To my firstborn, Kalina,
Dearest daughter, I am writing you this letter because I plan to take my own life and I do not want to leave this world without first leaving you something of myself. We haven’t talked much over the past decade, and I’ve never met your son, which saddens me. The state of my relationship with your mother has deteriorated more and more with the time and distance between us. I’m happy that she has been able to be there for you. I wish I could have been.
I plan to have you travel here with your son and your mother. I plan to accomplish this by telling you that I am dying of cancer. After you come and I see you and meet my grandson, I will sell this house that you and your brother grew up in and give you the money. Then I will die, but not from cancer, though this dark force in me might as well be cancer. It’s not so much a thing as a place within me—a black hole of sorts—that sucks me in and holds me down. As long as I’m alive and tethered to this body and this mind, I will be imprisoned by this place. So my death should not be mourned, because I am setting myself free.
I fell in love with your mother because she took the end of my tie between thumb and finger and when I asked her what she was doing she said: feeling for smoothness. It was the most unique gesture and explanation for a gesture I had ever encountered. Most people I had dated came to me with a multitude of inane thoughts and words thrown together without discrimination. I myself had been artlessly rhetorical in 90 percent of the conversations I’d ever had. I gave more value to speech varied through phrases of eloquence than to the substance underlying that speech. Your mother had a diverse thought life and a simple way of sharing it without being condescending.
Another reason why I fell in love with your mother was her avoidance of my heavy eye contact. Her eye contact, the narrow gallery of her glance—it had perfect aim in its timing and intensity, and it always remained light. Or at least, not heavy. Her eye contact was like her speech: she would either speak most concisely or most fully. And there would be a good reason for either.
It wasn’t just my eye contact that was heavy. Your mother tried but she could not bear the weight. In our early days together, I had this terrible habit of missing her even when I was with her. I thought it would be endearing but she experienced it as pressure. Instead of enjoying the moment, I was terrified of the moment’s inevitable end and worried about when the next moment of our togetherness would be. Neither of us had a lot of free time. I thrived on that sense of constant anticipation. She was always present. Right with the moment. My preoccupation with the moment’s end annoyed her.
Once, we were driving and I asked her what she was thinking about and she said: the lines that we drive on that carry us nowhere; the cracks of the pavement filled with battered moonlight.
Even the way her bad moods played out from the glittering arrangement of her brain was present and carved by the sharpness of her intellect.
You are this same way, Kalina. You are smarter than most people you meet and you know it and they know it. You won’t give most people a chance and most people won’t take a chance because your intelligence scares them. Don’t make the same mistakes your mother made. Let people in. Your son, let him in. I don’t know him and perhaps will never meet him but I suspect he is more like me than you. His absence of knowledge about you makes him want to know you all the more. It’s more powerful than mere want; it feels to him as though his life depends upon knowing you. This was how I was with my own mother, which set in motion what I sought from women as an adult. And so the past repeats itself, plays itself out again and again in the next generation and the next.
There is something I want to confess to you. I have never told anyone, not even your mother.
When I was a child, between the ages of nine and twelve, we lived in India. We lived on a military base, but my mother worked outside of the base and dropped my sisters and me off at a village woman’s house to be minded. The woman had three boys, all around my age. Most days, she would send her boys out to play with my sisters and keep me inside. She made me do chores like sweeping the floor and washing her clothes. At first, it seemed unfair, like she was singling me out to punish me. But after a few days, she made me take my clothes off to do the chores. Then after I washed her clothes, she made me wash her. She took her clothes off and sat in the washtub and gave me a cloth and a bar of soap and had me wash her body. She had large, brown breasts and a mass of black hair between her legs and under her arms.
When she had me do these things without my clothes on, I felt singled out because I was special, not because I was being punished. For many months, she never did anything beyond wanting me to do my chores naked and wash her body. But then one day, she made me do sexual things to her while she was in the washtub. She took my hand and put it on her vagina, pushed my fingers into her. She made me suckle her breasts. After weeks of doing these things only when she was in the washtub, we began doing them in her bed. And she would do sexual things to me as well. This went on for at least a year until one day I told her I wanted to be out of the house with the other kids instead. And so it abruptly stopped. She put me out of the house and did not let me back in. After it stopped, I spent my time running around with her boys, two younger and one just barely older. We connected with another group of boys in the village and we would all have sex with each other. It was a sort of game. We would chase after each other and wrestle, then clothes would come off and it would turn into sex. I think this is why, as I grew older, my attractions tended to be toward younger men and older women.
Or, maybe, one has nothing to do with the other. And maybe it doesn’t matter.
Making excuses for my sadness doesn’t lighten my burden. And it hasn’t been all sadness, this life. There have been pockets of joy so profound that it felt more painful than the sadness. It was a sharp, satisfying pain—like a cramp in your side when you run too fast, too far.
Love, your father, Todor