FOREVER

Dear Mom,

I’m going to keep writing to you for a while. Maybe forever. Maybe that was your plan. But I must say, for someone who wanted to die, you were awfully invested in controlling everything that happened after you left. You could have just stayed and made sure we kept doing what you wanted. Now we might not.

But I will write, because I’m not ready to be without you. I’m angry and wrecked and I’ll never fully understand. But I really miss you. I’ll miss you forever.

About Peak Wilderness: I know you did it to make me strong for the future, and also to keep me from falling down and dying of grief. To give me something to fight with, to rage against, to focus on. In some way, if not in exactly the way you intended, it worked.

Although that program . . . I don’t think I deserved it. But you know that already from the other letters. Or you don’t. I’m going to pretend you do.

So, it worked, sort of, but it could have scarred me for life. Scarred me more, that is.

And I wish, for karmic and practical purposes, that before you left me, you’d had to spend a few days collecting your dirty toilet paper in a Ziploc and sleeping on the wet ground with a smelly, snoring pervert. At the same time I wish you had seen one of the sunsets, swum in the freezing lake under the stars, sat around a campfire (roasting your undies), and grappled with your weaknesses and found your strengths and eaten bugs for dinner and learned to put up a tent, build a fire and a lean-to, tip a canoe, follow a path in the wilderness.

It just occurred to me: if purgatory is a real thing, it might be just like Peak Wilderness.

Where are you . . . ?

I hope you are somewhere. Somewhere better—with the happy little bluebirds, maybe.

Anyway.

I nearly lost my virginity to an ex-convict, which was really fun.

And when I got home, Andreas told me that a boy named Isaac had stopped by. My heart lurched, hearing this. I thought he’d moved on, was ready to give up for good.

“I invited him in,” Andreas said.

“You what?”

“I wanted to take his measure. We had coffee.”

“And . . . ?”

“I could tell he likes you, so I made very strong espresso,” he said with a mischievous grin. “He drank it.”

“This is your testing method for young men?” I said.

“One of them, yes. I’ll develop more as needed.”

I laughed.

“I believe he is . . . good. So if you like him . . .”

At this I gave another laugh, but a less comfortable one. “Like” is such a simple word.

“It’s been so long since I’ve even spoken to him,” I said. “What did you say?”

“Beyond pleasantries? Only that perhaps you would be ready to talk with him when you got back, and that I would . . . encourage you to. He left his number.”

“I have his number.”

“And his summer workplace information . . .”

I smiled. Tried to breathe.

“But I believe Juno is in Paris?” he said. “You could go there, and then I could meet you and take you to London to check out your school. Maybe this boy can wait . . . ?”

I laughed again. Cried again. Imagined myself at the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, in the cafés and shops and hostels, laughing with Juno, using our terrible French to chat up dashing Parisian men.

But in the end I needed to be here with Andreas for the rest of the summer, helping him tend the garden he’s planted where the garage used to be, here in our house with all my memories of you, with what’s left of you, with what I have to build the rest of my life on.

Andreas has rented a flat in London, and he’s going to base himself there so I won’t have to be alone. I know I will be seeing you—remembering you there, feeling like you’re around every corner, which I guess you are. You are around every corner of me.

You told me once I could be anything, and I believed you.

I’m choosing to continue believing it, even if you stopped.

Forever,
Ingrid