“And now it makes sense?”
“Because she thought you would have needed it more.”
“Oh.” A track record of panic attacks and the kind ofanxiety that didn’t let you sleep. Obviously people had known, my family had known, Em had known. But to hear it like that from my brother? It was just... something. I didn’t know what it was.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Abe said quickly. “I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
“No, it’s totally fine. It’s just a thing. It’s not a bad thing,” I repeated. And it wasn’t a secret, I reminded myself. One of the downsides of having such a close family: things weren’t secret.
“I’m sorry. But you’re doing so much better now, so probably she just wanted to check in with you.”
“Yeah, probably,” I said, thinking my aunt had probably not written twenty-four letters for the simple purpose of checking in with me.
“What are you supposed to do next?”
“I don’t know; I haven’t read the next letter yet.”
“I’ll go!”
“What?”
“This is perfect; nobody ever comes in here, so you’ll have privacy. I’ll go, and then we can just talk later, okay?”
I could tell Abe felt bad. He was practically tripping over himself to get out of the bathroom (four things he hated the most: hugs, confrontation, hurting people’s feelings, and people who dog-eared the pages of books). I barely had time to say good-bye before he disappeared out the door.
Now that I was alone in the bathroom, though, I saw Abe’s point. I had privacy, I had time, I had toilets: What else could I really ask for? I pulled myself up to sit on the row of sinks and started reading.
Lottie,
There are many different types of writing. Light-hearted, serious, believable, fantastical, political, romantical... I’ve spent my life writing about a little immortal boy and his sister, Margo, and I’ve had such a nice time doing it. Writing isn’t for everyone. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. It takes a little bit of talent, but mostly it takes practice and determination. There’s a saying, something about talent and work and the ratio of 10 percent to 90 percent, respectively. I agree with that completely. I’ve watched hugely talented (more talented than I, certainly) people do nothing at all with their writing, and I’ve watched people who can’t write a proper sentence chug through it and patch together a story and go on to become a best-selling novelist (no names). You can see, then, how perseverance is really the key to any sort of success.
But aside from Alvin Hatter, I’ve really been writing all my life. You have my journals now (not quite time to read them yet) and my computer, and Ireally think I’ve written about a thousand times more words than I’ve actually seen published. That’s a good thing. There’s a lot of junk in my brain that needed to come out before the really good stuff could find its way.
So, something easy next:
Write in your journal, Lottie. You used to do it all the time, and I think it might be good for you.
Who knows, maybe you’ll even discover your own immortal boy.
Love, H.
My first journal was a gift from Aunt Helen when I was eight years old. I filled it with glittery cat stickers and stick figure drawings and profound musings on the day, like:Peter Garbo is an idiotandAbe eats his own boogersandIf I could be any animal in the world it would be a cat with wings. Rainbow wings.
When I had filled it up, I presented it to Aunt Helen proudly, and she pretended to be floored by my observations.
“This is great stuff, Lottie. Someday you’ll look back on this and be happy you wrote it all down.”
She bought me another one, and I went through two or three a year until I was fifteen and it suddenly felt like all the things I wanted to write about were too heavy for the paper. My anxiety was worse than ever, my brain was atreacherous place to navigate, and I thought those feelings might be better left trapped inside me than free to fill up a page.
So I piled the journals in a box in my closet.
I hadn’t looked at them in years, but that night I took the last half-finished journal from the box and went into the attic, which was hot and stuffy but at least afforded the maximum amount of privacy, and I wrote.
Or—I tried to write.
My pen hung an inch or so above the paper, but I couldn’t think of anything to do with it. Where there used to be words, there was now only a quiet kind of emptiness. My ears were fuzzy and ringing slightly, like how I imagined it would sound to be buried alive.
I’d been thinking a lot about death lately. About the many different ways a person could die.
