The Letter Not Sent

This is background crap for the book I have on here called The Color of Light. Not really meant to be a stand-alone piece. Skip it if you're not reading the book.

            I hardly know where to begin with you, which is the same place I’ve always begun with you. Baffled, uncertain, afraid, awed. To be honest--put out. Terrified and guilty.

            I think you must hate me. All the anger you packed up and carried off with you when you left to live with Randy can’t have fermented into anything palatable.

            You know everything when you’re young. Everything. As you get older, it trickles away, bit by bit, until the only thing you know is how little you know. I wonder how much of what you know you’ve lost by now, how much of what you know has fallen away so that you can see what was behind what you knew, all the time. Do you know little enough yet to know it’s impossible to understand how it can be better to be in Hell with someone else than in heaven alone?

            When you were born. You were tiny and purple and screaming your head off, not at all like your silent, sweet sister. You did all the screaming you were ever going to do in your life in those first three months. You stunned me. I knew I was doing something wrong with you, something that I was somehow doing right with Angie. But I couldn’t understand what.

I have this funny mental image of your dad, it wasn’t funny at all at the time but now, maybe, it can be a little bit funny. In my head he’s holding you out, his hands wrapped around your red torso, your face scrunched shut like an old man’s and your mouth open to let out your piercing newborn howl of injustice. Karl’s face is averted and it’s clear everyone knows what’s best, which is for you to be safely back where you came from, quiet, and it’s also clear that it’s not going to happen and it’s time to deal with that and that is terrible. It would be more funny, now, if it hadn’t been so dreadful at the time. If it wasn’t all so dreadful now.

            After your three months of screaming, you were silent until you started to talk with Angie in that language you had with her. You had emotional reactions to colors, but they were subtle. Too subtle to be noticed by anyone other than your mother, I guess. Certainly your dad could never understand when the color of the day on Sesame Street was orange and you couldn’t stand to be in the room with the TV. Angie understood it, like it was coded in her to get it. Most people would never bother to notice a thing like that, the widening of your eyes, the way your breath would change when you were around large doses of certain colors. McDonald’s was always a nightmare for you. First for that, then later for other reasons.

            I know. The heart of the matter. You want to know how I could do it, I’m sure. How I could send you to Jake.

            I didn’t know, Jay. I swear to God, I didn’t know.

            And you want to know why I didn’t know, how I couldn’t see it. If I could see other things. Like your sensitivity to color.

            I don’t know. I didn’t want to see anything like that. I still don’t want to see it. To be honest I want to stab my heart with a rusted knife for my mistake in refusing to see it. In not believing you at first. You were right to be so angry. You’re right. You’re still right, and we’re still wrong. I’m wrong.

            I don’t think you blame us for everything. Do you? I can’t tell, as your mother. I can’t be that objective, to be able to determine what kind of a person you really are, under all the different ways I feel about you, as my son, as the boy you were and the man you’re on your way to becoming, as the child of your father. I don’t think you’re the sort to blame others for your problems. But how can I know, for sure? Maybe as your mother I only want to believe that, because of my guilt.

What do I know. Nothing. Only the hole in my chest now that you’re gone, and this sea of regret I can’t seem to find a place for in the house. I keep stuffing it into cupboards, under the kitchen sink, in the dryer for God’s sake, and it washes out and drowns me when I turn on the tap or open the garage door or God forbid walk past your bedroom. I’ve done everything wrong. And in the quiet of the house, I know it. The compulsion to scratch this pen on this paper and leave this trail of words like snail slime is the only way I can think to start to stop it.

            I want you to believe that I want to make it right. I want you to believe that I am finally beginning to forget everything I know, and to see how much I don’t know about you, and how sorry I am for thinking I did know you. You can understand how I could have been mistaken? I changed your diapers, I fed you and clothed you and kept you alive as best I could, I made sure you had the best of everything, I knew all the details of your blood and your bones and your skin and your idiosyncrasies and how you brushed your teeth and how you breathed at night, it’s easy to see how I could have thought I knew you. Isn’t it?

            I want to make it right. I don’t know how. Maybe I’m supposed to act without knowing. Maybe I’m supposed to tear down this marriage, maybe I have to trade a husband and a mortgage and a retirement plan for a relationship with my son. Do I have to do that? Or can I take those things with me when I come back to you and tell you that I was wrong? Or is that oversimplifying the complexity of the issue, which on its simple face is that you must hate us for how we failed you.

            I wish you could understand how it could happen. But really, I don’t wish that. I don’t wish you to have to experience this, which is the only way to understand it. It’s probably too much to ask. But I would like you to know how it happened. I would like to tell you, how it happened, that your father and I came to be who we are.

            Mostly, I want you to be happy. I want you to find someone you can be happy with, and I want to explain to him what it will be like, to be with you. You don’t want to hear it, but you’re like your father. He’s like you. The biggest difference is that his rage spills onto others and burns them, and yours spills back on you and burns you. In some ways, it makes no difference. It’s still a typhoon of spinning blades that shreds what it touches.

I met Karl when I was 21, at school. I thought I could save him. Something broken, but compelling, I loved him, couldn’t get enough. Like a tall glass of dark beer--sweet, with a hint of bitter citrus tang to make it interesting. He wanted saving. He tried to let me. He couldn’t.

It took years to figure it out. Years. I hope, when you find someone, I hope it doesn’t take you years, to tell the person you love. But I’m not allowed to hope this. My guilt by association and my blindness and my fear and weakness and failure to learn from past mistakes take away any rights I have to hope anything. God, Jay, I’m so sorry. So goddamn sorry.

You know about this now. Angie told you, the version she got from Jake. Which was only part of the story. You think your grandfather’s dead of a heart attack. That’s what we told you, last year. He wasn’t. He hung himself. It was only hurrying along the inevitable, he’d have been dead of drink within a couple years if he hadn’t left the world on a rope. So you see.

I don’t know what you can see, in this. Why do I tell you this… I tell you this because maybe you can find some forgiveness, inside you, for what was done to you. You don’t understand how it can tear a person up--

No, that’s wrong. You do understand.

I can’t get it into my head, still. I feel so sick. I don’t want you to live like we’ve lived.

It took six years for your father to tell me. Why he’d freeze up when I touched him. Why his face would turn to stone sometimes when he mowed the yard or woke up in the night or got out of the shower. I don’t know, even now, if he knows that I know. He was drunk when he told me. I was pregnant with you and Angie. Six months. He went on a bender, stayed drunk for three days over Memorial Day weekend. Told me he couldn’t be a father, what if he made the same mistakes, he didn’t know how to be a father because his was such a vicious twister of fury. Said he was thinking of leaving, never coming back. He’d never hurt a child the way he’d been hurt. Never let that happen. He said he was sorry he agreed to have children. A mistake. He said he loved me and that it wasn’t my fault he was the way he was. It wasn’t me, it was him. Et cetera. He spent Monday night puking his guts up in the bathroom and he went back to work Tuesday and it was like nothing ever happened. He didn’t discuss it. Wouldn’t meet my eyes for a few days, but I didn’t press him. It was like living with a ticking bomb, not knowing what would set it off, not knowing the length of its fuse. I couldn’t bring it up, or press him. You know how he is.

Why didn’t I leave him, maybe you think.

Well. It’s complicated. I loved him. I still love him. If I could do it over, would I marry him again? Yes. Even knowing what happened. So you can judge me, on this.

I’ve never left him because I love him.

And now it looks like I picked him over you.

Maybe I did. I didn’t mean to. Why did it happen, that I should have to make a choice like that?

He believed you, when you finally told us. When you told us what Jake did to you. He believed you.

And I didn’t.

That’s what it comes down to.

Forgive me. Forgive me. Please.

Please.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

"You know everything when you’re young. Everything. As you get older, it trickles away, bit by bit, until the only thing you know is how little you know. "
A very intense and sad story. Reality of living make us learn hard and real lessons. The story made me feel sad. Learning of strength and weaknesses of our elders leave us fearing what will we become? No weakness in the excellent story. Thank you for sharing the excellent story.
Coyote

[J_Star]

Thank you so much, Coyote Poetry.

[David Scott]

Star, I see the heart break here.
I believe this story was not meant to be edited for grammar as it feels like maybe just something you had to get out as if fell out of your head.
Kimmer did tell me to stop using the word "that" when at all possible... You should try this trick here.
Some of the sentences tripped me up, but I did not miss your intention.
To say your sorry and to ask forgiveness... You did not blame shift either. Other than maybe shifting too much blame on yourself, you were opened an honest.
I love the heart of this woman.

[KAOlmsted]

Wow. Just. Wow. I love this so much, because, in the version I read she was not a very sympathetic character and I didn't much care for her. This puts it all into perspective. (I'm assuming Stan has been changed to Jake.) I love her acceptance in this line: "I want you to find someone you can be happy with, and I want to explain to him what it will be like, to be with you."

I'm just sitting here absorbing this. No real critique because it doesn't need one. Every word is spot on. You nailed this, J...this is crazy good.

[J_Star]

Thanks, kimmer. I'm trying to work her in more. This isn't going anywhere but here, and is just an exercise to try to know her better. I have a much bigger challenge with Dad, I think.

I really appreciate you reading this. :)

[KAOlmsted]

My absolute pleasure. When I first started writing the book "seriously" I found these exercises helpful in developing character...I'd write scenes that were never going to go in the book but they helped me understand my babies better ;-) You could write a grocery list and I'd read it *laugh* ;-)

[J_Star]

you are too nice to me.

[KAOlmsted]

...ditto. xoxo