go through this summer alone.