We were sixteen and seventeen, precisely eleven months apart in age, and I sent you an envelope full of glitter in the mail. I have to assume a love letter was included as well— I was known for fifteen page, blissed out missives. Shortly after I sent the blue glitter, life turned particularly desperate for you, burning your tender nerves more than they could take. You cracked an x-acto blade open, dagger spit forth from bright orange sheath. You sobbed, holding it to your left wrist. You pressed the aluminum shark’s tooth into your wrist’s pale flesh— practicing— dragged it lightly across your skin, a thin red line left behind.
Then, an act of the divine, an act of chance that’s enough to set teeth chattering. The envelope I’d recently sent came spilling down from the shelf above, blue glitter exploding onto your palms, your thighs, your knees. You pressed your hands to your tear-streaked face, turned even your cherub cheeks into sparkling blue.
Robin, you thought then. Robin. And that was it. You could not leave me. That’s how you always told the story. You clicked the aluminum dagger back into its sheath, away, away from your slender, precious wrists.
Somehow, it’s now twenty-five years later, and you are still my favorite person in the world. And I’m sick again, only it could be fatal this time, not just excruciating. You write every day, tell me about your new plants, your dissertation, your nieces. You send postcards in the mail, made from giant puzzle pieces— sea creatures on the front, your swoop-swirl handwriting on the back. I send postcards to you and your nieces, flower faeries and dancing sprites to remind them to dream.
Today, I dissected my apartment, portioning its contents out to the people I love. I wish someone had told me to write my Last Will and Testament when I was healthy, because writing it while sick is just scary. Just blisteringly sad. I’m curled turtle in bed when you write and say: The idea of having your physical stuff with me, if I can no longer have physical you, makes me very happy. I’m so glad to be in this messy life with you.
I’m reminded of being eighteen and sick, endometriosis still years from diagnosis. We were rained out of our tent at a folk festival in Hillsdale, New York, clothes soggy, hair curling like untamed grapevines in the damp. That night, my abdominal pain put on a horror show, and with nowhere else to go, we slept cramped into my sister’s boyfriend’s car. I will never forget letting you run your silvered fingers over the hot throb of my abdomen. A place I never let anyone touch. Ever.
You sang to me then, something mellifluous and sweet, a love song you’d written about us. The pain still pulsated, but it also lifted just a bit, carried away by the sound of your voice floating into the star-splattered skies above us.
This messy life, indeed. I have loved you for twenty-six years, and whether I have five years left or fifty, I will love you for every second left to us. Today, I told my best friend I’d been lucky enough to have two great loves, and because of this, would be okay if I never had another.
It is hard to need more when I already have so much. It is hard to need more when I am so saturated with love that it spills out of me like sunlight sometimes, bits of gleam pouring to the floor the second I open my mouth.
Love spills out of me like sprays of blue glitter falling to the floor, blue glitter ensuring I can write this letter to you over twenty years later, ensuring you will be there to receive it.
Lucky is a pitiful word when it comes to you and I— too small, too simple. I don’t think the word to describe our love has yet been invented, though a few come to mind. There is numinous. There is luminescent. Sublime.
There is so much left to say. So many words to be written, found, cherished. I still imagine us drinking lemonade on a porch in our eighties, rocking on a swing that glides with the ease of a sparrow’s flight. I refuse to stop believing in that future, in a bower of purple geraniums growing above us as we rock back and forth on that porch swing, so happy. So old.
I still believe. I still believe my love for you is enough to keep me alive.
Yours,
R.
