A Collection of Letters
by Eva Lorren
University of Missouri - Kansas City
Eva Lorren is currently majoring in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri Kansas City. She is going to graduate in 2023.
For my mother:
You were a striking woman. Every morning before school I’d come downstairs into our kitchen, all furrowed eyebrows and froth. Unlike me, you were a morning person. There you’d be, in the kitchen doing yoga. Your arms would be raised up way over your head and when you breathed the flowers had a reason to bloom. You were your best self in the morning. You were even more important than the sun.
You’d always laugh at my grumpiness and ask, “Wanna strawberry-banana smoothie, sunshine?” Each morning, I was greeted with your coffee-stained smile and a fresh smoothie, and each morning I’d frown and sigh and trudge off to school, but I never missed giving you a good-bye hug.
You could tie your long thin hair in a bun by twisting the strands around your hand and pulling the ends through. You’d pause in parking lots and in between laundry loads and I’d watch as you gathered all your hair in your hands and tied it into a loose bun. Once I commented on it, how effortless you made it look.
“I think my mom used to do it too,” you said. “I remember being a little girl and watching her tie her hair in a knot.” You shrugged like it meant nothing.
So, I’d try and try to carry on the tradition, tying up my hair with nothing but itself, but I’ve never been able to do it. My arms would ache with the effort of it, and every few months I would try again and fail. How I’ve longed to twist my hair up and need nothing else, the way you and your mother do it, but I am afraid I am merely a muddled image of the two of you.
I remember you used to call me your shadow. Lovingly, after I’d follow you around our one-bathroom house painted pale yellow while you watered each plant. Some mothers would have complained, I guess, that their daughter was too close or under foot. But you only looked at me with warmth.
There was something special in your hands, so much care and love that radiated inside of you, I remember that you once carried a dying aloe leaf across the country, tucked in your purse and wrapped in a wet paper towel. You settled it into our house, then. Carefully tucked it into soil and used the rainwater you collected to nourish it. Just a touch of your magic hands and it healed.
There is no one else on Earth who could fill your image. No one else took walks for hours in the forest, barefoot, to cleanse negative energy. No one else could lead family yoga sessions, show us how to find our spiritual animal guide through mediation. No one else would have made me fresh smoothies in the morning or sunbathed on the deck all afternoon.
I’ll never stop molding myself like clay into an image that resembles you.
For my uncle:
You always stood tall in my memory. When I picture you, you’re not gray and tired and fighting like now, you’re in the pool. When I was young, you’d lift me from the sparkling water and toss my skin and bones body into the blue. I was enthusiastic and amazed and a child.
When I was a little older, maybe fifteen or so, you started giving me advice. It was drunken and longwinded, but I loved it. God, how I loved it. I’d stand outside, inhaling second-hand cigarette smoke. The scent belongs to you now and it always will; I could smell cigarette smoke fifty years from now and think of you only.
You’d always say, “I love you. You’re a great kid.” And I’d bask in the sunshine praise, feeling special and chosen to keep you company while our family drank inside.
My mom used to roll her eyes because your advice was always tinged with alcohol, but I took it hungrily in both hands. You probably don’t remember any of those words now, but I always will: “You can’t please everyone. Be independent. You’re the best, kid.”
Last I saw you, you were frail, thin, but your eyes still shone the way I remembered, even though they were flattened. You looked beaten and worn, stubble lined your cheeks and darkness circled your eyes, and I remember when you taught me how to drive. You’d take me to quiet roads I had never been to before and trusted me behind the wheel in a way my mom didn’t. We rolled the windows down and you taught me how to see the curb in my rearview mirror, showed me how to cruise to a stop instead of slamming, how to check my blind spot. I noticed that you never smoked in my parents’ car, but I wondered if you ached for a cigarette in those moments.
For the ghosts in my apartment:
You dance and glide over scratched hardwood floors. Ripped and graying Victorian gowns scrape the floor along with flapper girls twisting and twirling in their sparkling dresses. Those in the dining room whisper over an invisible candelabra and gaze worryingly at me in between tinkling conversation.
“She’s starting to smell.”
“God, is she staring at the knives, again?”
“I wish she’d just do it already. So, we can get back to the party.”
“Don’t say that- you remember how it felt to die.”
Some of the party dances in the living room, always arguing about which decade of music is better. Some of them swing dance, others head-bang.
The air around me- the human girl- starts to rot. It swells out of my ribs and fills my green kitchen with musk- a weed like scent. Crumpled on the floor. The ghosts already know: this is dying. This is living but dying inside. This is soul crushed hurt. This is sinking into the floor.
Some are watching me with a kind of curious expression, some of you worried. I do not blame you, any of you, for caring or not caring.
For my fifteen-year-old self:
You don’t know what hurt lies ahead. Remember how your mother would walk down the stairs: barely touching them, like how wind would move down the stairs. Memorize it. Write in into flashcards and keep them beside your bed. Think of her laugh: how it’s like yours, tinkling like chandelier diamonds bumping together. Remember how she’d stretch one foot all the way onto the counter when standing behind the bar in our kitchen. You would always make fun of her for that, huh. And the way she’d drink her coffee in the morning: staring into space, looking at nothing. Like her mind needed to process each sip. She laughed with you, then, like change clinking together in a pocket. Revel in the simplicity, the car rides home from school. I know you hate being picked up; I know you want to drive. But those car rides are numbered and so are your days in high school and how I wish you would have cared more. How I wish you would have hugged her tighter. Memorize her scent. Remember the time that you found an old dryer sheet in the closet? How it immediately brought you back in time, all the way to kindergarten. You would cry and hold her with slimy little fists until the teacher coaxed you away, distracted you. How you felt the same way when she crashed her car and left- like a hopeless child, screaming and kicking.
For the man who killed my mother,
There will never be a moment where you are not setting fire to the anger in my body, making it hurt, making it more dangerous. It swells out of me, and I break down to the floor in grocery store aisles that my mother used to go to, when I drive by the yoga studio she taught at.
I do not forgive you. I will hold onto this anger in my clenched fists, I will braid it into my hair each day. I do not forgive you, but I understand.
I’ve seen it with my uncle. He would let the alcohol steep in his blood, then get behind the wheel. I understand how it can numb the hurting. Everyone has their coping mechanism: whether it’s rolled into a joint, sloshing around in a bottle, in pages of a novel, or between bedsheets.
You may have drank to cope, but now I have no mother. Maybe you badly needed to be elsewhere, but now my mother will never visit my apartment. She will never see the paintings I made for her, filling my walls. Maybe she is watching from a cloud, but I cannot text her goodnight. I can never give her a copy of my first book or let her hold my child. You have taken it all away, in just a screeching moment on the highway.
I will never forgive you. You deserve the kind of rot that only occurs underground. You deserve blood and bruises and pain, the kind of pain you only ever feel from losing your mother.
For the old man upstairs,
I am still awake with a headache, and I am chilled to the bone because I heard you cough upstairs, like usual, but worse. This time sounded splitting, airless, choking, dying kind of coughing. Three of these, these heaves, and a thump to the floor and I thought, “This is it. I am witness to the old man upstairs’ death.” And I’m thinking and thinking, and you don’t have a wife, no one you live with and how you’ll just lay on the floor for God knows how long, and I’m thinking of those last breaths, how painful and helpless the feeling must be, and I’m thinking of what it would be like, going like that, and if you are as panicked as I am or if it’s peaceful. And now with you gone I am reminded of this ticking clock. I will watch my uncle die otherwise he will watch me, and I know it’s better that way. I know his niece should be confident and steadfast and make a point to not stare at pill bottles and kitchen knives for too long. I am sick to my stomach now, and my head still hurts, and it aches to be human in this moment.
My bed is suffocating, wrapped around my aching body. It feels like I am breathing in my bedsheets instead of air.
Right when death starts feels more like a friend than an enemy, I hear you again. That same old-man cough. That same smoking-for-fifty-years cough. And it’s like I exhaled all the tension in my body. You’re all right up there, for tonight at least. Sleep feels a little closer now, like I could hold its floating hand.
For Suicide,
It’s funny, as I’ve gotten to know you, I’ve noticed you arrive at my door in a different form each day. Sometimes you come as a wave: frothy and biting. You knock me down by my knees and wash over my whole body. These days you weigh me down like I am swaddled in a heavy wool blanket.
Often, you are a mosquito. Pestering. I’m swatting at my skin, and you are biting all the hard-to-reach places; nibbling at my neck, in between my toes, the middle of my back. You fly around my face and get tangled in my hair.
Sometimes, you wait a while to join me; come late in the afternoon. You suddenly spill out from a cup of tea, covering my lap in liquid longing for death. You trip me on the sidewalk, you snag my sweater like a door handle.
Other days you arrive by whisper, a soft, candlelit, swirling piece of smoke that curls up by my ear: whispering promises of sleep forevermore. You seem gentle, comforting those days. Like a solid backup plan. You remind me of waving grass and tombstones and make me wonder if any skeletons are glad that they finally left.
On occasion, you do not knock on my door. You go on vacation, take a break from your day job. These days are strange to me, like I weirdly miss my annoying coworker who hogs the water station and breathes too loud in the elevator. But these are nice days. Gentle days.
Suicide, how you keep surprising me. How I wish you would make up your mind.
For my uncle,
Sometimes, I don’t think of you for long stretches of time, for several days. Other times you are always floating around in my head, bumping into the corners. I wonder if you think of your sister, my mother, daily. How could you not? She was the epitome of grace. She was the center of our ecosystem.
I drive past your house to see your old truck with the latter on top. I like to see the cats that roam around your yard. They sit on the old couch on your front porch.
Sometimes, you are there too, out front, smoking a hand rolled cigarette. I watched you roll one, once, when I was a lot younger.
“I thought,” you said, taking a little box out of tobacco and rolling paper out of your pocket, “that hand rolling my cigarettes would make it easier for me to quit. Because it’s more work, you know. Turns out it’s making it harder! They’re so much better than the store-bought.” You chuckled and brought it up to your lips, then your face got grave, serious. “Promise me you’ll never start smoking. It’ll ruin your life.”
I believed you. I’ve never touched a cigarette, for you. How I’ve wanted one, to bring it up to my lips, femme-fatale style, but then I think of the promise.
“I promise.” I said, “I promise, I promise, I promise.”
I promise I’ll never bring a cigarette to my lips. I promise I’ll slow down in front of your house one day; I’ll ring your doorbell. I promise I’ll hug you; I’ll say I missed you. I promise you’ll get better, sober, happier. I promise I’ll shut the door in suicide’s face, so that you’ll be the one to hold a copy of my first book, hold my first child in your arms. I promise I’ll stay alive for you. Please promise me the same.