Dear Kurl,
All our talk. All the beautiful sentiments we’ve expressed to each other about our limbs twining together like vines and our minds sharing the same food and our hearts drinking from the same cup.
All our talk is empty, isn’t it? Or it’s superficial, at least—it describes something we feel at certain sparkling moments, something we feel all over the surface of ourselves but not deep down, not truly all the way through.
I know now that there are depths of you to which I can’t travel. There are areas I’ve never seen and am not permitted to go. You’ve cordoned them off, strung barbed wire around the perimeter, laid land mines. I get too close and you’re instantly up the tower with a bullhorn, hollering warnings. Watch your step. Danger. Back off.
It was only our third time inside my tent together. It brings back all my anger and frustration to realize that it’s only been three times, total, in all these months.
Lyle was out of town, and Shayna was singing at the Ace, and you and I were in my tent. It was late, Kurl; you’d come way later than you said you would. I waited forever. But I didn’t mind because now that you were here, the tent had lost its musty canvas chill. It was warm, and it smelled like you. Like us. I was already naked and it felt hot and tender, and we’d only begun. We had the whole rest of the night, or so I thought.
And then I caught a glimpse of the raw stripe across your hip, the beads of drying blood. Did you think leaving your T-shirt on would be enough to hide it? Did you think it was too dark in the tent for me to see? Did you think I wouldn’t feel you wince when I gripped your hip bone?
I sat up. You tried to pull me back down, but I shook you off. “You were late because of your uncle?” I said.
You sat up, too, and folded the sheet over your lap. You didn’t answer.
“Did you have to wait until he was finished? Until he passed out, or something?”
“Yes,” you said. Your mouth came to mine and your hand found my thigh, trying to end the conversation.
“Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just grab the keys, get in the car, and leave?”
Silence.
It made sense to me, suddenly, why you’d jogged over here instead of driving, arriving sweaty, saying you need to shower, asking to borrow a T-shirt of Lyle’s even though his largest one is still too tight on you. You’d been in that state, hadn’t you?—the state of needing to keep moving so you wouldn’t feel like you were dying. Unable to rest or be still.
I pinched the hem of your shirt and lifted it. More stripes reached around your ribs. More raw skin.
You swatted my hand away. “Leave it.”
I grabbed the hem again and yanked on it, hard, until the shirt ripped at the shoulder.
“What’s wrong with you?” you said.
“With me? What’s wrong with me?” I filled up with anger then. My whole body swelled with outrage. I said, “You’re hurt, Kurl; why are you pretending everything’s fine?”
“I’m not pretending,” you said. “I just don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“It’s not okay.” I hunted around for my shorts and pulled them on. I was so angry that my hands were shaking. “You never want to talk about anything, Kurl. You’re like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand.”
You laughed. “Really? I’m like an ostrich?”
“It’s not funny.” I crawled out of the tent and switched on the overhead light. Everything in my room looked pathetic to my eyes, naïve and juvenile. The bookshelf with its volumes of poetry, the row of comic books on the bottom shelf. The leather suitcase spilling out my vintage ties and handkerchiefs. Leaves of Grass lying on my desk, opened to a passage I’d planned on reading to you. Silly, romantic, superficial stuff.
And meanwhile you were hurt, Kurl. You kept being hurt, and hurt, and hurt, and there was nothing I could do to help you or to stop it. Nothing was helping.
You came out of the tent, blinking in the light.
“You don’t want to talk about it? Let’s talk about something else, then,” I said. “Like your essay.”
“What essay?”
“Your autobiographical essay. For college.”
“What does that have to do w—?”
I cut you off. “Why haven’t you written it yet? Why do you keep stalling, and refusing to talk about it, and telling me you have it under control?”
“Because I do have it under control.”
I’d caught the sharpness in your voice and felt a nudge of satisfaction at eliciting a reaction from you, finally. I wanted to see you get as furious and desperate as I felt. So I pressed harder: “You’re lying, Kurl; I can tell. Go ahead and stick your head in the sand, but I’m not going to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re not planning on writing that essay at all.”
A slow, angry flush came over your face. I could see the tightness in your jaw, that lockdown look coming into your eyes, but I ignored it.
“Tell me the truth. You’re not even planning to try, are you?”
Silence.
“I knew it.” I plucked Leaves of Grass off my desk and waved it at you. “Ms. Khang chose you for this. She wants you to have a future. Why are you throwing it away?”
“You and this fucking book.” You snatched it out of my hand. “I don’t have to take this shit from you.” You hurled the book across the room so hard that when it hit the wall it thudded to the floor in two pieces, its spine split.
“Nice,” I said.
You moved fast, scooping your sweats and soiled T-shirt from the floor, getting ready to leave, but I beat you to the door and raised both hands and pushed you back. “You’re just scared,” I said.
“Get the fuck out of my way,” you said.
“You’re a coward, Kurl.”
Your fist crashed into the door beside my head. The splintering crack burst through my skull like a gunshot.
“You little asshole.” You wrenched your fist back and cocked it again. It hovered in front of my face just long enough for me to see how your arm shook and how blood sprang up across your knuckles.
Then you dropped your arm and flung yourself backward, so fast that you stumbled and landed hard on your ass. Your shoulder plowed into a tent pole, and you scrambled, crabwise, along the edge of the sagging canvas until you were backed up against the bookshelf. “Oh, fuck, I’m sorry,” you breathed. “Oh, fuck.”
I slid down to the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees. I was dizzy and cold. My heart was pounding, but it didn’t seem to be circulating any blood around my body.
There was a long silence. You were still clutching your jogging clothes, and you used your sweatpants to mop up the blood on the back of your hand. You’d gouged your knuckles quite badly, and you looked at the injury with great absorption, holding your hand there, fingers trembling slightly, in front of your face.
“You should leave,” I said.
You nodded but didn’t immediately move. “There’s no point to the essay,” you said, quietly. “I can’t go to Duluth.”
“What?”
“College. I’m not going.”
“Why not?” I said.
“I’m not leaving my mother in that house with him.” You were still staring at the blood on your hand.
“That’s insane.”
“It’s not insane. It’s a fact. He works it out on me until he’s spent.”
“You can’t—that’s not…” But I couldn’t think of anything to complete the sentence.
Another long silence. You looked up and gazed dully over my head, staring at the hole you’d punched in the door.
“Kurl,” I said. “This is your life we’re talking about.”
A bitter, hopeless smile came over your face. You swept your hands in a gesture that took in the splintered door, the collapsed tent, the wrecked book, and your own damaged torso. “This is my life.”
You left, then. Heaved yourself to your feet, walked all the way around the other side of the tent to avoid approaching me head on. I moved aside to let you out. I listened to your footsteps on the stairs, the shuffling sounds as you put on your sweatpants and shoes. Then the front door clicked quietly shut like a coffin lid.
This morning I found your socks still folded together on my desk. I sat here at my desk staring at your socks and remembering how, when you arrived late last night and headed straight into the shower, I’d picked up your sweat-damp socks off the floor and lifted them to my nose before putting them aside.
I remembered how you’d once caught me doing the same thing with another pair of your socks, and how you’d laughed and called me pervy.
“It’s the socks’ fault, not mine,” I’d said. “They just keep floating up here to my face and forcing me to sniff them.”
Silly. A silly conversation, just for the joy of it. Sparkly, superficial, like everything we’ve said to each other.
As I sit here this morning, writing all of this out, I know that I said none of the things I actually believe are true. I should have said that you’re heroic, trying to keep your mom safe in the face of your uncle’s abuse. I should have said that you deserve to be safe, too, Kurl, and that it breaks my heart into a million pieces to see you trapped like this. Instead, in my fury and helplessness, I managed to imply that somehow it’s your fault for not writing the essay, for not taking the college lifeline. It’s not your fault, Kurl. I know that. I’m sorry I called you a coward.
The worst part of all is that it wasn’t just last night, was it? This fight has been brewing for ages between us. It’s been weeks and maybe months already, Kurl, that I’ve been learning to watch for the coded signs of your temper. I’ve been teaching myself to recognize where the trees have been felled, where the soil is torn up, where the trenches are dug. Without realizing it, I’ve already been turning back before I get close to your danger zone. Your no-man’s-land.
Yours,
Jo