Текст книги "Love Letters to the Dead"

Автор книги: Ava Dellaira

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

I wondered if I still had a crush on Mark, but I guessed that I didn’t anymore, now that there’s Sky. Still, it was comforting to see him, as if he were proof of a life that used to exist.

When he offered help, I said, “Sure,” laughing. “It’s sorta harder than it looks.”

So together, we strung up the lights, not having to talk about much other than how to get them in place on the hooks and where to run the extension cord.

When we finally climbed down from the roof, it was starting to get dark out.

“So,” I asked, “how’s college?”

“It’s good.” He smiled. “Harder than I thought. But no parents, so that’s nice. You’ll like it.” He looked me up and down. “Crazy,” he said. “You’re all grown-up.”

“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “I guess.”

I was really hoping that he wouldn’t say anything about May and how he was sorry, and, thank goodness, he didn’t. Instead, he said, “How’s your dad?”

“He’s all right. At work.” I gestured to the lights. “I’m going to surprise him with this. Thanks for the help.”

“Well,” he said, “come by if you want some cookies. Mom’s got the oven running twenty-four/seven.”

I nodded, although I knew I wouldn’t.

When Dad came home and saw the lights, he said that I’d put him in the Christmas spirit, so we went out and got a tree from the lot where we always go, in a rural neighborhood in the middle of the South Valley. The thing about traditions is that they hold up the shape of your memory. I saw May and me running up and down the aisles with our hands in our mittens, looking for the sort of tree that we thought would be left behind if we didn’t take it. I picked out the scrawniest tree again, and Dad and I laughed about it.

Then we took it home and started to decorate it. Dad put on Bing Crosby’s Christmas record—the one with “Mele Kalikimaka” on it—but as he sat down on the couch and watched me put up the ornaments, it might as well have been silent. Each one seemed to carry the whole weight of our family and what had become of it. The bells I made in first grade, with glittered foil over egg cartons and unraveling red yarn to hang them by. The Play-Doh stars, the animals, the pinecones. My favorite, which is a glass angel with May’s name etched on it. I hung that in front.

When I was putting the tinsel on, Mom called. I heard Dad’s voice strained as he carried the phone into the other room to talk to her. Then he brought it to me.

Mom said it’s strange to see it sunny and still warm at Christmastime. She said the light is bright and clear in California. I tried to picture where she was at the ranch and imagined horses with sleigh bells running around a field of palm trees. It didn’t make any sense. I told her I thought maybe I’d bake moon cookies. I thought that might make her wish she was home, because she always baked them every Christmas. The powdered sugar sounds like pushing clouds through the sifter and sticks to the cookies when they’re hot. I remember stealing them off the cooling rack with May.

“That’s great, honey. The recipe is in the brown box.”

“I know.” Then I blurted out, “When are you coming home?”

“I don’t know, sweetie.” She sounded tense. “This is good for me, okay?”

I was just quiet. I guess Mom decided to change the subject. “Dad says that you have a boyfriend now?”

“Yeah.”

Her voice turned excited, like a gossipy girlfriend. “So, tell me! What’s his name?”

“Sky.”

“Is he cute?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you being careful, Laurel?”

“Yep.”

Mom sighed a long sigh. “I mailed some presents. They should get there tomorrow.”

“Okay, thanks.” Then I asked, “Have you been to the ocean?”

“Not yet,” Mom said. And then, “Merry Christmas, Laurel.”

“Merry Christmas, Mom,” I said, and I hung up the phone.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear River Phoenix,

Have you ever heard of luminarias? They are a tradition in New Mexico for Christmas Eve. You fill lunch-size paper bags with sand from the sandbox, or if you don’t have a sandbox, you get some from one of the sand banks that are in parking lots around town for the holidays. You set up the bags outside your house, put candles in, and pull the wicks up to a flame.

I think they are most beautiful at the cemetery, where people leave them on graves. I went there alone tonight to see the ocean of light, which makes the quiet so much quieter. Each bag in the night was made by someone’s hands. Left for someone that they loved.

I brought a luminaria for May and found a place to leave it under a tree. I wanted to do something to show that she’s still glowing. We cremated her body. That feels so strange to say. We haven’t scattered the ash. I don’t want to see it. Honestly, it still feels sometimes like I’ll wake up one day and there she’ll be. That night plays in the back of my head like a movie where everything is out of focus on the screen so you can’t see what’s happening. The road races by. The river rushes on. I try to turn down the volume and just focus on the ocean of light.

Above me, the stars twinkle like they want to be as bright as the candles, but distance dims them. I bet your brother and sisters miss you tonight. I guess I just wanted to write to say hi. Or Merry Christmas. Or maybe to see if you are up there, in the sky with the stars, and if from where you are, they look brighter than a flame or a bonfire or the dawn.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear E. E. Cummings,

Christmas night is practically the most silent time that could exist. Like the whole world is made up of memory. After Dad went to bed with the tree lights still on, Sky came and I crawled out my window. We opened the presents we got each other in the dark of my driveway.

The newspaper he wrapped my present with was fragile, so I opened it carefully, not wanting to tear. What I uncovered was a heart that he had carved out of driftwood. It had my name on the back. It was perfect. He had sanded the wood down so it was smooth, but the grains don’t go away. I told him it was my favorite present I’d ever gotten. He looked proud.

I’d gotten him a book of your poetry. I made a bookmark from pretty paper with geese on it and put it in to hold the poem “somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond.” We read it in English class, and I loved it. When Sky unwrapped the book, I read the poem out loud to him.

The line at the end that says, “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” makes perfect sense to me. It means they can go anywhere inside of you, because like the rain, like water, they find places that nothing solid could pass through. It explains the way that Sky gets into me, into places that I never even knew were there. How he touches a part of me no one has ever touched. We both have secret places in us.

“Thank you,” Sky said, like he meant it.

“I got you the book,” I explained, “because the poem reminds me of you. And also because of how you said that you might want to be a writer, that time after homecoming. I know that you’d write something really different from that, but it made me think of how sometimes when you feel so much, you have to find a way to let it out.”

Sky smiled. “I hope we’ll both find the words for it.”

I had taken off my gloves and was running my hands over the heart he made me. I looked at him, and then I said something I think all the time but always swallow back in. I said, “I love you.” I could see my breath hanging on to the air. Or maybe the air was hanging on to my breath, for warmth.

Sky looked back at me, quiet. He took my hand and we started walking. All of the Christmas lights glowed softer and softer down the street, a path of light fading in front of us. We were halfway down the block when he said, “I don’t think you would love me if you knew me.”

I stopped. “I do know you.”

“If you knew everything I’ve done.”

“What do you mean?”

He was silent.

“Tell me. See if I still love you.”

Then he said, “Well, to start with, I beat someone up. That’s why I got kicked out of my old school.”

“That’s okay.”

“I really hurt him. Really bad.”

“Why?”

Sky stopped a moment. “I don’t know … There was this girl, this girl I knew. I thought he took advantage of her. And once I hit him, it’s like everything I was angry at just sorta came out.”

I nodded. This is strange, but in a way, thinking of Sky getting in a fight like that made him seem fragile. “I love you more,” I whispered, and then I was trying just to listen, to see if he wanted to say something else.

We kept walking through the night quiet. Through it and through it. But I couldn’t stop the feeling that was suddenly splitting inside me.

I said, “I’ve done bad things, too.”

“Like what? You forgot your homework?” he teased.

“No,” I said. And I think I sounded suddenly angry then. Because he stopped.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“I know she is, Laurel,” he said gently. “What happened?”

My chest got tight and heavy at once, and I started to feel spinny. I held on to his arm to stay up.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. You can tell me.”

But I couldn’t. We were driving back from the movies. And we stopped by the tracks over the river, off the old highway. And there were flowers growing out of the cracks in it. And now that I was thinking about it, I really couldn’t breathe. The river was very loud.

Sky was holding on to my shoulders. He was saying, “Laurel.” I tried to suck in the air, tried hard to get it into my lungs. Sky told me to watch my breath. So I breathed and watched it hanging on to the air for a while and didn’t think about anything.

“Laurel. Stay here with me.”

His face was clear, and all of the houses with their Christmas lights faded behind him. With his smallest hands he had opened a door in me, and I cried and cried. He held me there until I laughed a little. Like the whole thing was a joke. I wanted to forget all of it. We kept walking. Along the path of light, I saw every bulb come into focus only as we got close to it. And finally he said, he said it to me, “I love you, too.”

Yours,

Laurel

Dear John Keats,

I am looking out the window at the clouds cracking from cold, letting the silent sun in. Today it’s a new year. I bet in California on New Year’s Day, the air is velvet with warmth. I bet everything glows, and the palm trees stretch off the earth in a new morning yawn. Mom must be waking up there right now, in her new life. And I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but I hope that you’ll get it. I hate her for leaving me.

When we were younger, Mom used to have New Year’s Day tea parties for me and May and May’s friends. I never invited my own friends, because I loved belonging in May’s world. I loved how May would smile at me and drop sugars into my tea. Mom made sandwiches cut into perfect triangles and scones that she served with miniature jellies, which she would take from diners and save up for us. There were always more jellies than we needed. We never ran out of any flavor, not even raspberry. I can’t get those jellies out of my head today. Maybe my mind is holding on to them because I don’t want to think about everything else.

Last night, we all went to Kristen’s house for a New Year’s Eve party. Not a big party. A just-for-us party. And it started off perfect. Kristen lives in the foothills, up by the road where Sky and I drove that first time. You can see the city lights from there, spreading out below you like stars on the ground. Her parents are still in Hawaii, so we had the house to ourselves. We made New Year’s punch, with cinnamon After Shock and cinnamon sticks and apple juice and red food dye. It might sound gross, but it was delicious, and we all got blushed from it. Now that we’d done the rest of the break with families and all, New Year’s felt like it was a holiday made just for us.

After a while, Kristen wanted everyone to sit in a circle and give our New Year’s intentions. She knows about Eastern philosophy, and she said that when you set an intention, you can create transformation. Like the universe will listen. So we all got these papers she picked out especially for us. Mine had stars, Tristan’s had music notes, Hannah’s had horses, and Natalie’s had a design that looked like brush strokes. Sky’s had a design that looked kind of like fish and kind of like sperm, or at least that’s what Tristan joked. Sky was not really keen on this whole part of the night, since he doesn’t much like things that have to do with talking about feelings around other people. But when I watched him writing down his intention on his paper, he looked serious, like he meant what it said. The plan was we could read what we wrote out loud or not, and then we would burn our papers in the candles that were lit in the center of the circle.

Kristen went first. She said you can also set intentions for people you love. And hers was for Tristan, that he would recognize and use his true gifts and brilliance. That he would become who he was meant to be, even if it took him away from her. She said that he is a very talented musician. Everyone, including Tristan, was quiet when she read this. She threw her paper into the flame.

And then it was Tristan’s turn. He said, “My intention is to handcuff Kristen to the bed every night until I have to unlock her and put her on a plane to New York.” We all cracked up. Kristen looked a little mad that he wasn’t taking it seriously, and maybe also that he brought up handcuffs in front of everybody. But then he got more serious than he ever is about anything and said, “No, all right. This is what I really wrote.” The first part he read is a quote from his second favorite band after Guns N’ Roses, the Ramones. “‘Experiencing us is like having the fountain of youth.’ My intention is that it will always be that way, as long as we live. We’ll get old, but my intention is that we’ll never sell out. That we’ll never get too old to remember who we are right now, together.”

What they read, I think, explains the difference between Kristen and Tristan, which is that Kristen wants to grow into something, and Tristan thinks that right now, being young, is the most real thing. As Tristan put his paper into the fire, he said, “And I might add, I am in love with a beautiful woman. I pray that I will be able to survive losing her. And that she will come back to me if she can.”

Kristen tried to catch tears on her sleeve before anyone could see and said softly, “Your turn, Natalie.”

Natalie didn’t read her intention out loud, but she looked into Hannah’s eyes for a moment as she burned her paper.

Hannah said, “Okay, these are my intentions. I have more than one.” She gazed down and read them off her paper. “For my grandma to get better. For the shadows to stop growing. For people to stop being angry. For the world to be safe for love, every kind of love. For me to be one day brave enough to sing in front of everybody. For Buddy, my beautiful horse and dear friend, to drink from an eternal spring and never die.” Then Hannah kissed her paper before she burned it.

It was my turn next. I was a little drunk from the punch, I guess, but the intention seemed important, like a real intention. I wanted to read it out loud, but I couldn’t do it. I opened my mouth, but my throat got dry, so I threw the paper into the candle and watched the flame grow with it.

It was Sky’s turn last. He didn’t read his out loud, either, of course. But when he put his paper in, instead of burning inside the candle like it was supposed to, part of the paper flamed up and flew right toward me! I scooted out of the way just in time, but everyone was screaming “Fire!” Tristan threw his cinnamon punch at the paper, which blazed brighter for a moment and then burned out, and the punch soaked my dress. Sky screamed, “Shit!” But after a second we started laughing hysterically, and Tristan said to Sky, “That’s a pretty wild intention you had there, brother.” I wondered what it might have been.

My favorite part of the night came next. We danced to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” in the living room, which was full of windows that show the city star-lights. Natalie twirled Hannah, Tristan dipped Kristen, and even Sky danced with me, and although he’s not a good dancer, it didn’t matter. After a while, everyone let go of the person they were dancing with and we all just danced together. Spinning and dipping and singing like that night was all there was, all there needed to be. I’d have stayed in it forever if I could.

When the clock turned to midnight, we shouted and kissed, and do you know what? I saw Hannah throw up her hands and throw back her head, like she forgot that there was anything to be afraid of, and she pulled Natalie in and kissed her.

I kissed Sky, and he pushed my hair back from my face, which was a little sweaty from the cinnamon and the dancing. He said it in my ear, for the second time ever. “I love you.” He said it hard, like he meant it, and like maybe it hurt. It made me want to stay right there, with his voice in my ear. I would have given him every part of me if he wanted it.

When the song ended, Tristan started it over, and Kristen set the clock back three minutes, and we had another midnight, all hugging and kissing each other, and then we had another and another, until we were so tired from dancing that everyone collapsed.

I’d kept drinking and drinking the punch, and I guess by this time I must have been pretty drunk, because when the music finally stopped, the world was spinning.

Natalie and Hannah fell asleep wrapped around each other on the couch, and Kristen and Tristan went to go to bed in her room, but I wasn’t tired. I told Sky I needed some air, so we went out to the balcony and leaned over the city. “Sky,” I asked him, “what was your intention?”

He looked at me for a moment, deciding. “If I tell you mine, will you tell me yours?”

I nodded that I would.

“My intention was to learn how to feel again like I felt when I was eleven and my dad took me to my first concert. The Stones. I wasn’t even into music then. But something about that night, it got into me. My intention was not to hate him so much that I can’t remember that feeling, and feel it again sometime.”

“What was the feeling?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Like loving something so much that you want to create it. I mean, not it exactly, but like you want to do something. I mean, I was eleven. I don’t know if I knew that then. But I knew that it was the best night of my life.”

I wanted to hold his heart in mine and to make a safe place for it. “You’re going to create something great. You’ll be an amazing writer.”

Sky smiled at me. “Your turn,” he said. “What was yours?”

“It was sort of long. It was about this John Keats poem that we read in English, the one that ends with ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ I’ve been thinking about what that means. And then, when we were writing stuff down, I thought I understood it all of a sudden. The intention said, ‘Truth is beautiful, no matter what that truth is. Even if it’s scary or bad. It is beauty simply because it’s true. And truth is bright. Truth makes you more you. I want to be me.’”

When I finished, I was waiting for Sky to say something, but he just looked at me for a minute. “That’s pretty,” he finally answered, “but I don’t really get it. I mean, what is the truth you’re scared of?”

I shrugged. I thought somehow he’d understand. I thought somehow those words would have been enough to tell him everything I couldn’t say. “I don’t know,” I replied.

“If you want to be you, you can tell me. I want to know you.”

I wanted to tell him, but the story seemed to start such a long time ago. It didn’t fit into my mouth. It didn’t fit into my brain, even. It started when I figured out how things could get broken. When suddenly May couldn’t protect me anymore. It started when knowing that was sadder than all of the things themselves. My thoughts were spinning away, and then it hit me. She’s gone. I tried to push the reality away, but it was so heavy, I could barely breath.

“Laurel,” Sky said, “talk to me. Stop disappearing. Tell me something. Anything.”

I was spinning again. I started going backward, everything from the past blurring into the present, and through it all was the worst guilty feeling. I had to make it go away. I had to find May.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you a secret.” I leaned into him and whispered, “I’m a fairy.”

Sky looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” I said. “Watch, then, I’ll show you.” I got up and climbed onto the low wall at the edge of the balcony. “Close your eyes, and I’m going to fly off of this.” I ignored the voice in the back of my head that said, Only your sister has wings. It made me mad.

“Laurel, get down from there!” Sky said, from what felt like the distance.

“No. I want to fly. I want to fly like May,” I said, and started crying.

Sky came over and grabbed me, pulling me off the edge. I tried to hit him. I tried to hit him and hit him, but he wouldn’t let me. He held me tighter, so I couldn’t move.

And when I stopped, when I went limp in his arms, he lifted my face and said, “Laurel, I can’t do this. I can’t be with you if you’re going to be like this.”

“Be like what?” I asked. “How am I?”

“Like your sister,” he said.

“You don’t know what she was like. You didn’t really know her.” I paused. And then I asked, more quietly, “How did you know her?”

Sky just shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “You need to go to sleep.”

I was so tired all of a sudden, and so scared, and so ashamed. I could feel everything that’s bad about me and wrong and everything that I know I shouldn’t feel, all of the ways that I am angry at her rushing toward the surface. I followed him inside and lay on the couch. He brought me some water, and then he told me, “I’m going to go home.” I got the worst sinking feeling, like I’d ruined everything.

“Please don’t leave me.”

“I’m tired,” he said.

“Sky,” I said, “Sky, May wasn’t like that. She didn’t do it on purpose. She was good. She wasn’t like me.”

He just nodded. “All right, Laurel.”

“You know how good she was, right?”

Sky squinted back at me, like he didn’t know who he was looking at.

“Say yes,” I said, frantic.

“Yes,” he said. But then he added, “She wasn’t perfect.”

I wanted to scream that he was wrong, but I couldn’t find my voice. I kept hearing his words echo in my head as I lay on the couch watching him walk away from me. I kept hearing it all night, until I finally fell asleep, and woke up from a dream where May came back, her fairy wings shimmering and intact. She said she hadn’t died after all. She’d just flown away for a bit.

I called Sky this morning, but there was no answer.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Kurt,

Today is a day when the world turns out to be flat. January fourth. It’s a taking-down-the-Christmas-tree day. We waited too long this year, until all the pine needles were brittle and shedding so hard they fell past their snow-white sheet and onto the carpet, and finally started to show up in the kitchen. Neither Dad nor I had the heart to do it. Until I woke up this morning and I knew it couldn’t go on any longer—Dad and I looking at each other over Rice Krispies and not saying anything about the dying tree or taking it down, not saying anything about anything, me just putting my ear to the cereal bowl like I used to and making some lame joke about snap crackle pop.

So today when I woke up early, I went in my pajamas and started unscrewing the base, and by the time Dad walked out I had the whole tree over my shoulder, and it was raining its needles all over the cream carpet as I carried it to the door.

Dad asked, “What are you doing?”

“Taking down the tree.”

“Here, let me help.”

“No,” I snapped, without meaning to. “I can do it myself.”

When I got outside, I didn’t know what to do with it. So I went to the toolshed and looked around until I found a saw. I laid the tree down on the cement and started tearing through its trunk, until it was in jagged pieces. The smell of pine was overwhelming, like the tree’s heart was leaking out. I piled the series of sawed-off limbs next to the trash.

When I went inside, Dad was vacuuming up the last of the needles on the floor. The sound covered my stomach’s growl as I walked past him and into the kitchen to pour some Rice Krispies.

Dad came in and poured himself a bowl. He was wearing his work clothes, ready to go. “What do you have on the docket for your last day of vacation?” he asked, looking at me expectantly.

“Oh, just a little TV in my pajamas,” I said, giving him a weak smile. I don’t have to go back to school until tomorrow, thanks to teacher planning day.

“Where’s that boyfriend of yours?” Dad asked. “You think you might want to bring him around in daylight hours one of these days?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, my heart plunging into my stomach. I didn’t want to tell Dad the truth, that Sky hadn’t called me back in five days.

And then, as I picked up my spoon to try to force down some cereal, I saw it. One of the little plastic spiders I’d given Dad for Christmas, floating in my bowl. He must have snuck it into the cereal box. I did my best to laugh, and then I looked up at him. He was smiling so hopefully. “Gotcha,” he said, before he left for work.

When he was gone, I put on In Utero and lay down and listened to “Heart-Shaped Box”—it must have been a thousand times—and felt sick. I thought about dialing Sky’s number again, just to hear it ring. I’ve called over and over since New Year’s, and when the voice mail picks up—not even Sky’s own voice, but the generic woman’s that comes with the phone—I hang up. I haven’t left a message. I don’t know what to say.

Earlier tonight when I was trying to fall asleep, I kept thinking of the tree going in the trash, and it just wasn’t right. I couldn’t stand it being there like that. So I snuck out, and I carried the limbs, two by two or three by three, all the way through the dark neighborhood where I would walk with Sky and back behind the golf course to the ditch, and I tossed them into the water so they might get to go to the river and then, who knows, maybe to the ocean. They could become driftwood on a beach in California.

I am back in bed now, but I still can’t sleep. My hands have splinters. They smell like something stolen from the forest. I keep thinking about the day that May’s wings broke.

We were fairies, and when we were together, the magic worked and I believed in it. Every time the shadows in our room seemed to come alive, I could wake May up, and we would sneak out into the yard with new lists of ingredients for a spell. They changed with the season. Six red berries. Seven yellow leaves. A drop of honey from the honeysuckle. A hard-searched-out feather. A melted icicle. We cast spells to keep the shadow people at bay, spells to preserve the fairy gene, spells to defeat the evil witches. When I found an injured bird one day, we cast a spell to help her heal, and sure enough, when I went back to her box the next day, she was gone. She’d flown away.

But there was this part of the fairy world that I could never share with May; I couldn’t fly. I knew the rules. Only the oldest child had wings. But I kept thinking maybe there could be some exception. It was all I wanted. When Aunt Amy would take us to church, that’s what I’d pray for. When May pulled an eyelash off my cheek, I’d squint my eyes shut and wish for wings with all my might.

But when they didn’t come, I thought that if only I could see May fly, that would be the next best thing. If I saw her soaring into the sky, I would for sure be part of the magic. I would look at her naked back when we’d lie on the bed after a bath and Mom rubbed cold lotion on us. I would see her shoulder blades jutting out and imagine how she could unzip her smooth skin to reveal these transparent, magnificent, shimmering wings.

I would beg and beg to see. Just the tip of a wing. Just for a minute. But she always said she couldn’t show me. I kept begging, and one day, I must have been about seven by then, I begged so hard that I started to cry. So finally she told me that she would fly to the top of the elm tree in our yard, and after she flew up there, I could come out and see her.

“But you can’t look until I tell you. Until I’ve landed. Do you promise?”

I promised. I meant to keep the promise, too. I really meant to. But as I stood by the back door, waiting for her to call me, something so strong pulled at me. I thought maybe if I saw by accident, it wouldn’t count. So I cracked the screen door and peeped out. And I let my eyes flash toward the tree, just for a second, just in time to see her falling from high up. She was screaming, “You broke them! You broke them!”

I ran over and started sobbing. “But I didn’t even see. I didn’t even see. I didn’t look!”

“You broke them.” May was crying, too.

“I can fix them! Can’t I fix them? Isn’t there a way?”

May looked into my face. I was crying harder than she was. She wiped the tears from my cheeks. She said, “Maybe I can find a way to sew them. They might be crooked, but maybe they could work again.” And she gave me a list of things to find for sewing and said to go get started. She was going to take out the wings and have a look.

It was at that moment that I understood what the wings were. They would never work again. Because they were made up, and the magic spell that May had cast to make me believe, it was broken. But neither of us could admit it. Neither of us could stop pretending for the other. She had crutches after that for a month. As she’d hobble through our house, I kept telling her that I was sorry. But she’d tell me it was okay—her wings were working again, and by night she’d be soaring.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Amy Winehouse,

Your parents got divorced when you were nine. Your dad had been seeing another woman for almost your whole life. He said later that it didn’t even seem like the divorce affected you that much when you were a kid, but that somewhere deeper maybe it really did. You sang a song about it called “What Is It About Men.” The song talks about your destructive side that comes from a past that’s “shoved under” your bed. “History repeats itself,” you sang. I wonder if that’s true. If there’s a hurt that’s buried in us, maybe it keeps finding its way through.