The Rosalyn Letters

Monday, April 7, 1997

Dear Nova,

It's been just over six weeks since we were last together. It's late, and I'm sitting at the kitchen table with that feeling like I'm waiting for something, although I couldn't say what it is that I'm waiting for. Maybe just for today's hours to end. Maybe I'm waiting for the sound of your footsteps through the house. Lately, I do this often, sitting in a daze, pretending I might summon the sound of your voice somewhere in the other room simply by wishing for it-but of course, that doesn't work. I couldn't tell you how many times I've sat quietly like this, waiting. Eventually, my back will start to hurt, and I'll shift in whatever chair or position I've found on the floor, still not quite knowing what to do next. Today though, I'm trying something new. I'll write while I wait.

It's strange staring down at this old journal after its empty pages have sat around collecting dust for so many years of my life. Maybe it's childish to expect that finally picking it up now will make any difference, but I don't know what else to do anymore. So here I am, writing to you. I've already tried all the other things that just seem like caricatures of what you think a person is supposed to do in a situation like this-the things people do when they hurt but aren't quite sure how to make it stop.

At first, there was nothing but anger. At least, I think it was anger. My whole body just felt hot, day and night. It didn't matter the hour, the amount of clothing I was wearing, or the thermostat setting in the house. I even took my temperature once to see what was going on. Ninety-nine point six degrees. Not quite a fever, but not quite normal either. The heat seemed to spill over from my body, and sometimes it took on a new kinetic form. I started slamming every door behind me, although I can't say I ever recall consciously choosing to do so. I threw the front door so hard in its frame I broke a window pane in the living room. It wasn't on purpose, but if the whole house had toppled over right then, I'm not so sure I would have cared. Later, in a repentant attempt at remediation, I duct taped the wide splinters of missing glass back into place, but I resented every tiny tear of silver tape. I felt like destroying things, not fixing them.

A few days later in the kitchen, without any prior awareness of the impulse, I hurled a plate at the wall. Then two more. I watched each one bounce, then shatter with a percussive clatter as they met the floor. And I just stood there waiting-waiting like I am again today. I stared down at the ceramic shards on the black and white linoleum as if I expected some kind of supernatural intervention, but of course, there was nothing. Instead, I just felt embarrassed, even though I was the only person in the house. At that moment, I prayed for something to come and interrupt the silence. Anything. You know how sometimes silence can just feel so loud? But not even so much as the draft that whistles through the gap under the back door came to my rescue, and finally, I just walked over and picked up the broken pieces one by one and put them in the trash as if nothing had ever happened.

Did it happen? Lately, I get confused. I ask myself if it's merely forgetfulness. Absent-mindedness. Sometimes I do things-meaningless things-but afterward, I can't be sure if I've only just imagined doing them. I swear I remembered putting my keys away in the bowl on the bureau. Later, I discovered them still dangling from the lock in the front door. I remembered taking the garbage out to the curb. Later, a stench from under the kitchen cabinet alerted me that I hadn't. When can you truly trust your own mind? If no one else bears witness except for you, how can you really be sure something is real? There's that saying. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear... How does that go again? Did it make a sound?

The day after I broke our plates, I found a two-month-old expired carton of milk in the fridge, but instead of tossing it out, for no reason I can comprehend, I held it out perpendicular to my body, opened my hand, and let the whole thing drop to the ground. The cardboard fold popped open, and I watched what was left slowly glug out over the checkered squares as a sour smell filled the air. It looked like modern art. A Pollock. A de Kooning. Maybe even a Kandinsky. Was their art about order, or was it about chaos? And why shouldn't I be allowed to create a little of my own chaos too? Just a little. I didn't clean it up for several days, and by the time I eventually did, the rancid milk had dried to a crust. I had to use steel wool to get it up.

When later that week I eventually decided it would be wiser not to demolish the entire house, I thought maybe I could try to exhaust myself instead. On the first day of this new notion, I walked all the way down Peninsula Drive and made an entire loop around the park and back. The parts along the water were especially cold, but I played mind games with myself enough to ignore both the shooting sting in my fingers and the full body chill that slowly transformed into a sharp ache around my joints as the day wore on.

I knew it would be chilly from the moment I closed the front door behind me, but I reasoned I'd warm up once I walked a few blocks. When I still wasn't warm by the time I'd gotten to the end of the neighborhood, I reasoned I'd warm up once the sun had fully risen. When I still wasn't warm by the time the sun had reached its crest, I reasoned I'd warm up if I could only walk a little faster. The brown and yellow Presque Isle State Park sign materialized from around the bend, and I considered turning back to stop at Sara's Diner for something hot to eat but realized I hadn't even brought my wallet. I kept walking. I veered left onto the shoulder of Old Lake Road, and the expanse of Lake Erie soon came into view through the trees at the entrance to Beach 1. It was apparent by then it was going to be one of those choppy, blustery days. It didn't seem to matter that we've lived here our whole lives-I still neglected to account for the possibility of wind.

We've been to The Peninsula a thousand times. You'd think I'd know how to dress by now, but when I'd put myself together that morning, my head had been somewhere else, floating far above the rest of my body, legitimately unconcerned for the well-being of the rest of its attached parts. I wore my hat, of course-that I would never forget-but somehow, I hadn't bothered with gloves, or a windbreaker, or even breakfast, which unsurprisingly resulted in spending the final two hours of my trek convulsing in shivers.

I reached the turn for the Coast Guard Station sometime in the early afternoon. I knew it would be wiser to keep moving along the loop, but I couldn't help myself from a detour to pay the North Pier Light a visit. I passed a flock of geese near Beach 11 and bid a silent "hello" to the houseboats on Horseshoe Pond. When the trees finally ended, and I spotted the concrete platform of the pier stretching out into the expanse of the harbor, my heart lifted. There's always something about the sight of the open water that has a way of calming you, even if only temporarily. I walked out onto the pier to look back over the entrance to the bay. The North Pier Light was just the same as always-weathered and slightly rusted.

Before they built that lighthouse in the 1800s, ships couldn't see the land at the channel's edges and would regularly run aground. One even destroyed the original lighthouse when it tried to enter the bay during a gale and crashed right into it. Over the years, they've moved it, extended it, rebuilt it, and reinforced it. Its lighthouse keepers cared for it. And now, all these years later, it's still active. You can see its light from miles out into Lake Erie. There's something about that old lighthouse's ruggedness that always has a way of pulling me out of myself and back into the context of the world, even if for only a moment. My mind feels free to wander far beyond the confines of my small life, venturing throughout all of time and history.

Before the lighthouse, there was just the peninsula, a young landform only about a thousand years old. And before the peninsula, fourteen thousand years before that, there was only the glacier that melted to form the Great Lakes. That lighthouse is already nearly a century and a half old, but it's only a tiny blip in the whole story of this place. If that lighthouse is just a blip, what does that make me? What does that make you? I can't tell if that thought is a comfort or if it makes me want to throw plates at the wall again.

By the time I'd made it along the bay-side road, out of the park, and all the way through town again, I must have walked twenty miles, but it was really only the last twenty blocks that were a true death march back to the front door. When I finally arrived back on the porch, I somehow managed to commandeer my inoperable fingers only just enough to grasp my keys and turn the lock. I flung open our door and stripped naked right there in the hallway. I left my clothes heaped in a pile by the stairs and dragged myself straight up to the bathroom like a frozen zombie. I must have stood in the scalding shower for over an hour, and when I eventually stepped out, I looked and felt not dissimilar to a boiled lobster. I drank a beer and put myself to bed without dinner. Just the thought of food made my stomach tighten. All those miles, and yet no appetite.

The next day, I over-corrected for my...