Dirty Letters

It had been two weeks since I’d mailed the letter. Well, it was more like a book—several pages long. I’d explained all the details about the fire and my emotional state after and apologized for never having acknowledged his mother’s death, making sure he knew that I’d only opened the final letter recently after losing my dad. I told him about my anxiety issues—explaining agoraphobia in detail and how it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all mental health disorder. I wanted him to understand I wasn’t a total shut-in, that I loved the outdoors and could have intimate relationships. Honestly? I couldn’t even say what else I’d written. I’d stayed up that entire night until my heart was empty. In my head, I wasn’t writing to the guy who’d told me I sucked. I was writing to the Griffin I hoped was the same person I’d cared for so much.

I normally went to the post office twice a week during their slow hours to check my PO box that I used for reader mail. A week after sending the letter, though, I found myself checking it every single afternoon.

For several days, there had been no letter from Griffin. On the fourteenth day, a bright-red envelope stood out from the rest of the mail. The name on the return address: Griffin Quinn.

My hand was shaking. Do I rip it open and read it here? Could I even wait long enough to drive home?

I decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to potentially receive upsetting news in a public place. God forbid I pass out and wake up with a swarm of people huddling over me or something. The thought of that made me shiver.

So I decided to race home.

Once I arrived back at the house, I fed Hortencia really quickly so that she’d be content and pacified while I read the letter.

Sitting down in a comfortable spot on my couch as my heart pounded, I carefully opened the envelope.

Dear Luca,

I suck.

Do you still look up a word in the dictionary to memorize every day like you used to? Well, just in case you hadn’t reached this one yet, let me do the honors.

Self-ab*sorbed

/self-əbˈzôrbd/

adjective

1. preoccupied with one’s own feelings, interests, or situation.
2. a friend who shits on you because he never stopped for a minute to think maybe there was a reason his best friend stopped writing.

I smiled and looked over at the old beat-up Merriam-Webster dictionary sitting on the corner of my desk. My copy was from 1993 and had 470,000 words. The spine had multiple layers of duct tape holding it together from all my years of use. Ever since I was four and learned to read, each morning I flipped open to a random page, closed my eyes, and pointed to a word on the page to memorize. I’d highlighted the ones I’d committed to memory, which meant the old book had a ton of yellow in it now. Although by my calculations, I’d have to live to be 1,288 years old in order to finish. But that never discouraged me any.

I loved that Griffin remembered my little hobby. Only four people knew about it. It made my chest heavy to realize that he was the only one left now—Mom, Dad, and Izzy were all gone. Not even Doc knew. Not that I’d hidden it or anything. There’d just never been a reason to bring it up.

I went back to reading, anxious to see what he’d written.

I’m so sorry for everything you went through, Luca. Even sorrier that I wasn’t there for you when it happened. I lost my mum, and she was too young to die, but we’re supposed to lose our parents. We’re not supposed to bury our friends as teenagers. Especially not the way you lost Izzy. Jesus, my letter was pretty damn insensitive. It’s not an excuse, but I’d had a little too much to drink when I wrote it. Do you think we can start over? How about if we try. Yes? That’s nice of you. Okay. I’ll go first.

Dear Luca,

Hey! It’s been too long. I’ve thought about you a lot over the years and wondered what you were doing. For some reason, those thoughts have been more frequent lately. It’s too bad we lost touch. That was probably my fault. Anyway, I’ll catch you up on my life. Moved to the States four years ago. Still strumming my guitar—my music career has been . . . interesting. It didn’t exactly turn out the way I thought it would. But it pays the bills. Not married, no kids. Had a girl for a while. Now I don’t. Love the Pacific Ocean. Bought a surfboard. I suck at it but paddle out to escape life as often as I can.

So . . . agoraphobic, huh?

It’s kind of a cool word. Wonder how many points that gets you in Scrabble? The B, P, H, and C are each worth at least three. But wait . . . I don’t want you to think I’m a weirdo and sit around and play Scrabble all the time. Then again, you wouldn’t think that’s weird—you memorize the damn dictionary. A quiet game might be just up your alley. Maybe a two-person game? Would three people in a room freak you out? Or is there a set number that pushes you over the edge? Seventeen maybe? That’s a lot. Way more than can play Scrabble at once, that’s for sure.

It’s too bad you don’t have agrizoophobia. (Fear of wild animals, just in case you haven’t hit that in the dictionary yet, either, slowpoke.) That would get you ten points just for the Z.

Maybe next time. I mean, some wild animals are pretty damn scary.

Later, gator,

Griff

P.S. Your letter told me everything wrong with you . . . or at least everything you think is wrong with you. Tell me three things that you’re proud of in your next one.

P.P.S. I lied. You were never not dear to me.

P.P.P.S. I’m so very sorry for your loss, Luca.

“So let me get this straight, he poked fun at your condition, and that’s one of the things you like about him?” Doc stopped and held his pointer finger up to his lips to shush me, even though he’d just asked me a question. We definitely didn’t have traditional therapy sessions. Twice a week, we walked in the woods for a few hours and talked while he looked for birds. He brought a notebook, but half the time he was jotting down notes on the breeds of bird he saw, not anything that I said.

“Yeah. I know it’s odd. But he wasn’t really poking fun at me. I mean, he was, but he wasn’t. It’s one of the things I’d always loved about our relationship. He was always honest, and his joking around was never mean-spirited. It was more like his way of showing me that whatever I was obsessing over wasn’t such a big deal. Like when I was seventeen and still a virgin—I’d told him I was nervous that by the time I did it, everyone else was going to be more experienced, and I’d seem like an awkward amateur. So he made up this crazy song called ‘Urgin’ the Virgin.’ He just has a way of making it okay to laugh at my fears.”

“Hmm,” Doc said. I assumed his response was related to a bird sighting and not what I’d babbled on about. But when I looked over, his trusty binoculars weren’t even up.

“Hmm, what?”

“Well, you fired your old agent because she made a few jokes about your condition, even though she’d always said she was joking. You were never fully convinced of the nature of her ribbing. Yet with Griffin, a man you’ve never even met, you’re able to accept his poking fun as harmless and almost comforting. It seems that you’ve placed a lot of trust with this pen pal of yours.”

I thought about it. “I do trust him. I might not have ever met him, but I considered him one of the closest friends I ever had. We shared a lot over the years. He lived in England, so there wasn’t a chance we were going to walk into each other in the halls at school, which helped break down the normal walls that kids put up to protect themselves. We were really close. Even about some pretty intimate stuff.”

“And yet you broke off all contact with him after the fire.”

“I told you, I was very self-destructive back then. It felt so unfair that I was still alive and Izzy wasn’t. I didn’t allow anything that might cause me happiness to stay in my life. And I think a part of me was ashamed to tell him what had happened. I know now it doesn’t make sense, but I was ashamed I didn’t save Izzy.”

Doc and I walked in silence for a while. Eventually he stopped to peer through his binoculars. He spoke to me while looking off into the distance. “Allowing him back into your life can be good for a number of reasons. One, your relationship with him is intertwined with the period of your life that has caused you the most sadness and grief. You’ve permanently eliminated almost everything from that time of your life—leaving New York, not listening to music, crowds, gatherings, sadly even your parents have passed. So on a daily basis it’s very easy for you to pretend that part of your life didn’t exist. But it did, and while we can push things we don’t want to think about into the recesses of our mind, the only way to truly put them behind us is to deal with them. Griffin is part of your old life that you’ve tried to bury. Dealing with that relationship is a step toward moving forward.”

I nodded. That made sense. “What are the other reasons?”

Doc adjusted his binoculars. “Hmm?”

“You said allowing Griffin back into my life could be good for a number of reasons. But you only told me one.”

“Oh. Yes. Acceptance. The more people you open up to about your condition, the less you’ll fear the reactions of others and the better your support system.”

“I guess . . .”

“Plus, then there’s the coitus.”

I assumed I’d heard him wrong. “The what?”

“Coitus—you know, the unison of the male and female genitalia. It’s been a while since you’ve been with a man.”

Oh God. “Um. Yeah. I got it. Let’s just take it one step at a time.”

Once, I’d written 14,331 words in a day. It was the most productive writing day I’d ever had. Although my average daily word count was more like two thousand. Yet it took me half a day to write a few hundred words in a letter to Griffin. It wasn’t so easy answering the question he’d asked.

Dear Griffin,

The ten pages of tragedy and heartbreak that I wrote to you about bled from my fingers. Yet you asked me a simple question—what three things am I most proud of—and I’ve been staring at an empty page for the better part of an hour. The first one is easy.

My work. I’m proud of the books I’ve written. I guess in my depressing first letter, I failed to mention that my dream came true—I’m a writer, Griff! Four years ago, my debut crime-fiction novel became a New York Times bestseller. I’ve published three additional books since, and I’m currently in the thick of the editing process of my fifth.

The other two things I’m proud of aren’t so easy to come up with. But I guess something I’m very proud of is asking for help after Izzy died. It took me a while longer than it probably should’ve, but I found myself a therapist, and I’m working on facing my fears. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was to pick up the phone and make that first appointment. It may sound silly, but even explaining my issue over the phone the very first time was difficult. I’m not better yet, but I’m working toward it these days, and for that, I’m proud.

God this is tough. Why did you have to ask for three things? I’m realizing I’m not very good at tooting my own horn. But the last thing I’m proud of is something I do as often as I can—I guess I’d describe it as random acts of kindness. For example, a few times I paid for the groceries of a stranger behind me. Or on a really cold day, I sometimes pick up hot chocolate for the school crossing guards—they’re stuck outside in the cold. I know it’s not earth-shattering, but I enjoy doing it. Once a month, I spend the day cooking a bunch of different meals and then drop them off at Mr. Fenley’s house—he’s my neighbor who lost his wife last year, and he really misses her home cooking.

Okay, enough about me. Now it’s my turn to pick a question for you to answer:

Tell me three things you’re afraid of.

Your favorite pen pal,

Luca

P.S. I love handwritten letters, but if you feel more comfortable on e-mail, we can exchange messages that way.

P.P.S. I’d love to exchange more recent photos. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours? 😉

P.P.P.S. Agrizoophobia is thirty points without bonus spaces. But logizomechanophobia—fear of computers—is forty-three points.

I thought about including my photo in the envelope, but in the end I decided against it. We weren’t kids anymore. Mrs. Ryan’s rules didn’t apply. But swapping adult photos felt like a big step for some reason. Especially now that Griffin lived here in the States. Once we took that first step, what was stopping us from taking a second? That thought was pretty scary but also pretty exciting.

I folded the letter into an envelope and addressed it to his PO box in California. When I was done, I slapped on a stamp and looked down at the name. It was pretty damn crazy.

Griffin Quinn.

After all these years.