Dear You,

My dad always said, “Your mother left me,” which was confusing because he drove her to the bus stop. I was seven when he first said it, and I knew what he meant. But I still wanted to say, “No, Dad. You drove her away.”

My sister wanted my mom to come back more than she wanted anything in the world.

Every day she said something like, “If we clean this fast enough, mom will come back,” or “If I become a girl that stars in TV commercials, mom will come back,” or “I dreamt that mom came back last night and took your room, so you had to leave.” I wanted her to stop saying those things to me, especially if that meant that she’d stopped thinking them. I wanted to say that I didn’t want mom to come back, especially if she didn’t want to come back. But instead I just ignored it.

My sister was six years older than me, and I figured she knew or felt something I didn’t know or feel yet.

But my dad couldn’t ignore anything. As soon as my mom was gone his senses became so sharp that nothing got by them. He outlawed scented detergent, any perfume. He once knocked on my bedroom door to tell me that I should stop using the eraser of the last pencil that my mom had bought me before she left. “It’s echoing all around this house, making me crazy.”

But he especially couldn’t ignore my sister.

Even if we were in a restaurant eating waffles or waiting in line for a bargain movie or in the dentist’s waiting room pretending to read magazines and she’d include the word “mom” in any sentence, he’d begin to explain himself slowly. And slowly the words would pick up pace and pitch and volume until he was nearly screaming. I say screaming because even though he was a big man with a big beard and knuckles like walnuts, his voice could’ve been mistaken for a girl’s when he yelled, especially his voice how it was when he yelled at my sister back then.

As his skin grew purple wherever his insides pushed it at and his voice became sharp enough to cut through bone, my sister became impossibly calm—she’d even let her perfect posture slouch a bit and rest against whatever was behind her.

By the time he was out of breath, he’d be near tears. He’d pause for a moment, not even long enough to form a new thought, and begin oozing apologies for hours until my sister mentioned my mom again and the whole thing started up new.

“Your mother left me,” he’d say, slowly. We’d be back home then, trying to decide a channel to watch or a reasonable bedtime or who would have to eat the strawberry in the Neapolitan ice cream.

My mom had always eaten the strawberry so my sister and I could get our chocolate and my dad his vanilla.

“But she’d come back,” my sister would say, changing the subject back to what the subject always was, as my dad dug into the carton with the wrong spoon. “If you’d just change everything, she’d be back here tomorrow. I know it.”

Let me take a break here (right here, before my dad begins to freak out another time) and tell you that I’m telling you this because this is what you really need to know about me. This is what you needed to know.

This is what I should have said to you the first day we met or that day at the beach, that first time, when you wanted to take a quick run alone. That first time when I got so mad at you that my fingers nearly pressed through your skin as you tried to pull your arms away from me. That first time you said, “Ouch,” surprised that my tiny fingertips could even try to hurt you like that. Now that you’re gone, that’s how I see you in my head—stepping away, so close to a smile, hoping there was some way it was still all a joke.

I see you still in that never-ending moment when you’ve realized that the person you love (or are trying to love) is crazy, and it’s the worst feeling in the world because you know everything has to change: either you have to leave, or you have to become crazy yourself.

I hope that when you first met me up until that moment on the beach and we began falling apart like a scab does (by hardening, cracking, then crumbling), you couldn’t have imagined that I was the kind of person who would ever hurt about nothing, someone who would try to claw through a person she supposedly loved, someone who could use the word “fucker” one hundred times in less than a minute then forget it all and want to kiss and make love any way you wanted. I just wanted to make the world work in my own fucked up way. Doesn’t it go from noon to midnight in seconds?

Before I did any of that, I should have told you all this.

Then maybe I wouldn’t be just some hypocrite who poses as able to become close with another human being without some sick, mentally parasitic thing going on. Because obviously I am. As much as I want to and need to be, I am.

Knowing that’s is the hardest thing in the world for me, as you’ve figured out. But this is all the shit I should have told you long ago, nine months ago—right when we first met and I was immediately certain that you were the only person I’ve ever met whom I could ever love completely and illogically and forever.

This letter should’ve been on the chart that should’ve been at on a clipboard at end of my bed as a warning for anyone considering climbing inside.

The warning actually should just be bullet points. It should’ve just said,

WARNING. I am:
• Irreparably damaged
• Emotionally unsuited for proximity
• Irrationally prepared for (or unconsciously desiring) abandonment
• Sexually insatiable
• Completely needy in general

There used to be simple ways to say, “I’m all fucked up inside.” Things like tattoos and piercings and public diaries. But now everyone has those things and they mean pretty much nothing other than that you are alive right now.

Now we’re all kind of hiding in front of each other and that doesn’t work out very well, as I’m figuring out. So it’s time for me to be Honest. Capital H. Honest. Not direct or blunt or any of those things I’ve become to dull the hopelessness of life or to try to seem interesting. This is somehow the opposite of all that. Or I hope it is.

I actually want to be honest with you because I love you (or I want to become capable of love and then love you), and if I’ve ruined that, I want to you to actually know why. Because what you think matters to me that much and it always will. Or right now, I imagine it always will, which is the same as forever to my brain.

(A pre-PS or PPS: Life would be so much easier if people meant what they said. Like when I told you: I never want to see you ever again. If I meant that, it might be hard to comprehend, but at least it makes sense. OK, bye. We’re done. Burn my pictures. Whenever you think of me, breathe out and count to ten. Just turn it all off. It’s easy.

But the way it really works is that I only tell you that I never want to see you again when I really want to lock you in some cage and stare at you all day long until your skin melts from all the sick pressure of my needs. I only say “I never want to see you again” when I need you to you so bad that it only makes sense for you to go away. Because if you gave in, submitted and surrendered to every craving I have, you’d become me, which would finally make me hate you and actually able to never see you again.

It’s terrible to realize life’s sad facts. But needs, by their definition, are sick things. Anything you need may eventually ruin you. Like the need for water or food or love or passion or fun or control or humiliation. Need any of those things for too long and you’ll just dry up. You’ll die. Or you’ll want to die. It’s torture. But it can be a torture you’ve asked for because your brain can’t tell the difference between a real need—like food and water—and one you’ve created to give your sick thoughts something to glom on to—like the way I need you. What I’ve created is so real that it’s beyond being something I can explain. In fact, I’m certain that if I could really explain it, it would immediately go away, like some monster in the closet. But I can’t, obviously.

My brain thinks I need you more than I need water. I don’t wake up thinking about water or food or air. But I wake up picturing you asleep, head just off the pillow, your leg shaking as if it can’t decide if it’s supposed to be able to bend. Before the image goes away, I wonder if the endless past and future we’ll spend together in my dreams actually says anything about how you really feel. Or is it just my invention of you that makes you so important that I start to question everything else?

For instance, I have nine voicemails I haven’t checked right now. They could be from my doctor telling me that my last physical was wrong and that bump is an early sign of scurvy, or my landlord explaining that the lead in the paint is actually toxic and I need to move, or some serial killer giving me an obtuse clue of where I shouldn’t go alone. But I can’t press 1 and check them. Because if none of those messages are from you, I think I may not want to live anymore. My brain needs doubt right now to operate. More than anything I need some doubt and the ability to go back into time and give you this letter.)

Back to my story: Stories are so much safer than relationships because they don’t start where they begin; they start where they end. That’s where the beginning comes from. But you don’t know that till it’s over. And that way they actually make sense, or, in my case, terrible, awful, disgusting, repulsive, simple sense.

If I’m going to tell this story, I’ve got to go back to where it begins—back to my dad. Back to him freaking out.

He stuck the spoon into the chocolate like it was a flag on the moon and told my sister “She’s gone,” again and again, like a kettle boiling. “She doesn’t want to come back and nothing I do is going to change that. I tried for years, and that’s just something you have to know. Please.” He could say it with some poise at first. But by the time she asked him a third or fourth question, he was screaming and my sister had won. She won every single time.

My parents weren’t married when my sister was born, not to each other. My mom was married to the guy who owned the largest car dealership in the Valley, and my dad was eighteen and a mechanic at said dealership. Her getting pregnant was a very bad thing for both of them. Why she didn’t just take care of it I do not know, especially since she knew her husband wanted a kid very badly but he just wasn’t capable, according to the doctors. Now I didn’t find out any of this (consciously) till much later in my life, but I know now that my mother getting pregnant by my dad probably ruined her life, which is to say it was probably something she never got over. She had to leave the car dealership guy because one day he changed all the locks and telephone numbers and had her car towed away. That day she moved in with my dad, who had to find another place to work an hour away. First they lived at my grandma’s, then an apartment near the sulfur tanks, and then half a decade later, after my mom learned how to keep people’s books, they were able to buy a house. In the first picture they took in front of that house, my mom was so pregnant with me it looked like there was two of her.

I lived in that house my entire childhood.

After that there were seven years of some nice times, I assume. My mom never spoke much. She nodded a lot. Her eyes always seemed teary, but she never cried. She’d try to get us to do things during the evenings or the weekends, but she could never say what, and my dad was too tired anyway. So, she started taking long walks. My sister and I joined her sometimes, but mostly she just went alone. If she went by herself, she’d leave right as the sun was setting and not come home till after I was in bed. But she was always home in the morning, so everything felt fine until the day my dad told my sister to watch me. He had to drive mom to the bus stop.

When he walked back into the house, he set down his keys in the sink and told us that mom had left him.

“What about us?” my sister asked.

“Well, I know she’ll see you sometime, when she can, but for now, you too. She’s left me and it all: her car and the house and her clothes. She said we could have them. She wants to start all over again, somewhere. She said she’d call you guys before long. But not me; she’s left me for good.”

The first month she didn’t call once. When we asked my dad about it, he didn’t know what to say. So we’d ask if we could look in her closet. He said no over and over until another month later. We were watching a TV show where the mom took the girls to buy clothes. They tried on a million different things and the music was very happy. When the show was over he said that he guessed that we could poke around our mom’s closet.

I was standing up by the time he finished the sentence. But before I could leave, my sister asked if mom was coming back, and he started yelling. I could still hear it as I opened the closet door and surveyed the new world I had to explore.

I didn’t care about them anymore. All I cared about was the closet.

At first, my sister and I spent the better parts of afternoons inside it. We tried on everything until it fit right or somewhat comfortably. I began wearing her blouses, which drooped like dresses. We divided her earrings, each taking one of the pair. And eventually the little room went from barely being able to contain all clothes to a collection of hangers and opened, empty packets of stockings and everything else we could find. By then, my sister had given up on it, but it was still the only place I was comfortable, the only place where I enjoyed the quiet. I would stay in there, doing homework or reading about girls who babysat other girls until I heard my dad’s truck turn down our street. I’d be out in the living room by the time his wheels hit the curb and the engine coughed twice, signifying that he’d pulled the key out. I didn’t want him to know how obsessed I’d become. I didn’t see how that couldn’t make him mad. And he had to know. His senses were too good.

But he’d just walk, nod at us and, sometimes, he’d go straight to bed. And sometimes we’d try to be a family.

I don’t remember when my sister started sleeping in my dad’s room. I went to bed before them, so I had to figure it out from the mornings. She would walk out and close the door behind her. And he would follow, not long after.

Right around then, everything changed.

They didn’t argue anymore. They didn’t really speak. And my sister became very quiet, alone no matter who was around.

My dad sold my mom’s car.

One day, when the house was empty, I opened my dad’s door. I went into the closet and saw my sister’s nicest dress hanging neatly over two pairs of her shoes, and I never went back in.

It’ll make no sense to you that I have to say that this went on for five years—my sister sleeping in the same room as my dad lasted five years. I never heard a sound from inside, never wondered about what went on. I never cared. I was too young, I think. Relatives never came over. We never had guests. Whenever anyone knocked we all looked at each other’s eyes like we were the Frank family living in some attic. But it was mostly normal and calm and I didn’t care. I’m sure it was because no one had taught me how to care about things like that. I still really don’t think I know how to, and four out of five of my therapists have agreed.

I just knew it was, and it lasted until she was seventeen and I was twelve.

It lasted until my mother came to see us on the day before Christmas1989.

She knocked on our door about an hour before my dad got home. She asked us if we wanted to go on a walk. We both nodded involuntarily. She didn’t even look a day older. I think she was even in the same clothes she’d left in. Her shirt tucked in the same way it always was, like an accident she didn’t mind.

We followed her to Carrow’s, the closest restaurant, without saying a word. We sat across the table from her and after they brought us water, she said, “I suppose you have questions for me.”

We were silent for a minute. I kept looking around, expecting to see my dad walk in, his face purple, his hands trying to pull off his beard.

I kept staring at my mom’s face, trying to figure out what made her so special to me. But my sister didn’t waste time.

“Why didn’t you call?” she asked.

“I’m a terrible person,” our mom said.

“Are we going with you now?” I asked, since I knew that’s how most divorces worked.

She shook her head. “I’m a terrible person.”

That was her answer to every question, a million questions. She said it as sure as person could be about the time, or the date, or maybe even the weather. She was a terrible person. That’s what we needed to know. As soon as the food came, she excused herself and went to the bathroom. And she never came back.

We sat there and picked at our food for an hour, waiting. We didn’t know she could leave without being driven away.

When the waiter asked us if we wanted our check, my sister said that we had to call our dad. Neither of us had any money.

“Who was that woman with you?” the waiter asked. He was smiling like this was all some trick. He was my sister’s age, or younger.

“Our mom,” I said.

“And she just left you?”

“Our dad will come pay for us, I promise,” my sister said.

“Wait, your mom left you two here to pay for the bill?”

I nodded, but my sister wouldn’t even look at him.

“That’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard. Jesus.” He put one hand in his hair and scanned the restaurant. “You two can go. Please go. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

He seemed awful shook up, but I wanted to get home. So I pushed my sister to scoot out. At first, she wouldn’t move. But I pushed with everything I had, every inch that was alive. And she budged.

When we got home, she told my dad that he had to go back to Carrow’s and pay for us. But not to leave a tip. The service was very bad. My dad did it. And when I woke up the next morning, my sister was gone.

Whenever my eyes met my dad’s after that, I knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to say he’d driven her away. But even he knew it wasn’t true.

Nothing ever happened with us, my dad and me. I know that’s hard to believe, but he tried to become normal after my sister left. He took me to churches. He sent me to camps. We did spend his whole summer vacation in Bakersfield following a lead he had on her. We watched diners and bars and supermarkets, waiting for her to stroll by, hopefully not with a boy or a man. But we never spotted her. Or if we did, we didn’t recognize her. At midnight on the morning before he had to go back to work, he gave up our stakeout, headed home and never mentioned it again.

My sister found me on the Internet last year, fifteen years later, and we trade emails every few weeks. We still like the same TV shows, thank God. It’s something to talk about. I don’t mention our mom. I don’t know if she’s even alive. I don’t mention our dad and how he died and there was no funeral because I was in charge and I didn’t want him to have a funeral that no one went to.

One day she’ll ask, maybe. And maybe that’s the day we’ll meet up again. Or that’ll be the last time I’ll ever hear from her. I’m not sure.

I’m not sure how any of this affects me or what it means about me or why I need you to know. I’m sorry. All I know is that I’m not normal. I know you aren’t normal either and no one is. But for most people that’s not a bad thing. For me it is, especially because I still believe in bad things. Somewhere deep down, in that place in our brains that can’t be changed, I still believe that tiny mistakes can make a person hate you and horrible anger and need can turn hate into love. My circuits are all fucked. I can’t make any sense of it either. But I’m working on it.

I’ve started these new drugs, and I think that’s why I’m writing you. My doctor said the chances of them working are 40%. But that’s a chance. After these there are a million more I can try. You took a chance when we had 0% possibility of making it. Maybe you could try again. Either way, I wanted you to know how it could seem like I couldn’t love you, when it’s obvious I do. At least, it’s obvious to me.

Love,
Me

This story was inspired by Jeff Hurlow’s Myspace Portrait Project.

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