Read This Like a Memory
Article by Leyla Kramarsky Art by Max Montague
Dear you (Me, before I learned to keep a plant alive, eighteen years old),
I graduate in two months.
P.S. This is not an elegy.
I am not a collector of things. I used to be, but I couldn’t take the loss.
The casualties:
A small plastic dolphin, down the bathroom drain. Given to me by a boy who I kissed in the back of the school bus in kindergarten.
A marble horse.
A ring.
A plastic bunny.
Because you were bad with hard objects (specifically, it seems, those of an animal nature), I keep words. Letters, mostly, but newspaper clippings and old photographs will suffice. I keep telling myself I’ll collage with them. I always carry glue, ready to save something. They live under my bed in a green Staples folder from high school. Sometimes, when my feet stick out from the bottom of my sheets, I’m worried they’ll grab me and pull me under with them.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about postscripts. Like P.S.’s,” I tell Mira. Really, they’re haunting me.
“Oh interesting.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about them.”
“Ok.” She nods.
“Like, are they more important than the letter? Less important? Sometimes I think they’re the entire letter.”
“Right. They’re sort of like parentheses.”
“Okay, yes.”
“Like, clearly the writer wanted it to appear less important, but is that because it is or because it’s secretly more important and they’re overcompensating for its secret importance.”
“Totally.” I agree. What a fantastic take.
I’m talking to Mira over facetime in a bathing suit on a couch somewhere hot. She’s in her room miles away. I wish I could sit down on her floor. I would like her to offer me a cheese stick.
P.P.S.
My first (your first) home was near the Firestone tires and across the creek from the train tracks, and every time a train passed in the night it shook my room. I still smell it sometimes in wool and gas stations late at night. And each time, I see a blue clock and a sofa and a ghost and I thank God.
I was too young to live there– unable to roast sweet potatoes or drive. But, still, I laughed, I learned what a sun, moon, and rising sign were, I bought my own groceries, I acquired a bike from Craig’s List and had it stolen a month later. The flowers in my vases were always dead, but everything else was so alive. Tingling.
I am sure I fell in love in that house. Maybe with another person, maybe with a new life, maybe with the evening light that snuck through my window at 6:00 pm every day. I had no bed frame and no blinds. Total exposure.
Everything you’re feeling right now– everything you feel in that house– won’t go away. It will fester. It will boil and steam until it bubbles over and spills onto the tiled floor and burns your bare feet. It will turn purple on your skin in the shape of a thumbprint.
A bruise is a sort of postscript, I think. A postscript is something that can’t let go, I think.
P.P.P.S.
Another postscript: a sunburn, a half-empty handle of Fireball in the trunk of my car, a squashed straw hat.
Your first summer will be perfect. The trees will be impossibly lush. You don’t know yet how beautiful a color evening can be. On the lakes, in the fields. The whirring buzz of cicadas. The breeze. The burn of whiskey on your throat. It will all sound like a guitar, strummed gently at a campfire by the person you love the most. It will taste like black raspberry ice cream and PBR. When it’s all over, you will stand in your driveway, surrounded by its remnants, and cry so hard that you exhaust yourself to the point of illness and mom has to drive up from the city and tuck you in.
This is a new kind of yearning. This is how you learn to miss people. This is when it begins to hurt. Words fail because they aren’t feelings. And when I say feelings, I mean it purely in a bodily sense. I mean that songs paralyze me. I mean that freshly cut grass smells like Saturday. I mean that I have dreams. I mean that I think about you all the time.
When you go back to school you’ll look for it all. For yourself. And you’ll keep finding her as a sort of afterthought. And you’ll miss her.
P.P.P.P.S.
Sometimes I think that loving someone so much feels a lot like missing them.
“Weak is not a synonym for bad.”
Ruby says to me in the ocean. We’re standing just before the waves break (where I always get scared…because I almost drowned once) and she’s holding back with me. And I’m so taken with how much we know about each other. How much we’ve seen and will see and how much we’ve loved each other through it. And I can’t help but think about being twelve with her. Then being twenty-one with her. Then thirty. Then seventy. Of all the endings, this one is perhaps the hardest.
We spend five hours on the couch in the Airbnb. It’s raining and the power goes out. We finish a bottle of wine in the dark. I wake up holding her hand at 4:30 a.m.
She stands so close to me when I’m making breakfast that I can’t move my left elbow. When I turn to make fun of her, she says “I want to be closer,” and puts her head against my neck. We keep trying to write postscripts in the form of post-grad road trips and next summer adventures, but the words are fuzzy.
I think of Reese and her theories on “perfect hugging height” and the idea that sometimes we are simply made for each other.
P.P.P.P.S.
I’m not really sure what I’m writing about. I think I’m just scared of ending this piece/my last issue of Cipher/college.
P.P.P.P.P.S.
I sort of thought that by the time I graduated, everything would be laid out ahead of me and it would all feel exciting and real and tangible. Instead, you get older and you stop going home and you start going to your parents’ house and the grocery store starts to get boring and you have to learn to cry in front of your friends.
I am trying to figure out how to take it with me. I worry that everyone else learned to love in a way that I haven't. A way that is free and sustainable and related and doesn’t make them anxious and doesn’t feel like it could crack. I worry that closeness expires across time and state lines. I worry about my mother, my brother’s impending college matriculation, our absence. The holes that form.
But, then I dance in the kitchen with Evie and Max and I giggle with Emma in the upstairs bathroom with Avril Lavigne playing and Sam is leaning on me on the couch and my arms are wrapped around her and I walk into pillar and Dani and Sabine are upstairs and Dani’s hair is in a clip with a glass of wine waiting and Reese is explaining her book organization method and Lex’s eyes are sparkling and Mira is sending me poetry and words and I run into Arlo on the street and Naomi has come into my room holding something beautiful that she has made and I feel like a child again. And, in kitchens and bathrooms miles away, Maya and Natasha and Jan and Anais and Elsie and Lucinda are in homes with the lights on playing their own music and calling when it’s a particularly nice day out or they’re on a particularly long drive or a star reminds them of me, and the love doesn’t go away! How nice to know. How lucky.
P.P.P.P.P.S.
We all look different now. But you would know us immediately.
P.P.P.P.P.P.S.
A poem Mira sent me:
Trains
Rebecca O’Brien
At night the train passes so closely/
Outside my window that my apartment/
Shakes. It used to frighten me the way/
That I would wake in the morning to/
Find that the keys had shaken from/
Where I had set them on the kitchen/
Counter down into the sink, or the way/
That my potted cactus had shaken from/
Its table to spill across the floor. But the/
Morning I awoke to find that you had/
Shaken away with the passing of the/
Train I was not surprised, and that was/
When I knew I had been in one place/
Too long.
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S.
There’s never enough, and that is why we save things. Why we write letters and add postscripts. Why we make it so that the longing is something you can hold. To say I don’t want to stop talking to you ever. I don’t want to go. But, we do. And the remnants live under our bed. And they read like a memory, and they remind me of you.
We’re in the yard surrounded by the ghosts of kiddie pools and potluck brunches. Miles and Olivia are piled on top of each other reading. I cut up mangos to share. I imagine our bodies from above. I imagine I could float up into the clouds that are rainbow around their edges from the sun. There’s so much to do, but maybe instead we’ll go for a walk.
Let the rest of your life be delicious. It is. So far, it was. I miss you.
Love,
Leyla