ISAAC

Dear Isaac,

Uh, hi.

I thought of you today. And I’m so far from everything and everyone that despite our being nothing but tense pretend-friends for the last long while . . . I thought I’d write.

Did I ever tell you how my mom believes music saved her life? Not just her sanity, her actual life. I think you could call that ironic.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to write about; I’m just filling space, bullshitting really, which is totally, hilariously, a waste of time in this context. Bullshitting in my own journal. Pathetic.

How about I just dive in?

It’s my fault, our being pretend-friends. Mostly mine, anyway. I have no business writing to you. And yet . . . here I am, so far away from where you are, and who knows what’s going to happen in our lives from this point forward. You probably noticed I didn’t come back to school after New Year’s, and we might not be in the same place in the fall, either. I got accepted into this incredible school in England, and I might do my final year there. I plan to, actually. Not that I expect you to even care anymore. You probably don’t. And I’ll never show you this, anyway.

I realized, just now, that I liked knowing you were close by, after we broke up, if you could call it a breakup when maybe we weren’t officially together. Even when I was mad as hell, and hurt, it was nice knowing you were down the hall in another classroom, or right next to me but pretending I didn’t exist, or a couple of subway stops away on weekends. I thought I wasn’t thinking about you anymore, but I was. Am. I could see you, hear you, smell you if you got close enough. Now I can’t.

It’s funny how many things we never talked about. That’s (at least partly) my fault too. I had so much going on at home, and I didn’t tell you any of it. The thing is, I got used to dealing with things on my own, and even if I’d wanted to talk to you, I didn’t know how. So you didn’t know how fragile I was, how screwed up. You didn’t know how much I needed to feel I could trust you, even though I wasn’t, in fact, trusting you. Ha. You didn’t know how complicated and full of contradiction I was, either, and hey, at least I saved you from that.

So, my mom, when she was little, she says she was “moody,” which . . . there’s probably a diagnosis for it now, but the point is, she had trouble staying afloat. She didn’t feel normal—not at home, not at school, not anywhere.

You and I both have felt that, I know.

Anyway, she had trouble. She couldn’t be happy. And her parents—my grandparents, whom I never met—didn’t know how to help. My impression is they were of that stoic, Victorian, chin-up generation where they didn’t talk about things.

She used to climb out her window at night and lie there on this short bit of roof with a steep incline, and wish that the stars would come to life, and fly away with her. One time she started to fall asleep out there, and almost fell off. For a whole three days after, she felt incredible—amazingly energized and happy—that’s what she told me. Near-death experience = happy.

Weird reaction, right?

Then when she was eleven, she started piano lessons. She was late starting, compared to a lot of kids, but she said that in music she finally found something to grab on to. The rest of the time she’d just been drifting.

I have that sometimes—a drifting feeling.

Her parents didn’t get it, really, but music was at least a proper activity for a young girl to be engaged in. Like I said, she says it saved her life.

Because, what—otherwise a star would have come to take her away?

You know, Isaac, I spent half my life on guard against that star. For the longest time she was all I had, the center of my universe, and I just had to be vigilant. Later, it felt like I was always trying to get her back—the real her. But it wasn’t just her, it was my childhood, the shining-ness of it. That time in my life was like a state of being I could somehow get back to, an anchor, like music was her anchor.

She says it saved her, so it probably did.

What is going to save me?

Ingrid