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THE PAST WAITS for me. Sometimes I still wish you had waited too.
These four years and this new religion have not taught me forgiveness. History and forgiveness both look like you, a lot like March; apparitions pulse in and out of my vision like autumn sunlight on stained glass—I see a funeral and a stripe of auburn hair, I feel a clammy pinky trying to curl itself around mine, slipping in summer sweat, slipping, because I am pushing its arm underwater. It doesn't matter where I go and what they close me in, I am always standing in the intensive care unit that reeks of bubblegum. I hear the strike of a match and know the cigarette can only follow, a stillborn again, left to die first between somebody's lips, then in its ashes, then in yours. Every day, they try to drag me out of the music room and tell me I should bathe, that I can't save them anymore, and every day I scream no, I beg them not to touch anything, not his piano, they're not coming back because they're watching themselves be wiped away. How do you expect them to live if you won't let them be remembered?
I'm guilty of distance. I used to hate it when people said the past is easier to define through the details in insignificant objects, like the nightlight in a country house's bathroom or the rusting brass of a childhood bed, a staircase leading to a brother's locked door, a father's used car. Our old manicured, suburban hell. Our flower beds, now wilted. But I understand the need for that distance now. We'd suffocate without it. Imagine, imagine if we let ourselves think of it as the people frozen outside the frame instead.
I wish the distance had come sooner, during rehearsals, so I could have left the character behind at the edge of the set. It was just a play.
So in my last letter, I tried to limit myself to objects too, but you forced your way in. No, you waited to be let in. The only waiting you did.
The past waits for me to fall asleep before it shows me the drained cups on your kitchen counter and Grandma's chintz armchair, and sometimes the little child in it with its skin bruised like the fabric is me, and sometimes it is you, and sometimes it is nothing but empty space and ceramic dolls sitting on the singed outline of us. They couldn't erase us from their memory, so they vaporized us, and I spend every moment awake going back for your ashes on the carpet, but you blow them away, you blow them into my eyes. You loved me blind but never blindly.
The past waits for me to renounce my faith, but I won't, I can't renounce again. This is why I wished to reassemble you neck-first, this is what I yearn to whisper into your mouth: I have reconverted. I have crept into the crevices between the shattered glass that cut our mothers' necks. I believe I have resurrected and that everyone can do it. I believe you just don't want to. My resurrection failed because of you. This is why I write to you again, for the fourth time, hoping each instance that it can be the last. My conversion, you see, happened exactly the way I thought it would: I see God in everything. I see You in god.
And god, none of this mess would have been real had we taken his play less seriously. We were stupid to think he, watching, directing us meant more than we did, now look what he's made of us. When he left, he took us with him, and we let him, forever stuck on that curtainless stage, waiting for him to come back and free us with his applause.
The past used to wait for me to recover before it showed you to me again, in the wine they sometimes let me indulge in, in the clink of its glass, in any and all lamplight. The lingering, sick comfort of it makes every face yours, it creates faces where there aren't any, and eyes that follow me, and lips that scream my name, the same old accusation of murderer, murderer, murderer. And lips, I wish I'd never kissed yours, because it wasn't for long enough to be saved, only long enough to burn my throat with the hot blood of our families and everyone else I killed for you.
The past waits for me to flee far enough from it before it reveals itself in front of me, always changing one fundamental thing to throw me off. Yesterday, your hair was a different shade of red and the hotel you went to in the winter to find love in your best coat and least favorite lipstick and little else was bandaged in scaffolding. Your paintings were bleached of their color. Your gravestone had a different name. Your dad told me you were still alive and just didn't wish to see me, and shut the wreathed door in my face. I found a note in your glove compartment that said your new address was 'somewhere in California', but I doubt I'll find you there. Even the park doesn't look the same to me anymore, and you'd think I would remember that exactly, wouldn't you? See, a carousel has replaced the statue by which we found the first body, and the chipped enamel paint on its horses is opaque, and it tinkles, faintly, something by Chopin, as the bodies that followed ride it into the silence of dawn.
And the sidewalks of our cul-de-sacs are bleeding. Our town is burning like Rome, the gasoline in my left hand and my right holding yours. The person your hand belongs to keeps changing, too. The entire problem is that there are too many of you to remember as distinct bodies, five. Five overlapping pasts and one split soul that I am responsible for keeping alive in every unsent letter and every unpublished draft.
This is a love note. Don't say it doesn't sound like one. I'm too out of breath to try harder.
Because the past waits for me. It doesn't seem to understand I am running from it. It thinks I am running back to it. Maybe there was never any difference, not when the fresh starts rack up like body counts and each new life has the guilt of the last one staining its palms.
How could you say this isn't a love note? I have written four of these, one every year, and you are in all of them, and I only rewrite them to do you justice. And to combat memory, I suppose, as memory isn't a friend, just a traitor that shows me five parts of me and tells me they're still alive, somewhere, if I try hard enough to search for them. And there it pulls the bag over my head and throws me onto your front yard again.
This is a love note because I revisit tragedy every minute just to get to the brief, flickering moments in the tape where you smile at me; or when I take the gun out of its safety and tell myself shooting it is a necessity, because it means we can go back to the night in the brownstone when we sat in each other's laps and toasted to what we saw in each other, as if we knew each other at all. And there is hot cider, and Christmas carols in January, and confessions and proclamations settling the stirring, restless air and its youth and its sex. When for a moment we are unseamed from the stitches of Hell, which for an evening we could pretend was nothing more than sobriety and a school uniform.
See, I remember the blood on the music room floor. But I also remember the laughter. That is supposed to make it fair, as if it's my fault to focus on the blood when the laughter was always there, too.
The past waits for me. And because this is a love note, I crawl back into its arms and let it crawl back into me; a mother, a lover, a disease.
You remember me too, I hope. If you do, you should know I can't go on until I start again.
Of course you don't remember. But enough is enough—it's time for me to make you.
The past waited for long enough. It consumes me whole. I am the past. And here is what's passed.
Back to Calvary we go. Before the pain, too, becomes as unfamiliar as home.
