A Love Letter Thirty-Three Years in the Writing

It was a cold night in February; I had gone to my parents’ house to pick something up, but I remember clearly that as I walked out of the house, a haze around my heart, my whole body and my knowledge of all things good and true, my mother pushed open the screen door at the kitchen, leaned out from it and said, “Don’t you dare skip class to go to some funeral.”

But before I share this story with you, I need your trust. I need you to know this has been locked in my heart for thirty-one years. I want you to know this is about a girl who has been gone for thirty-one years. She has now been dead longer than she was alive. I want you to know I loved her.

Death is simple. It is finished. It is complete.

Love, my friends, is complicated.

In August of 1985 I enrolled for my fall classes at the local university, which was either thirteen miles away or maybe a million miles away from my parents’ home. I was a very young eighteen.

To give you an idea of what eighteen looked like for me, our one, avocado-green landline phone hung on the kitchen wall. The TV turned by a dial you had to get up and turn. The microwave oven was as big as a Buick. We had a Buick. I had never seen the ocean or a meal that didn’t get cooked in a black iron pot with a mirepoix base.

Before that day, signing up for fall classes, I had also never seen a woman who looked like that.

My best friend, Todd, and I were walking to the registrar’s office to write our largest checks ever. She was a friend of his and he introduced us.

Let me set the scene: If this were a montage in a movie, the film would slow down, and our uber-poetic, geeky, over-achieving, eager-to-please, Molly Ringwald look-a-like heroine—me—would find her heart beating quicker than a Van Halen drum solo.

See, she had on a long, soft, billowing paisley-printed skirt with mahogany combat boots. She had on a grey tee. Her hair was pixie short and a deep brown. Her eyes were brown, but sometimes green when she flirted. Her voice was a rasp file on raw silk. Her lips were red. She wore a single Tahitian pearl in the suprasternal notch. I wanted to be that grey pearl. I wanted to nest like Thumbelina in that space.

She and I never kissed. But she was known as the Lothario of Lesbians. Drunk and blissed-out girls would tumble out of bathroom stalls with red lipstick stains on their collars and necks and smeared across their soft faces.

She and I never dated. But I valued every morning before English or math or history, when we sat at the picnic tables in the quad and talked with the rest of our friends. Her cigarettes and Styrofoam cups filled with black coffee were kissed red. We danced on the weekends in the best bars in the French Quarter. On Thursdays we drank lemon pledges. On Sundays, we huffed poppers and went to tea dance. One August night we got stranded in a hurricane and watched as the rain pelted the warped glass of the French doors. After class one day she spilt / we spilt / a blue Hawaiian was spilt all over me / us at Flanagan’s. I blushed in the bathroom where she blotted me dry. I never even kissed her except . . .

One night, hanging out at Chaps on St. Charles, the rain was coming down soft like it does in New Orleans, just enough to shake the scent off the magnolias and into your hair. I had on a long black-velvet pencil skirt, a white silk shirt and my favorite studded patent leather shoes. She danced around me at the foot of the one-hundred-year-old stairwell in the club, singing “Book of Love” and kissed me, square on the cheek, red lip prints for all to see. I could not see straight. For one and a half years I hung on every breath she exhaled. For one and a half years, give or take thirty-one, I cherished her lips on my cheek.

As an adult I have had partners—and dates that didn’t get too far—who have questioned my attachment to her, my love for her. They’ve questioned how I could love someone I never even slept with. Well, because love is not a Tinder match. Love is complicated.

My own parents, Christmas of 1985, threw me out of the house for loving a girl. She was a girl and so was I. In hindsight, I assume my parents were reading my diary. And I know that kiss was in that little white book between the mattresses. If you ask me why I hate Christmas, now you know.

After leaving my parents’ home, shit went down and it went down fast.

I did what I did to stay alive. I dropped out of college. I slept pillar to post. I made some bad choices. I drank too much. I fucked too much. I stayed out too late. Maybe I shouldn’t have.

But that’s not the story.

On a cold night in February, I went to my parents’ house to pick something up, the phone rang and my mother told me it was for me.

It was my best friend’s mother. She said, “Baby, Todd wanted you to know Nan died,” and I heard aunt and I thought, why does this matter to me, what aunt? And she said again, “Baby, did you hear me? Nan was in a car crash. She’s gone.” I dropped to the floor. There was an unfamiliar buzzing in my head. I felt untethered, unmoored. I felt exactly like I feel right now. It hurts the same.

And I remember clearly that as I walked out of the house, a haze around my heart, my whole body, my mother pushed open the screen door at the kitchen, leaned out from it and said, “Don’t you dare skip class to go to some funeral.”

I went to the funeral. I don’t remember crying.

I’d like to tell you what happened in the crash, but my friends kept it from me. I only know it was bad and quick.

I remember the casket was pearlescent pink and arranged at an angle to the room. There were white roses on top of the closed casket. I didn’t know she liked white roses.

I know where she is buried, but I’ve never been. Sometimes, around her birthday, I’ll toast to her. I thought I saw her once sitting on my porch swing. I don’t know. If love is complicated, the heart–brain relationship is a fucked-up mother fucker.

Now that I’m nearing the end of our story, I’m not sure what I meant to tell you. Can love be both complicated and simple? Yes.

Can you one day, maybe thirty-one years later, be a woman far from her heart of New Orleans, living in Omaha? Maybe you’ll share your bed with a man with long legs who likes to tangle them into yours. You may have beautiful friends who make you want to be better. You may have danced and gotten drunk and fucked up some shit and swam in the sea and seen guitar solos that shook the rafters and loved truly and deeply, and all of that does not heal all wounds. I want you to know that no matter who you love, you should love fiercely. That if you ever meet your girl with the single Tahitian pearl in her suprasternal notch, you should love her. You should love her.