Letter to a Stranger

To the girl I used to be

When you think back to those years in Indiana, there are splotches of black on the images. The memories are faded now, fraying at the edges, unraveling into dust. They’ve become weary artifacts, preserved because they mean something — they will mean something. They have to mean something.

In this frame, you see a man raising his arm and a woman running. The woman runs outside, into the pure summer night. The door swings back and forth, too agitated to know where to stand still.

The man runs after her and she screams, a howl at the strand of moon in the velvet sky. No one can save you now, the moon whispers, retreating further into the darkness. He chases her into the backyard.

A girl, holding a red, embroidered sweater, runs to the window and looks out. She watches, his hand on her arm, her hand on his face. She hugs the sweater to her heart, and climbs back into bed.

Or this one. A man lays in bed, smoking a cigarette, the bedroom door halfway open. A girl hides. Or — a girl stands there, shaking with sobs. Suddenly, a booted foot lands on her stomach, throwing her backwards into the wall. She lands quietly, no longer crying.

You don’t talk much about Indiana. When people ask, you tell them that it was a wonderful place to grow up. You tell them about chasing fireflies at dusk and summer thunderstorms. You tell them about learning to ride a bicycle, about pretending to be Alex Mack, about that time you went to throw out the trash and were stung by a wasp or that time you stuffed your clothes into a laundry hamper and “ran away” across the street. You tell them about the kindness of strangers and the racism of neighbors.

You don’t tell the whole story. Because who’d want to know?

In this frame, a girl wakes up. She looks up at a pool of water beginning to spread its tentacles across the ceiling, its edges darkening with mold. It’s silent. A drop falls onto her forehead and she winces. The girl rises, dresses, walks to the kitchen. There’s a slice of toast on the table. She throws it in the trash, covering it with a crumpled piece of paper towel, and walks out the door.

And here. She sits in front of a keyboard, the closest thing to a piano that they can afford. She plays from her memory, listlessly, apathetically, her mind elsewhere.

Maybe this was why you wonder so much about other people’s lives. You see stories everywhere you go and everywhere you look, word bubbles drifting above the woman in the green plaid jacket, the man in line for the bathroom.

It is, perhaps, foolish; sometimes a man is just a man, sometimes a life is just a life. This hasn’t yet occurred to you — that there might not be a bigger purpose, an overarching moral, a theme embedded in the undertones of life.

You acknowledge that our author’s intentions are open to interpretation, but you insist to yourself that said intentions were present, ever present — if one just took the time to “delve,” as your high school AP Literature teacher liked to emphasize. “Delve,” Mrs. Clark was fond of saying, her plump hands tracing a half-moon in the air.

And so, you delved.

In this one, a car comes from the right, making a left turn towards you. You see it in the corner of your eye. Instinctively, you raise your backpack to your side and lean your small body away. You hear the screeching of rubber on cement, smell the friction, feel nothing. You remember falling slowly, landing softly.

And so, I delve.