After Life Lessons [Sample]

Letters from Abandoned Places

Letters from Abandoned Places

 

Winter 2016, February, I think

Somewhere between Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio.

Dear Sullivan,

The road has always been yours. Your territory, your freedom and your bondage, all at once. Now it's mine.

It feels like we have been on it forever, have walked for miles, for leagues on end. “This is nothing,” you once said, “we can get that far, easy.”

Did you believe it when you said it? Because you were used to crossing distances, because you were always on the road, because it was your home more than our apartment ever was?

It is a thought that enters my mind in every town we pass, every road we walk down: Did you play a show here once? Have you walked the same way? Have your wandering feet ever stood right here where I am standing?

The world is so unreal, I don’t know what happened, but we used to see some survivors here or there, or zombies, but now we go whole days without seeing anything. I forget sometimes what a blessing that can be.

It feels like a world in between, a wild and cold and empty limbo that retained some superficial characteristics of earth to ease the passing. And in this world it would feel perfectly natural to walk from one time into another, if I could only find a patch of earth to stand on that you’ve stood on before.

I could come up to you and smile. “You don’t know me yet…” I would say, “But you will. Don’t try to figure it out… and you can think I’m crazy, that's okay. Just make sure that you don’t spend the summer of 2015 in New York City.

“That’s all, and if you do, you and the people who love you most—and by that time you’ll know why I tried to warn you off it, just convince them to spend the night in the sewers—or better yet, to just keep walking until you’re out of the city.”

I haven’t watched enough science fiction to properly figure this out, but I’m pretty sure one of three things would happen:

Either a) Song and I fade into nothing and you lead your life until you meet us. And this time, we don't lose you and life will make sense again,

b) it causes a new bubble in the ocean of the multi-verse and in this new parallel world, we stay together but Song and I in this world will never know,

or c) the paradox we created causes a rift in the space-time-continuum and it devours the entire planet.

Sometimes, just… sometimes I think I’m going crazy, but c) doesn’t sound so bad at all. It sounds clean. All this would end, but I wouldn't have broken my word, I wouldn't have given up.

I miss Lake Ontario, its coldness and its depth and the way it looked like a portal out of this world the longer I stared at it. I miss the memory of your finger, brushing over the small expanse of blue on the map, too, and the way you would talk about this journey as though it was an adventure and not a life-or-death necessity. I shouldn’t have walked us all the way up here in the first place—but that was the plan. Avoid major cities, get to the lake and then south. Maybe I was just slower than we anticipated.

I screwed up, love. It's my fault. I thought it was done snowing; I thought it safe to move south, to leave the towns at the lake shore. It was getting so hard to find food, and you'd always said to go south. I screwed up, I made the wrong call. And now here we are, in the middle of nowhere, and we're dying.

There is so much I regret, Sullivan. I should have been with you; I shouldn’t have let you go. You shouldn’t have been alone. Nobody should be alone when they die, and I let you go. And now every night when I can't sleep because of the bloody cold, I find myself imagining how you ended it, and that I should have been there. I should have held your hand. It wasn't worth surviving for this.

I still can’t believe in God—less than ever, really. Did you believe, all the way to the end? I should have asked you that. And I should have asked what to tell Song.

I haven’t told him anything, really. I’m a coward. Because he believes you’re just… late. He's so used to you disappearing over night and coming back weeks later, with adventure stories and a little present, it seems almost natural. Deep down, I think, the real reason I don’t correct him is because the more he talks about it, the more it feels like a possibility. In a different world. Because I'm used to it, too: that you always come back. In the end.

It’s what I imagine when I can’t sleep at night. A hundred different scenarios—but you come back to me. Sometimes, just sometimes, I can hear your voice and what you would say, and I try to remember the way you used to hold me and how your kisses tasted and how you smelled. It’s the first thing that went: smells. And more has gone, I know.

Did you know I took your letters with me when we left? You said essentials. But you took the guitar and I took my pencils, and so your letters found their way into my art supplies and I never told you. You sent them from so many places, all those towns with strange names, splattered all across the map. Song and I would stand in front of the one we pinned up in his room, I would lift him on my hip and we’d trace the route of your tour bus with little markers.

I have lost my way, Sullivan. I don't know where our last marker will go. A gas station in the middle of nowhere, if the snow doesn't let up.

I want you to know, that I haven't given in. Not yet. And that I kept my word.

And that I love you. That’s all.

 

 

Always.

Emily