June Letters
Some things are better said in writing. Not because they’re easier in writing, but because writing gives them the permanence they deserve.
Writing || Letters || Communication || Love
Iwrote three letters in June. Not typed — handwritten, in the notebook I had started using for non-debate things, the one that had started as a record of the year and become a record of myself. I wrote them not because I couldn’t say these things out loud — I was, by June, significantly better at saying things out loud than I had been in September — but because some things deserved the weight of having been written, the specific permanence of ink on paper. The first letter was to Abuela Elena. I told her what the year had been and what she had given me — not just the tin box and the story of Catalina, but the specific quality of her presence, the way she had arrived and looked at me and said you look like someone carrying a river and had begun, from that first moment, to help me put it down. I told her about the state championship and the February porch and Jamie’s mother’s tea and Tyler coming out in the hallway. I told her I kept the tin box on my desk and that I would use it the way she had told me to — not as a reminder of loss but as a tool for giving, a thing to pass forward at the right moment to the right person. I sealed the letter and mailed it. She wrote back in three weeks — a full page, in Spanish, in the handwriting I had been reading since I was old enough to read. She said: You have made me very happy, Alejandro. Not because everything is perfect, but because you are living honestly. That is everything.
The second letter was to my dad. I left it on the kitchen counter on a Wednesday morning before school, under his coffee cup. It was shorter than Elena’s — Dad and I had talked enough by June that most of the important things had been said out loud. The letter was for the things that were easier to write: the specific gratitude for Christmas Eve and the candle and the mi hijo. The gratitude for invite them to dinner and for the lamb and for asking about Jamie with the casual regularity of a parent who had integrated a new fact and was comfortable with it. The gratitude for being exactly the parent I had been afraid he wasn’t. I came home that afternoon and he was in the kitchen starting dinner and he looked at me when I came in with the warm, bright, proud eyes. He said: “The letter was good.” I said: “I meant it.” He said: “I know.” He went back to the cooking. That was it. That was everything. Carmen Reyes expressing complete acceptance through continued activity in the kitchen. Perfect.
The third letter was to Jamie. I left it at their apartment door on a Saturday morning, walked to their building before they were awake and slid it under the door, and then walked home through the June Portland morning which was warm in the specific way that Portland mornings were warm only in June, the tentative warmth of a place that had finally committed to the season. The letter said: I’ve been thinking about what I want to tell you, and I’ve decided that writing is the right form for it because I want it to be permanent and something you can come back to. So: thank you for asking me on day one if I actually believed the resolution. Thank you for making me argue from life instead of from framework. Thank you for the Saturday coffees and the Thursday arguments and for saying the answer is yes before I asked the question. Thank you for being patient while I got here. I’m here now. Completely. And wherever next year takes us — the distance is just geography. The real thing travels better than that. — Alex. They texted me at eight-thirty: three words. I’m here too. Then: Also you could have just said this.) Then: But the letter is better. Keep it. I was already keeping it. I kept everything this year that was worth keeping, which was most of it. Which was almost all of it.