Dear Kurl,
Yesterday was amazing, wasn’t it? It was hands down the best birthday I’ve ever had. Thank you for my lantern! The LITTLE WIZARD from Detritus, which you fitted with an LED/battery mechanism so that I don’t burn the house down in a kerosene fire.
You confessed that you’d had it since before Christmas but had been too shy to give it to me back then. “It’s for the tent,” you murmured, when I unwrapped it, and laughed at me when my face heated up at the thought of my tent with this red light glowing over our skin.
It was my first civic protest, but I’m fairly confident it won’t be my last. The whole day felt like the future. The warm sun on our backs promising summer. The whole Otulah-Tierney family pitching in—Bron’s mother, her sister, and the twins handing out leaflets, her dad passing around a thermos of hot chocolate to our group. I loved all the chanting: “No spills, no fear, tankers are not welcome here!”
As usual, the credit for the successful event must be laid at Bron’s feet. Her mother said as much: that none of them would even know about the oil-tanker issue if Bron hadn’t been delivering her weekly lectures at their breakfast table. In a way the whole day was an Otulah-Tierney-family festival in Bron’s honor, since she’d just received her acceptance to the Stanford journalism program, her top choice.
But for me, the aspect of the day that made it feel most like the future was the briefest of moments, Kurl—thirty seconds, forty-five at most. Do you know what I’m referring to? You held my hand. We were marching along in the crowd, in public, in broad daylight, and you reached out and took my hand and held it. The best part was that it didn’t feel strange or unnatural at all. It felt right.
Bron ruined it, bless her over-politicized little heart. She poked her head between us from behind and said, “Okay, see? When you two can do that at school, in the hall, without any recriminations: That’s when we’ll know we’ve achieved equality, and not until then.”
Yours,
Jo
PS: In reference to your last letter: I formally forgive you. I forgave you the first time you apologized. Anger is a relatively small thing, Kurl. We are large, remember? We contain multitudes.