Into the Velvet

Henry's Final Letter - Epilogue

Luiza,

I realise this might come across as an excuse for me to explain away my misdeeds, to rationalise what might forever seem to you as unforgivable.

And what I did was unforgivable.

I only want to defend myself in some way. On the whole, I hope you don't think me too much a bastard for insisting I'm not sorry. I'll explain why. But firstly: I don't think I'll ever actually send this letter to you. It's been years since... that time. And you don't live with your parents now. I don't know how to reach you.

But I won't look for you. If I've ever used my contacts in your hometown to get a feel for your place in the world, that should remain my secret to bear. You'll never read this for a reason.

Did you really ever know me, Luiza? Sometimes I think you'd come the closest out of anyone. Sometimes I think I made you up. The past feels far away, but I remember everything; that diner, our texts, your laugh. I'll always remember the hollowness of your face, standing outside my house. How you'd looked against the flames. Angel. Vengeful child. Abandoned doll. So very different to who you are today.

I'd like for you to know me better, and hope that goes towards explaining why I—

Why.

I'm an only child, Luiza. I don't share. What I feel, and whatever weighs on my mind, other people can only guess at. I'd never had another person to facilitate sharing with. Books filled my head and childhood bedroom with fictional people, so I'd never feel alone. Anything other than reading bored me. Nothing could compare to unreality when I was the main character in a tale of adventure. My dilapidated house on a murky swamp, and my father spilling beer on himself by the television, had served as my backstory.

As a child, I'd felt bored by others. My minute-by-minute awareness of the mundanity of other human beings—their overt imperfections—bothered me. Luckily, my ego had been sufficiently glutted; I'd been my drunken father's Einstein boy. I would come first in all my debating championships and science fairs, until I grew old enough to steal his smokes.

My favourite poets were and still are the Romantics: Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Byron. They'd understood life in ways no one I knew could, could distil truth to prose. I'd always assumed I would be a great writer one day. But that was no good; I just as strongly had no desire to accept I was no good at writing. I was a reader. I had none of what my poets possessed, and what you have. My inner eye stayed shut.

I'd gone onto college and majored in English Literature. Had made my dead mother and sunken-in father proud, even if I'd resented them. Even before college, I'd already despised my parents, thinking they'd been brain-dead and feeble for not dreaming big enough. One of them had even had the gall to die for nothing. What kind of story was that? They should've known to outsmart modern-day mortgage slavery. They should've never settled anywhere, least of all with each other. Never should've had a child, when it'd only anchored them down in one place.

Fuck their mundanity, I'd tell myself, dreaming in the darkness of my empty dorm. Fuck home owner taxes and health insurance. Fuck suburbia. Fuck every picketed, pointy fence, and fuck the middle-class labradoodles cosied behind them. I would live my life refusing to settle for a meaningless existence.

I would touch the sublime.

So, two years into my degree, I'd backpacked around East Europe with two-hundred dollars in my bank account. Looking for what the poets saw, I'd gotten high on the cheapest drugs I could find and met strange people in awful places. This let me imagine myself as a high intellectual; engaging in philosophy, reciting Beauvoir and Lacan to win drunken arguments. It'd been the closest I could come to elevating myself into another time.