Dear Aaron,
It rained today. Spicy pine-scent lingers about my porch. . .can you smell pines in the Kingdom? A few days ago (and for the first time in weeks) I went hiking away from my little valley. I saw wildflowers, dark clouds, and green, green fens. I breathed deep, sniffed in the sweet scent of the douglas pine. I heard the breeze fluttering through the aspen trees—could you hear it too? Today I saw, really saw for what felt like the first time in weeks. The lowering sky, dark, with one hill all crested, crusted with tawny light spilling over it. Everything else was in shadow but that one, golden place. What are sunsets and summer storms like in the Kingdom? The Big Dipper is hanging close enough to touch, just off my porch; each star bright, crisp, and close. What are the constellations like in the Kingdom?
It's coming up on a year. Sometimes I can talk about you without crying. Sometimes I'm a little too far removed, too numb. And sometimes the tears well up in my eyes when I hear a song, or when I realise how long and fast this year has been. Today it was kindness that caught me off guard. Just a kind word of thanks and encouragement from a stranger. . .and it made me think of your memorial, where people I didn't know came up to me and comforted me like I was family. The kindness is unbearable, because in that place I can't be numb—the feelings come, and in them there is sorrow, there is pain.
A whole year. . . Grief swells and ebbs, it doesn't go away. It is etched on the inside of who I am—even when others forget, I remember. I remember your smile and your voice. I remember that I forgot to tell you how thankful I was for your friendship when I had it. I remember that miserable day in the airport in Anchorage, feeling like the person I knew had died—like our friendship had died. And I ached, feeling abandoned, feeling unwanted. These last eleven-ish months have dug up those buried feelings, only to wound me afresh. To kill the tiny, internal flame that still burned—the hope that one day, somehow, we would be friends again. That somehow the medicine would help you become you again, and you would remember that I was your friend. But that day didn't come. A different day came instead. A day that I didn't expect to wound me so deeply. A day that cut my heart open in a way that nothing else has in all my life.
Sometimes I think of life being divided before and after 9/11 (nearly half my life ago this year). And sometimes I think of my life as pre and post Summit, or Semester, or Oxford. There are several lines of demarcation in my brief existence. But now there is life before and after 9/3. Few others will recognise that date as a timeline. As an arrow lodged in my heart, and in the hearts of your parents and your sister, and the few others who were part of your tribe.
Did you know that I almost called you? Either last summer or the one before. I found out something. . . Something kind and generous about you. And even though I had no reason to believe you would speak to me, I almost called. I still wish I had. Even if you wouldn't talk to me. I wish I had said thank you when I could. I wish I could have talked with you one last time. But then 3 September came and there is no two-way phone line to the Kingdom. Not for non-Incarnate mortals to one another. And that's good. . .I suppose. I know I can talk any time to the Incarnate Mortal who lived and died and stood death on its head. I know He speaks to me.
Maybe I've been too busy, too pulled in every direction to really feel much this summer. But the wind whispers your music in between the aspen leaves. The stars in the sky reflect the laughter and fun in your eyes. The warm sunlight takes me back to a hayride on a different Monday that was also the third of September. I have wondered what it will be like to go back to Pagosa after 9/3... I haven't been there since... For a while I couldn't sing the Doxology at church without ending up in tears. It made me think of meals at the lodge. But now it feels like a friend taking my hand and walking me through the pain. Will going to the lodge again be like that? But more than the going back to a place where I remember you is the going to a place where you should be and aren't. Briarwood Ave. The woods at Fort Barton. Sunset hill. Your room. . .your roof. Your memory (in some way) is there—even though I never saw you in those places, you wrote or talked about some of them. But you aren't there. Now comes a different hard. What about your sister's home? What about when your parents move? What about all of those places where you never will be? What about my own home and town, where I hoped to show you my bookshelves and my friendly walking paths and all my favourite things? You should have been in those places, too, but you never came. . .
Time does not bring relief, you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year's bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear To go—so with his memory they brim! And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, 'There is no memory of him here!' And so stand stricken, remembering him!
—Edna St Vincent Millay
