Hi Madre,
It’s almost midnight, a random day in January. I’m cheating a little—I’ve never started writing to you this early before your death date but since this is my thing, I get to make the rules. I’m feeling a little naive that I make such a big deal out of having people that love me and I have no one to call right now as I am curled up on this chair sobbing. I suppose that’s unfair to a lot of people in my life, I should be precise— I would feel bad, a menace, if I called any of them. I hardly ever feel this way and it’s like the loneliness is trying to seep into my bones and take up permanent residence there and I am trying to fight it.
I cannot believe it’s been seven years. I’m writing a few weeks early this year because my Mother’s Day plans were ruined. I will plant in your Madre pots soon though.
I tried to get your police report. I don’t know everything that I am looking for but I think I’ll always be looking, no matter how much information I get.
I wear your ring on my left middle finger now; I have no other rings to wear. It suits that finger. I hope it stays there forever.
I’ll be moving to North Carolina soon. No one is explicitly saying it but I feel like no one believes me when I say I am meant to be there. The thing is, I don’t really belong anywhere now that you’re gone. I don’t have a home anymore. But when I picture a life without you—the only option I have now—that is where I see myself. There’s this picture I posted on Facebook, a million years ago; I had come home for Christmas. It was a picture of my wine glass in front of the wood stove, my nemesis, that stove I hauled wood for my entire childhood. No one was in the basement when I took the photo but I can remember everyone talking and laughing upstairs. I captioned it It’s good to be home. I don’t have any illusions I will ever get to the level of comfort I had when I took that photo, which is fine, I think we spend too much time in life trying to recapture feelings instead of cultivating what we have but I do know I can find a comfort similar for myself in the mountains. I think it’s going to be lonely, but I also think it’s going to be fucking beautiful. And I don’t mean aesthetically pleasing, although I’m sure it will be, I mean it is going to be the life I’ve dreamed of.
Sometimes I imagine asking you the questions I hesitate asking anyone else, like— what should I do with these photos I have that I no longer want to see but are also on my phone? Anyone else would just tell me to delete them but not you, you of the same cloth as me. I imagine the scenarios we’ll make up to rid me of these photos; we’ll smash my phone with a hammer, we’ll put it on train tracks, we’ll throw it in the compost bin and then throw it in the garden. But in the end you’ll say “but maybe you should keep them, someday you might want to see them again” and I know this to be true.
Although I am a champion crier, I’ve cried more in the last year than I ever have before. I’m so exhausted ( I try not to go back and read what I wrote you years prior but I feel confident most of them said I was tired). And I just don’t want to be tired anymore.
My hands are starting to look old, but beautiful. Just like yours. Becky recently told me my legs looked like yours—the best compliment. You had great legs. I love when people tell me I look like you, like as long as I exist, you’re still here too. I am 16 years away from how old you were when you were killed. An eternity and no time at all.
I made a friend on my trip to North Carolina. It’s been awhile since I met anyone new and as you do (if you are us anyway) with a new person, we were comparing our traumas—I forgot how jarring it can be to people when I casually say “my mom was murdered”. I think this is healthy, that I can talk about it without breaking down but I know that’s probably not actually true because I always want to immediately add And he slit her throat after she was dead, what was that about?! I’m always going for the Gold in the Trauma Olympics.
I was reading a book recently and it triggered the memory of people leaving flowers on the porch of the Shoppe. For weeks they left flowers. Can you believe I forgot that happened? It was so kind and made me cry every time and yet I completely forgot about it. I wonder if this is how it will be now, losing more and more until pieces of you come back at random moments. Every day for 7 years I have made myself say “hey babe” in my head in your voice. There are videos of your voice of course, but you are not talking to me in them. Someday I will forget how you sounded talking to me; always excited to hear from me, sometimes a little rushed. I am trying to hold off that day as long as possible.
I started doing this thing in the past two years, mostly the past year, where I love people through sending them mail. Friends, strangers. This intimacy in writing words and licking an envelope and choosing stickers and gifts and sealing it all up, a choreographed thinking of another person. I wonder if this is a lesson I would have learned without your death; loving people fiercely while you still have the chance.
I wish I could ask you what it felt like to start over, how long it took you to stop second guessing yourself.
But the most important thing I wanted to tell you this year is I’m mostly happy. I finally feel like I know myself. I hope you got the chance to experience this when you decided to start over. Your journal is so sad but I remember how your face lit up when you talked to your customers at the Shoppe and how excited you were to show me new products and vendors. And even though the circumstances weren’t ideal, I know he, your sunshine, made you happy too.
I hope by this time next year I’ll have a lot of new things to tell you. A whole letter describing the mountains I wake up to every day. I hope it’s as beautiful where you are.
Miss you and love you, always ❤️
I have said it many times before… I am only a phone call away if you ever need anything… even to cry! Love you!