CORRESPONDENCE

I was rummaging around, looking for some picture of my mother to post for Mother’s Day, when I came across a box of what I thought would be photos. Instead, the box turned out to be mostly filled up with old birthday cards and notes. I went ahead and started sorting things into keep/toss piles because I do not need a Hallmark birthday card from birthdays of past. As I sorted, I came across a stack of letters from my high school friend, David. I’m pretty sure we’d known each other since birth. We had always gone to school together starting in preschool and then we both went off to colleges on different sides of the state. I guess we the idea of not being at the same school at the same time was so unnatural to us that we wrote letters back and forth for almost a year. Then we diverged onto opposite pathways and just sort of stopped writing. I would say that David took the more traditional path. College, wife, business finance job, suburbs, kids. It is not a surprise to anyone that I took a less traditional path. I put David’s typed letters into the keep pile even though we haven’t talked in probably twenty years.

There was a letter from Stephanie. We didn’t write to each other often; never had the need to. We stay in somewhat regular contact, but I placed this into the keep stack. Her daughter, Cati, who is graduating from high school on Friday, will someday enjoy seeing her mother’s handwriting and getting a glimpse of her mom before she was a mom. Then I came across a series of postcards. All of them were from Chris, sent from different locations from the trip he made to Texas and New Mexico with Amy, Christy and Scott. Postcards from a trip centered around the hunt for UFOs. The first one I came across was a long postcard (not the traditional rectangle) of Western Texas. The first sentence Chris wrote says “I took this picture and made this postcard for you.” I read that and immediately snorted out a laugh. He had written snippets of their travels on the back of each postcard telling me how I would be wowed by the McDonald’s Observatory in Texas and about seeing deer and a skunk in their campsite in New Mexico. There was one that simply said “I miss you.” Under the stack of postcards, was a letter in an envelope addressed to me. I did not recognize the address of the sender, but when I opened the letter and read a sentence I knew instantly who it was from.

It was a letter from Chris, one he had sent me early in our relationship. He had been visiting someone in Texas. I can’t really remember the details of where he was when he wrote the letter, but I remember every detail of finding that letter in my dorm mailbox and reading it. I chuckle now, but when I first read this letter, I was shocked. It is positively pronographic. The thing that felt so shocking to me at the time about this letter was that this was the first time I had ever read anything pornographically directed to my person. I want you to keep in mind that I had never gone beyond kissing with anyone until Chris and when we met, Chris had already lived a life. He was five years older than me and had experience. Chris also had a wide open view of sex and sexuality. I came from an environment that lacked public displays of affection and where the topic of sex was never discussed unless it was in a negative way. I didn’t believe sex was bad. I just lacked the opportunity to have those experiences and I was naive. Chris was my guide and gave me a safe, non-judgmental environment to explore my own sexuality.

Not everyone gets so lucky.

I don’t think I can ever bring myself to read this letter again, but I tucked it back into the box with the postcards. One day, someone is going to be cleaning out my house after I die and they are going to come across a box filled with old letters. Maybe they won’t toss them immediately into the dumpster. Perplexed by these pieces of paper with handwriting on them, they’ll pause and read a few before tossing them aside. I am sure they will be confused by the woman these letters were written too, one set of letters of innocence often including scripture from a friend and another letter filled with graphic sex. I like the picture I am painting of myself here with my eclectic collection of things, a Vespa in the garage and roller skates in the closet. When they start clearing out after my death, I want them to find my collection of naked self portraits and the vibrator I keep behind a stuffed teddy bear on the shelf next to the bed and then shake their heads at the collection of religious/spiritual texts that they pull from the bookcase.

I want them to find all the colors to paint a portrait of a well rounded woman with a well lived life.