A letter woven out of string
Article and Art by Katie Lockwood
I met my pen pal when I was ten while camping at the Grand Canyon for spring break. It was an obligatory bond that started when my dad noticed a neon-hoodied girl bobbing around the only other occupied site in the whole campground. He decided from our similarly questionable fashion tastes that we should be friends.
We bonded over little other than our love for obnoxiously colored Under Armour hoodies. She had a parakeet, a little brother, and played soccer. I had a recently dead dog, been called an old soul since I was six at every adult dinner party, and bright pink shin-guards which hadn’t been touched for four years.
We would hang out after dinner in the empty campsites. I suggested that we should make fairy houses. She was far more into kicking a soccer ball back and forth. Logically, we settled on playing Go Fish, because cards are the only thing consistently kept in a family camping supply to entertain bored kids, and Go Fish is the only card game 10-year-olds know how to play. People say that games like Uno and Spoons bring out the worst in people, which I can safely say is true having watched people get stabbed in the leg with broken plastic spoons.
But if games like these bring out one’s most barbaric qualities, I think Go Fish conversely brings out one’s tolerance for the utterly self-aware and mundane. No one wants to sit around considering the cards they have in their hand. No one wants to respond monotonously to being asked about what cards they do or don’t have, and no one wants to fish for something worthwhile– until it is a card game, and, at that, the only card game one knows how to play. We played until it was dark enough that you had to squint and hold the cards close to your face, or until one of our parents called us back to make smores (whichever came first).
Every night that week, we milled about like old people who play cribbage in the park on Sundays (I wasn’t called an old soul for no reason). Sometimes she brought her little brother, who I didn’t mind, until he asked why I wore the same hoodie every night. It was at that moment that I noticed how much more expansive her neon hoodie collection was than mine.
Altogether, I liked her more than her little brother, which was saying a lot considering they were two of the four people I had to interact with that week.
We gave each other our mailing addresses at the end of the week. I honestly can’t remember whose idea it was to be pen pals, as the concept was utterly outdated by 2015. We were the dawn of screenagers. I had my mom’s old iPhone that I used to take up-close pictures of wildflowers and rocks with, which I then edited and over-saturated to oblivion. We could easily have given one another our phone numbers at the end of the week to stay in touch, and we could have just as easily forgotten each other in the next few weeks back at school. Why, instead, did we play limbo with the idea of knowing one another?
I kept a box of the things she sent me: pictures of her skiing trip to Montana, a postcard from Boise, and a doodle she sketched of her room. I kept the envelope from the most recent letter she sent, replacing it each time she sent me something new so that I could remember her address. I sent her a friendship bracelet I made (made with blue and green string because those were her favorite colors), pictures of the swingset in my backyard, and a copy of the program from the play I was in around that time.
Dear Pen Pal,
How are you? What’s your favorite color? How’s your little-shit brother? Do you want to keep pretending that we care about this now that we’re 9 years older? Should we get Snapchat instead? What’s your favorite movie? What makes you scared? Why did I listen to my dad when he said I should go talk to you? When’s your next soccer game? Will you write to me to tell me how it goes? Are we drifting? Do you secretly dread writing like I do? What are you doing tomorrow? What are you doing for the rest of your life? What did you do when you left the Grand Canyon? What did you do when I left the Grand Canyon?
Do you still wear neon hoodies?
xoxo
I came to learn that she had family in Wheat Ridge, which I don’t think she realized was nearly five hours away from where I lived in Colorado. She mentioned how fun it would be to reunite there someday, and we toyed with the idea in each letter we sent. The thought of seeing her again slightly intrigued me, but mostly made me want to throw up. What are we going to do now that I don’t wear neon-hoodies and all I know about her is what she told me?
I can’t remember if I was the last one to write, or if she was. But there isn’t an envelope in the box now. I gulp at the fact it was probably me.