A Million Miles Away(18)

Sam says I need to shut up about you already. He’s looking over my shoulder right now and says if I don’t cross out the part about him being short he’ll roundhouse me. Tough luck, Sam.

I have to admit that I didn’t expect to miss you as much as I do. I miss you next to me, but we didn’t have all that much time in the same room, anyway, so I miss talking to you most of all. In that little time, I told you things I’ve told no one else. Not secrets, just parts of the way I see the world that I didn’t know could be said aloud. So what I’m saying is, you hold all these parts of me, these parts I dug up, and you hold them inside your beautiful hands and brain and skin, so far away. And I have your hidden parts, too. I promise I’m keeping them safe. They’re still here, under all this body armor. I remember everything.

One guy lost it this week. His name is Joel and he has all these moles on the back of his head and he didn’t go to high school and he loves Disney movies. Someone got ahold of a bottle of vodka and we passed it around and it seemed to affect him most. He was laughing a little too hard at nothing and then he wandered off somewhere and no one knew where he went until we heard screaming from the med tent. He was crying and kicking over gurneys and shelves, yelling about wanting to go home. The sergeant didn’t let him, of course. Now he doesn’t say a word to anybody.

Soldiers sometimes ask each other what their reasons for fighting are, so we don’t end up like Joel, you know? Then, once we’ve got them, we’re supposed to let these reasons lie, never draw them out while we clean our guns or go on missions. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night—and the nights are so dark here, darker than even country nights in Kansas—and I have to hang on to the bed because I feel like I’m falling. Even if I’m supposed to have reasons for being here, I have no idea where I am or who I am or what the hell I’m doing.

I’m starting to do this in the daytime, too, which is even worse. I wake up while I’m polishing my boots or something and everything feels and looks wrong and sort of spins and aches like I’m sick.

But then I feel the parts of you that you gave me, and I see you on my last night before I left, the lamplight on you while you sat on the bed, and I can feel you keeping me. You may not know it but everywhere you go parts of me go with you. I snap to and know you’re happy somewhere, or at least you’re something somewhere, not here, and I know there are parts of me that are safe inside you, that will always be safe inside you, and I can breathe and go on without losing it.

Write me back. It doesn’t have to be as crazy as what I just said, but I tried to tell you about normal things like the goat meat and the little kids who ask for chocolate and it didn’t come. I’m reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. What are you reading? Send me a book if you want. Tell me about the art you’re making. Write me back. Even if we move bases, they will forward your letter to me.

Thinking of you,

Peter





By the end of the letter, tears were running down Kelsey’s cheeks, catching in her mouth, dampening the collar of her sweater. Michelle’s room was still full, but so desperately abandoned. No reading would happen here, no art would be made. There was nothing.

She wondered what happened to the parts of Peter that Michelle was supposed to keep safe. Where did those parts go now that her body was gone? Who would hold him together?

Kelsey realized she had stopped breathing. If there was no letter back, Peter would know something was wrong. He would become like her, and break apart. But Peter wasn’t just going to slip his grades or ignore his friends or toss perfectly good trees on the pavement. Peter was in the mountains of Afghanistan. If he felt as weak as she did, he’d wake up one day in the middle of gunfire.

Before she could question herself, she slipped from her door to inside Michelle’s room. She prayed her mother hadn’t thrown away the stationery the two of them had received for their birthday a few years back—one set with Kelsey’s initials, one with Michelle’s. If she had already written letters to Peter while they were apart, she would have written them on the crisp cream-colored paper.

In the top drawer, Kelsey found the stack. She sat at her sister’s desk, wiped a makeup-smeared face with the back of her hand, and began to compose a response. She spent the rest of the afternoon there. She dug for the parts of Michelle that Kelsey herself had kept. She searched her memories and Michelle’s books and stared at her paintings. She imitated the wide loops and unfinished rises and falls of her sister’s handwriting.

She sat, and she searched for the words that would bring her back to life.



MITCH TO PETER (FIRST ATTEMPT)



12/20



Dear Peter,



I’m sorry I wasn’t able to write to you for such a long time. I just received your first letter. As for the email, well, I was grounded from using my computer. I’m still grounded. Don’t ask why. My parents are seriously off their rockers. I can’t wait to get out of Lawrence and go to college.

Otherwise, life here is quiet. I am trying hard not to eat meat. I take walks to the river to draw it, and then I use highlighters to fill in the colors. Finals were easy for me. My sister is probably angry with me, because I told her again that she is better than her boyfriend, even though they have been dating for three years.


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