Dear Mauricio

Dear Mauricio

The blank page was taunting me.

I had so much to say yet I couldn’t find the words. His presence had been shrunk down to a round profile picture at the top of the page, the empty space below it begging to be filled. I didn’t know where to begin.

Dear Mauricio,

It felt so formal, so stiff. What else was there to say? How does one address their first love, their sworn enemy, the monster under their bed?

I imagined him on the other end of the message somehow. Watching as three dots flickered across the screen, perhaps holding his breath, waiting for words to appear. I knew it was impossible. He had no idea I had even found him or thought of him or planned to do whatever I was about to do. For once, I had the element of surprise.

I couldn't let him distract me, to pull me back to all the places he had kept me before. I closed the messaging app and took a deep breath, wanting to think of anything else. My tickets were bought. Itinerary planned. Yet I had left a small gap in my plans, just in case.

Mauricio,

I had written him before. The first letter I gave him had felt like a final goodbye. A collection of words in clumsy English, desperately trying to clarify the emotions I didn't understand. It was the end of 11 months abroad, my junior year spent living in a foreign country with his family. I occupied his childhood bedroom while he finished his thesis 12 hours away. He was a face in a faded photograph until I met him. A weekend in September that became my entire existence. I swallowed my shame and tried to forget until he came home one day in October. He couldn't stand being away from me, he had whispered.

Dear Mauricio,

I often thought of the first night I met him. In a room of strangers, surrounded by a language I couldn't comprehend, his smile was a welcome reprieve. He had studied abroad and could speak my native language. He was solace from confusion and chaos and culture shock. I couldn't help but blush as he told me I was different. I wasn't like the other 16 year olds he had met. I pretended not to notice the way he watched my lips when I spoke.

I drank each glass he handed me and fell into him as the world began to spin. The bitter taste of alcohol settled in, blanketing my tongue and lulling me into the warmth of inhibition. In the backseat of the car, the hand on my thigh melted into my skin and I couldn't help but notice how good he smelled. We went to a beach with people I couldn't remember the names of. He pulled me close and whispered words I wished I couldn't understand. The sand was heavy under my feet as I ran from him, tears crawling down my cheeks, vomit climbing up my throat. I had tried and tried but I couldn't wipe away the heaviness of his lips on mine.

Querido Mauricio,

I should have locked my bedroom door that night, but when he left me in the darkness I couldn't make my body move. I was a woman, he said. He promised me I was ready. I couldn't come up with a response that was louder than silence. The word danced across my brain, but I swatted it away, closed my eyes tight, and waited. I remembered each Sunday morning mass, each promise I had made to myself and the God I was desperate to believe in. I remembered it all and came up with a path to forgiveness. I crossed out the word "marriage" on my imaginary checklist and scribbled in "love" instead. I would wait for love and in the moments before he returned, I told myself I could love him. Love could erase the truth and drown out the panic in my brain.

Love soon meant the warmth of tears on my cheeks, the itch that came with the healing of skin cut and rubbed raw by the carpet in his bedroom. It meant a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the unbearable knowledge that I had been irreparably changed. I knew what love looked like, I had seen it in the gentle kisses and soft words exchanged by my parents. I knew what it looked like but not how it felt. Love became waking up to his skin pressed against mine.

I tried to find a place with him, running my fingers through his hair, kissing his forehead, drinking all the bad parts away. I tore apart my skin in all the places he had touched. I tried to wash him away but only managed to turn the water of the shower red as it gathered around my bare feet. He was everywhere.

I wrote him letters.

Mauro,

My second letter was anger. It was anger and rage and sadness poured onto a page that I promptly tucked away. The words found their place on the paper but the anger lingered inside me. I was 18 and the hands of my boyfriend had started to send me into darkness. With each gentle caress, the world around me would shift and I was no longer there. I was no longer myself, I was a collection of chaotic thoughts and hazy memories. I couldn't figure out why. Until I remembered.

To Mauricio,

I wrote more letters as the years went on. I etched his name into the core of my existence. I scribbled and erased and painted and tore, writing an entire universe of words over and over and over again. I tried to keep him confined to the pages of notebooks and journals and nightmares and memories I couldn't shake no matter how hard I tried. He always slithered back in. I could see his eyes on the lids of mine. My room was perpetually haunted by the memory of his silhouette in the darkness.

Mi amor,

He wrote me a final letter a year after I last saw him. I loved writing letters, he reminded me. People like receiving letters, he had written. His pages of professed love and sadness at my absence were meant as a gift I couldn't return. I put his words in a box, closed the lid, and told myself that none of it was real.

But still, I wrote him letters.

Sixteen. Sixteen letters for sixteen years.

One for each year we had been apart, one for each year I had lived when we met. Written confessions of all the years in which I tore myself apart, consumed by anger and sadness and confusion. I couldn't have realized it back then, I didn't want to. I had been robbed of something I didn't know to cherish.

Dear Mauricio,

No, too formal. After everything he had done, after all that I had lived, it was too formal. I opened the messaging app, the cursor blinking at me in anticipation.

Words spilled onto my screen.

#

Mauricio,

Please don’t delete this without at least reading it first. Please just respond yes or no, you owe me that much.

I’m starting to plan a trip back to Chile and if/when that happens, I’d like to see you and speak with you.

I know it’s been a long time but I think we both have a lot of things that have gone unsaid and I think we both deserve some closure.

I’m coming from a genuine place. I truly mean no harm and have no malice in my intentions. I’d just like the opportunity to see you in person. I have so much to tell you. Please at least have enough dignity and respect to respond. You owe me a response. -Kelsey (blue)

#

I read it and re-read it and read it once more. No matter what I erased and re-wrote, it all felt wrong. Open. Exposed. Vulnerable. I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to respond or merely roll his eyes and delete it. Maybe he’d never see it, maybe he’d block me or leave me on “read” forever. Maybe I’d never need to prepare to see his face again and my past could exist in words across pages, screaming into the universe and being met with silence. Maybe the wound would be forever left open and I’d be left with the painful realization that closure was something that other people get.

My last name had changed, my profile picture hid my face. I couldn’t imagine that he knew many Kelseys, but I couldn’t know for sure. I signed it "Kelsey (blue)", just in case. It was a nickname he gave me, inspired by the lyrics of a song he taught me to love. He had named me Kelsey Blue one night, fingers on the strings of his guitar and singing softly to me,

“Come on, baby blue…” A smile. A pause. A correction.

“Come on, Kelsey Blue.”

It was a nod to my blue eyes, he told me. A love note easily passed under the guise of a personal concert. At the time, it had felt like a gift. A way to remind me that I was special somehow, that I meant something, that what we had meant something. Years later I would tuck it away, force myself to forget, forfeit the identity that he had helped me create.

I thought of the piles of paper, secrets ripped from notebooks and journals, years of thoughts collected on pages, scattered across my desk. Each letter a recounting of pain, an expression of otherwise unbearable heaviness that nothing would take off my shoulders. I saved every letter that could never be sent.

Months before the moment in which my finger hovered over a screen, I had decided to go back to the end of the world, to the place that had destroyed me and left a ghost in the place of the person I once was. I wouldn't go back to that house or that city but maybe things could be different the second time around. Maybe things could be different because I was different.

I wasn't the girl on the bedroom floor. I wasn't the blood being washed down the drain. I was no longer the girl drinking herself into an abyss, struggling to come up for air but not caring if she did. I had grown into someone else. Someone better, someone whole, someone real.

I collected the letters, the story of our time apart. I pieced them together and I made a decision. I wouldn't send the letters. I would hand them to him.

I read the message once more.

Another breath and then

send.

I Could Write of Ghosts as Dead Things

thief / Cheater / Liar