Four Love Letters
I. Spring
It’s April again, bird chatter waking me early, the new sun tending to its new flowers, but the air still cool enough for you to say, “Come here,” and tuck my hand into your coat pocket on our evening walks. The sky is marbled with clouds, jet-trails streaking. In spring, the snow dregs and daffodils make me feel like I’m fifteen again, in the school library wondering if anyone will ever touch me. Or at a garage sale, hunting for shirts long enough to cover the bony jut of my hips. Or splayed stomach-down as Nickelodeon loops, scribbling stories about girls who fall in love with ghosts—though the ghosts always left at the end, true love having resolved their unfinished business on our earthly plane. But this isn’t one of those stories. You’re not a ghost. It’s all real. Our hands curled like nesting animals in your pocket, the gaps in our hardwood, the leftover curry in the fridge. All real. I try to dog-ear this scene: our feet on the pavement, burst of hydrangea and mutt bark as dusk begins its slow bleed. I fold its corner down smooth so that in twenty springs I’ll be back here with you, not knobby-kneed and sad.
II. Summer
Inside me, nothing will take. You drive me to another early morning doctor’s appointment through Rock Creek Park, where the leaves are greener than jewels and the forest thickens with life. A nurse needles my blood and ultrasounds the pink of me. As always, they say everything looks good, but I’ll get a call in two weeks that I’m not pregnant. Three years is a long time to hold your breath. You order us sushi for dinner every time that phone call comes, since at least I can still eat raw fish, and we watch a movie and go to bed early and don’t think about it. We have become especially gentle with each other. You try to hide your worry, but sometimes you come into our bedroom and lie face-down next to me and I can hear it in the lines of your body. The same quiet bleating in me, moments of panic cresting like lost sheep running up a hill. We wait together through another summer of barbeques, beach trips, birthday parties for our nieces and nephews, sparklers bright against the sky before fizzing out.
III. Fall
We met in the fall. Halloweenie Roast in the dorm courtyard and haunted houses with students in monster masks. On Halloween night, I went to your dorm-room party dressed as Miss Scarlet. All my roommates came—Mrs. Peacock, Miss White, Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum—with their wrenches and candlesticks. I can’t quite remember what you were, but it involved a skirt, your pale hairy thighs bared to the world. I’d been eyeing you around campus but was nervous about flirting. Back then, I was shy as a tulip, a bird with air for bones. I’d kept the secret of myself to myself for a long time. And you: your black brows and small, even teeth. You’d never been wrong in your life. Irresistible to me, how each thought entering your head was a stone set securely into mortar. I wanted to climb that wall and sit on it. Fifteen years later, I yell at you about exactly that: how you always assume you’re right. Even when I’ve read a study and you have only a feeling, you’re set fast and I feel crazy. I have to pull up the proof on my phone and show you. “Oh,” you say. “Huh.” Tears in my eyes. We’re working on it. But you know what? Part of me still likes it. Don’t tell anyone.
IV. Winter
For the thousandth time, you swat my hand away from my mouth and ask why I peel the skin off my lips and fingers, stripe myself with tiny, tongue-red wounds. It’s a grey Sunday in bed, both of us scrolling. I’m grumpy about many things: another doctor’s call, laundry, the National Geographic article I’m reading about Llullaillaco Maiden, Incan girl-sacrifice mummified in mountaintop ice, who was drunk when she died. “Perhaps to keep her calm,” suggests the article. Her hair in a hundred thin braids, coca between her teeth. Her preserved face could be any modern girl sleeping. I wonder if she was calm at the summit, and who went with her to make sure she didn’t run, and what they talked about on the way. Death makes me squirrelly.
“It’s fine,” I say about my picking fingers, and I don’t sound that nice. “I just like it.” Though sometimes it bleeds or stings like hell. Especially in winter, when my skin is dry and eager to leave me.
“Be nice to yourself.” You hold my offending hand tight. Between us, it changes like the tide who is more patient, more stressed, more sad, more hopeful, as if we share all our emotions from the same pot. I press my face to your shoulder and smell your sweat-and-laundry scent. Feel where the hard bone of your arm meets the hard bones of the rest of you. Our bones will last so much longer than our other, softer parts. In the ground or tombed or under apocalypse debris, coca between our teeth. Maybe someone will find us one day, intertwined, and wonder what we said to each other in the end. Maybe they’ll understand that, before the world ended, we’d picked each other out of the whole bustling mess of it.