letter to the juj, from the sky

Friday, June 13, 2008
Approximately over Lake Michigan

Dear Juliana Sartor,
I don’t think a whole lot of people use that as an adjective anymore. It is a formality, just thrown  in at the start of a letter, no one stops to think what it means.  You’re no fifty’s housewife either, this is not a “yes, dear” situation. You are dear to me. The same way you feel about deer. You are deer to me.
This starts as a letter because we have decided that writing letters to one another is the sort of thing that we ought to do. I don’t disagree. By the time I return on a plane to Michigan you will be headed towards, or possibly in, Montana. I will mail this when I get home, mailing it from California seems backwards and unfair to the postal system. I cannot explain why exactly, but a letter mailed from “home” (in this case, Michigan, or, you know, me) should be mailed from HOME. California isn’t home, California is some uncle I never heard back from. California got drunk at my aunt’s wedding and threw up in the guest bedroom. California never even volunteered to wash the comforter from that disaster. I ended up doing laundry the entire next day. Bad movies, good music, mediocre television, the need for ESL classes, fruits and vegetables. My father often says “California is the world’s seventh largest economy, by itself.” He could be making that up, but I doubt it, he isn’t the sort to try to impress anyone. He wears tired threadbare polo shirts with nothing underneath, red skin and tired hair poking out. In the truest sense, he has self-esteem.
This letter, or what I am attempting to make a letter, is intended to address the somewhat frightening truth that I have no recollection whatsoever of ever meeting you. Not that I don’t remember seeing you for the first time (I don’t), or talking to you for the first time (I don’t), but one day you were someone I knew, and that was just that. I feel as though I knew you before MLA with Kathy Thompson and Nicole, but maybe not. Did I see you and meet you and smell you and begin to know you the first day of my Junior year of High School? It is possible, though I find it unlikely. Through Nicole and Julie I feel like we would have met before, but my mind is entirely white and blank. Tabula Rasa… go fuck yourself with a philosophy class, sorry, talking to myself, my mind wanders entirely too much.
There are spots of my memory white with heat and anger, and biting fear. I remember terrible sad moments from my childhood, cowering under the red face of my father watching him do pathetic terrible things. I have forgiven him for some of these. I remember brilliant beautiful things, dancing with you in Mike Crowley’s living room, teaching Jeremy how to “frug”, smoking marijuana (calling it this seems appropriate here) and watching Garden State and crying and not knowing why. Reading in front of an assembled room of quiet and well-assembled people for the central review and you telling me I did fine. Same with the ann arbor slam. My memory melts and folds, things seem to have not happened, but I remember them happening. This is why it is so strange that I cannot even invent meeting you.
Meeting is a silly word, a short and entirely inaccurate word, I feel now that I know you, though I still confuse your brothers’ names (bizarre, I know, they are so different). I have seen your father once, and he looked nothing of what I thought he would. Angie’s Mom confused me for Chuckie the last time she saw me in the dim glow of my car’s overhead light in your nighttime driveway a month ago. So, perhaps I am not all that well connected to you, I never bought you a whole lot of stuff, I have only cried on you a couple times, blinding panic attack in aforementioned Mike’s bed especially. This does not keep me from feeling that you are part of me. You make me somehow whole, or at least feel that the parts of me that I find so inadequate only stand to make me human.  This is a love letter, not the usual Hollywood attempt to get you to make out with me on moldy basement couches, I have girls with plastic bottles of greek dressing and terribly red fake tans for that, apparently, but it seems that you ought to know how much you matter to me. So, you know, a lot.
And if I told you this simply out loud you would smile, and hug me, and say, “we know this.” Of course we do, it is public record that I care so much about you, having told you before, and it being recorded in a lot of poems and other poem-like things. My Mom was so glad to see me stay up much later than I should have the other night so I could laugh with you in the Grecian and feel decent about myself. I had not laughed out of anything but sadness and the great weary fear that comes with the loosening and tightening of bolts and gears in a very long time. I am becoming something much more Detroit, wiry muscles and veins appearing in my forearms, tips of my fingers soft from bathing in warm golden oil, knuckles scraped and raw.
So I hope this finds you in better spirits, I hope I run from steaming turning lathes into a car and drive across endless Iowa and Nebraska to find you beaming on the side of a melted and green mountain. Like all thoughts I have ever composed in my life, this must include an apology. I am sorry for the grammar, I will not proof-read this, it would make me misty eyed and probably freak out the perfectly nice late twenties couple sitting next to me. I apologize for not quite being able to settle the issue of you coming into my smudged memory, it is more important how vividly you exist there now. In the oceans and the quiet eternity of breaths taken we are just about as close to meaningless as it gets, but in the soft gray of a gravel lot every night when I scuff my shoes in dirt to soak up oil, it is our friendship that my mind turns to most often. I have a couple copies of the Central Review lying around my house, and I read through it lazily, knowing a lot of the poems and stories really well. And I have to admit that the Rogenbuck poem doesn’t really make all that much sense to me, still, you think it is sexual, but you aren’t afraid of sex. Whatever he meant by it, I have come to love a single line, buried in that bizarre use of the shift key.

I am becoming as birdlike as possible.

You are the reason.

I love you,

Dooley