Sincerely, The Dreamer

 

Ida,

 

You know I’m not one for words, right? Of course you do. You and I go way back. Remember when I knocked on the front door of your childhood home all those years ago? When your mother finally appeared, apron and all, I said to her, ‘I saw there was a little girl playing on the driveway here yesterday. She must be my age. Does your little girl want to come outside and play with me?’ And your mother smiled and undid her bun and whisked me inside and she introduced me to Cooney, your family dog, who was young and peppy back then, and I thought it was funny the way she bounced up and down the stairs like a conscious slinky. I walked slowly through that dark, flyaway hallway leading to your father’s office, which for years your family all called the computer room, before changing the name of it to the den, and I admired all the pictures that’d been framed and hung up on the walls there. Photographs of you and your mother and father and your three brothers posing all over the rocks at the beach in matching attire: White shirts, jeans, bare feet. I remember just the stretch. Those rocks were regionally iconic. Mostly, because nobody could figure out why they looked so strange, how they gripped that rusted, accordioned sheet metal reaching out like a skeleton’s arm into the deep water. Apparently, that structure, it used to guide fishing boats to shore on rainy days back before the town could afford a lighthouse. Do you remember what you were wearing when we met that first day? I do. You had on a yellow polka dot dress and your blonde hair was white like heaven, white like clouds on a clear day, and your smile was just as white, even though it was broken. You still hadn’t lost all your baby teeth but even so you had such a wonderful smile and even though it was gummy and a touch pomp-like it arrowed me and I remember feeling deep down in my toes this tingling sensation I’d never felt before, not once in my whole life. You were quiet at first. Go figure. I’d asked you if you’d like to help me dig to China in the backyard, and you shook your head no. How about if we climb the blackberry trees and pick blackberries to turn into a jam or a pie? I’d asked you instead. You looked up and smiled your beautiful, broken smile and we ran like booted angels toward Hobken’s Grove where we climbed up and over the fence and then searched and searched until we found that one gnarled tree on the westernmost acre which must have been made for us to scale, the tree bearing the low branch which was bent into the shape of a simple fishing hook. The sun was hot that day, but you must recall the shade beat it, too. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember when we heard the whine of the highway traffic and held our breath pretending as though we were underwater listening for the sound of a boat motor propelling a crew of gangly pirates along and along?  Still, I can see you perfectly now as you were then. Your bare feet, how they coiled like talons around the bark, shearing off shards of delicate, flaky wood with every step. You slipped and slid, and your dress occasionally caught a twig, causing you to twist around and dutifully unsnag the fabric from its snare. It took us a while but eventually, I found the perfect blackberry. Plump, deeply purple, the integrity of its shape unmatched. I placed that blackberry in the palm of your moist hand and you looked up at me and slung the blackberry into your mouth like it was nothing and then you closed your eyes, enjoying the taste of it, and munched and chewed away at it as a warmth overtook your cheeks and suddenly your eyes sprang open and inhaled me and I felt then that I was beheld, beheld at last, but noted this sensation as only a child might, settling for inexactitude, though I was so acutely, unreasonably enamored with that look you bestowed upon me then. From that day on, Ida, I knew I had only one real job in my life. My work would be simple: Until the day I died, I vowed to find some million different ways to earn that look again and again from you. This wasn’t any sort of unwieldy psychological theorem I conditioned my instincts to absorb and transmute to hurl around later. No. I went by feel. Pure feel. I started to consciously and unconsciously figure out what lit up those cheeks of yours. You liked to laugh. I in turn learned how to make funny faces: I spent hours in front of the mirror practicing crossing my eyes, scrunching my lips into odd constructions to look like a duck or a boar or a person who had somehow mistakenly been born with two sets of lips instead of one. A budding masochist, you giggled when I got hurt. Not, ‘hit by a car’ hurt. No: Clotheslined by the monkey bars during a game of hot lava monster; frantic from choking on a bug inside the mess hall of our make-believe castle; aborting a front flip off the swing set. That sort of hurt. We spent that whole summer picking blackberries together. Do you remember dangling our feet from the boughs clambering over the banks and washing our feet in the creek before letting them dry off in the grass? Remember racing through the woods, over the ruinous stone wall separating the wild briar from the bland farmland, tracing the paths of the wildlife there—deer, raccoons, bunnies—and hacking our way through the immense and unruly thicket which offered up some thousand score and more hiding places? We got cut up, scraped, stung, bitten—though neither of us much cared since we were kids and kids don’t care very much about anything for very long. We grieved quickly and forgave easily, and fun came thoughtlessly and seemed never-ending. The sun was our only constant: A topic of conversation, a guide, an antibody that we conjured from the spirit realm to heal the broken corners of our own bizarre, little world. We watched it mend old barns, lighting up the vines covering its doors and eaves like bulbs hung on a wire at a wedding ceremony—marveled at how they packed a vibrant almost holy punch, those beautiful blips of glowing, bright green. Who could forget Tuscara’s Grove from the vantage of The Plateau: A tableau of hills blanched in tawny browns and pale ambers, bewitched by almost impossible symmetry. You taught me how to whistle up there. The winds carried our whistles which were faint and tentatively melodic like nascent rivers bearing into lacking pastures the petals of wildflowers. We tuned new tones and introduced a new kind of music to complement the birdsong and the always-rustling fern out there. Do you remember catching me on the day I almost collapsed the dead portico overlooking the glen? There, where I nearly hurtled headlong into that crag which we assumed must have bored miles deep into the earth into an underwater aquifer; into a subaqueous cave that we imagined nurtured the sort of algae and microbials that lit up and diffused their neon hues all throughout the water, drowning those glorious caverns in brilliant florescent tints—turquoise and aquamarine. Do you remember describing to one another the pictures we dreamed up inside our heads? You took your cues from the patterns of the pastoral, often mentioning the hexagonal eyes of hives, the golden-swooning palates of those tallgrasses in the savannahs, the gluttony of all those early evening shadows spraying up and out from the root beds of old trees before they got to gobbling up the forest floor at dusk. I meanwhile stretched my neck with fondness toward the sky. Yes, the ceaseless waltz of the clouds and the sky was the show for me. We used to draw our own lines between the stars at night, sketching fawns and crowns and bludgeoned geometries from one celestial body to the next with our fingertips leveled against the heavens. You must remember what you said to me when I asked you whether you believed in God? You said, How else could the sky and the earth cooperate? You made it sound so simple—maybe anodyne is the right word—but I still didn’t get it. Which I told you. And so, you explained to me it must be a miracle for two things which are so utterly different to grace one another, day in and day out, with such undisputed friendliness. Do you remember?—Screw it. Here’s what I remember. I remember holding hands for the first time, there in the fort we built out of sticks and mud on the same summer night you found out your mother was pregnant again. You were scared and excited about the possibility of having another sister or brother around, but I assured you it would be wonderful. It would be like having me around, I said to you. Who knows, maybe the two of you will end up being even closer than we are. But you shook your head. This is different, you said as you nudged me, snatching a breath of wisdom from out your lungs that couldn’t possibly have belonged to you. This is much too different, you told me.

 

It felt right, reaching out for your hand after you said that. Your hand was dirty from the dirt and warm with your blood and even though it was the first time we laced our fingers together it felt as though we had been doing it for decades. I remember I had a lot on my… a lot I couldn’t seem to tell you about. In fact, in the thirty-three years we’ve known one another, there’s only one secret I’ve ever kept from you, Ida. This is it: I wanted so, so badly to tell you there, on that night, inside that fort, underneath the invincible turning of the stars, that I would hold your hand for our version of forever if you desired it. It’s romantic, and it’s true. And though I didn’t have the pluck to say it then—twenty-seven years later—thank goodness you did. Yes, thank goodness you did, my darling.

 

Sincerely,

 

The Dreamer