To: condorboy
Date: Saturday, January 14—12:12 AM
Subject: save me
Dear Connor,
I know what you can do to make me happy: Invite me over next weekend. Take me away from all of this and let me run around in the forest with you. We can build our own little Craft Shack with sticks and stones, we can teach the squirrels and raccoons how to tie-dye, we can lie around in pine needles all day and listen to the wind toss pinecones to the ground. We can lick slugs again. We can do all the things we forgot how to do, all the things our lives won’t let us. Just you and me and the deer and the owls.
I’m serious, Connor. I miss you. I miss you so much. I’ve been living in this world inside my head where all I see are ugly reproductions of myself, except one of them dresses like Trevor, and one of them walks like my sister, and one of them talks like my math teacher, and one of the them smells like my mom, and I can pretend they’re all real people, that I’m running around trying to please them, but none of them are actually real. They’re just projections of myself and my fears and all the things I wish I did better. You’re the only real person I have left, the only one who’s something more than a need or a judgment or anger or disappointment. I don’t know how to explain it, just that I feel less alive now than I have in a long time, and I know—I just know—you can remind me what it feels like to have someone look at me and love me without wanting me to be something else.
Love,
Isabel