Stay of Execution

Letters I'll Never Send: To The Guy Who Didn't Call

Dear [_________],

      I saw you last night, and I think you saw me.  I was sitting with my family, laughing and drinking some red wine, when I looked down over the balcony and saw you there, standing, putting on your coat.  For a moment I couldn't concentrate on what my cousin was saying.  I watched you.  I wondered if you'd seen me come in and walk past your table.  I wondered who you were there with.  Your family, I expect.  A girlfriend?  Who knows.   It's been a long time.

      I kept watching you.  You were wearing a blue shirt, some kind of checked pattern.  From above I can see the way your hair is receding.  I hadn't noticed that before.  I prepared myself to give you a smile and a wave, but you didn't look up and I pulled my eyes back to my table.  Just as I turned back to the conversation I could see you glance up at me, out of my peripheral vision.  A moment later I looked back at you but you were looking away, and again I caught you looking up at me at the instant I was turning my head away.  So funny, these missed glances. 

Dear B,

My beautiful, vivacious, brave friend.  I am writing you as I promised I would last night.  This letter is for you to pull out in upcoming months when you doubt yourself and your decision, when you find yourself mean and full of self-judgment about what a bad person you are.  You're not.  You know that now, but you might have moments when you forget, and I want you to pull out this letter to help you remember. 

For the last 15 years you've been ignoring your inner voice, and all of your doubts.  Think of that little girl inside you who said, 'this doesn't feel good.'  Or, 'I want to do this instead.'  And she spoke up again and again and you shook your head impatiently and said, "Not now."  And finally you got sick of responding to her so you locked her away in a little closet.  And still she kept speaking to you, banging on the door of that closet and wailing, scared and alone and ignored.  And you shoved blankets under the cracks of the closet door and tried to muffle the sounds of your own dreams and your unhappiness.  Because it wasn't convenient at all to listen to her.  What she had to say was confusing and difficult.  You didn't know where it would lead.  You had the perfect life -- everyone agrees that you did -- and so that little girl inside you must be crazy, and dangerous.  Shut her up, for heaven's sake.

The bravest thing you've done is to go upstairs and open the closet door and let her out.  She was right, as it turned out.  She's your friend, and even more important, she's your responsibility.  Take her in your arms like you would your own daughter.  Tell her you're sorry.  And tell her you will always listen to her from now on. 

Letters I'll Never Send: To Myself in 12 Years

Dear Self,

When I think about what I want to say to you all I can think of is asking for forgiveness.  I hope you're not mad at me for not earning very much money.  I'm not putting enough away, and the last two years have been a blow to my savings.  I wonder if you're grumbling about my decisions.  I wonder what you think of me.   I feel like striking a deal with you: if you won't be mad at me for not making lots of money, I won't be mad at you if you haven't married anyone or had any kids. 

But of course you can blame me for those things, so it's not a fair swap, is it?

I don't know whether you'll be a harsh judge of me or a forgiving one.  I've eased up a lot since I was 20, but I still worry sometimes that I'm doing it wrong, whatever "it" is.  I don't notice it most of the time but when I sit down and think of you, sitting there a dozen years in the future, I can feel how desperately I want to do right by you.  I don't want you to be mad at me, or think I'm a big chump. 

Letters I'll Never Send: To Myself at Age 20

Dear Self,

I've been reading your journals lately and I'd like to take you out to lunch.  You could use a big sister, I think.  I haven't figured out how to do that yet so for now I'm writing you this letter.  As I write it I ask myself whether advice from the future can have any helpful impact.  Maybe not.  But I want you to know that I'm here, rooting for you, smiling and shaking my head as I read what you're discovering, and how it feels.  I'm grateful to you. I'd like to spare you some of the doubt and pain that's ahead. 

I love how open you are.  You are interested in everything.  You are making lots of plans.  A lot of them won't pan out.  Right now, you are fixated on what you aren't, and on what you will be, could be, should be.  You admire people who are different from you, who have the characteristics you would like for yourself.  You might benefit from spending a little time recognizing what you are.  What you are is pretty cool, as it turns out.  Don't wish it away or disregard it quite so easily.  You'll discover you can't avoid it anyway.  Remember the quote you put in our high school yearbook: "You can try to run but you can't hide from what's inside of you"?  Turns out you were right. 

Love Letters

You never wrote me a love letter.  I wonder what it would have been like, if you had?

You wrote me a love letter, but not until after I left you.  It was sad, and hard to read, and made me more sure than ever that I'd done the right thing. 

You gave me a love letter written to another woman.  I have no idea why. 

Your love letters were cryptic and oblique and lovely.  I still read them.  Sometimes they make me smile, and sometimes they make me cry. 

I pretended that what you wrote me weren't love letters, because I didn't know how to respond. 

***************************************

I wrote you a love letter, but I never sent it. 

I wrote you a love letter, and I wish I'd never sent it.  How was I ever so dumb, anyway?

I wrote you a love letter that contained the words, "This is not a love letter." 

I wanted to write you a love letter, but I was afraid and I didn't know how. 

I wrote you a love letter that I couldn't wait to give you, and I smiled imagining you reading.   When I saw you next you quoted it back to me.  I had never seen you that happy.   

Letters I'll Never Send: To My Dead Grandfather

                                                                                                                    August 13, 2005
Dear Grandpa,

It's been a little more than a year since you died, so I thought I'd write and let you know how things are going.  We miss you, but we're muddling along alright.  Grandma was very sad for awhile, although she pretended not to be.  I always thought she was the social one, and you were the quiet one, but I think she liked to be home with you, reading in your chairs side by side in the green room, more than anything else.   She does crossword puzzles and calls people on the phone and reads, but she doesn't like to go out too much.  I know she talks to my dad just about every day, and I'm pretty sure E calls in from Ireland daily, too.

Letters I'll Never Send: A Confession

                                               July 28, 2005

Dear [________]

    I'm willing to bet that you've never seen the website www.postsecret.com.  It's an address where people send secrets written on the back of postcards.  The website is a collection of photographs of those postcards.  It's mesmerizing and wonderful and sad and lovely.  I've been looking at it a lot lately.

    And I've been thinking about my secret, what I would write on a postcard, and how it would feel to tell it.  My secret is about you.

    I was in your house one time, years ago.  You weren't there, and I was looking for some paper to write a letter.  I found a spiral bound Mead notebook in a drawer of odds and ends and opened it up toward the middle, looking for a blank page.  I saw right away it was your journal -- I hadn't known you kept one -- and I didn't put it down.  No, I read it.  Not too much, I was too guilty for that, plus you might have been coming back shortly, but I read a few pages, marvelling at your inner world.

    And here's the thing.  What I read in that journal was more complicated and discerning than I had realized you were.  You were writing about something hard, turning it over on the pages, writing about your own struggle to make sense of it and suddenly I saw the subject -- and you -- in a whole new way.  I saw your intellect and your heart and I admired you more, and differently, than I ever had.  I had a glimpse of your mind.  But I stole that glimpse, it was your private world, and I was ashamed of myself for stealing it.  I've pretended for years that I don't know who you really are.  No, this is worse.  I've pretended not to be interested. 

    We know each other, but not well, and I'm ashamed because I think that's my fault.  I have these layers of shame and gratitude that I can't separate.  I want to be ashamed for reading your inner thoughts and part of me desperately is, but part of me is grateful, too, for the little glimpse of you I got.  I'm ashamed that I don't know how to get there through conversation. 

   Yours,

   Scheherazade

Letters I'll Never Send: Purple Loosestrife

                                                              August 3, 2001

Dear People of Canada,

    On behalf of the United States, I would like to apologize to you for the infestation of purple loosestrife that threatens your country's beautiful yet vulnerable ecology.  It will be a shame to see the Atlantic provinces covered in this invasive wetland killer.  Although we are not directly responsible for introducing this exotic plant, the New England states have been guilty of sloppy ecological stewardship and a lackadaisical approach to spread prevention.  For this, I sincerely apologize to my neighbors to the north.

    Yours,

    Scheherazade Fowler

Letters I'll Never Send: An Ancient Grudge

I am starting a new category for letters I've written or imagined writing but wouldn't ever send. 

In a 2001 journal, I found this letter.  I was on a post bar-exam roadtrip with my dear friend, who has since become my Housemate, and we were talking about people we hold unreasonable grudges against, or still feel guilty about mistreating.  We offered to take dictation for one another and while driving we drafted some letters, that are funny and somehow serious at the same time.  This one is to a girl who was mean to me in 4th or 5th grade: