10.23.2004
A Letter to Amy on Her Return
From Katie Bowler
Amy,
You have been gone twelve months. They have grown longer for you like a tiring museum, painting after painting, name after name, until you can't consume another stroke and instead look forward to the plane landing in Boston so you can fall into kitchen hours at your parents‚ turkey-dinner home and slip slowly across the country, east to west, flying quiet with the lights 9 p.m. airplane dark over my Mississippi River, reciting your crooked letter, crooked letter, humpback, humpback lines, going home, touching down beside the Rockies with them warm around you as you taxi home, past Arapahoe Avenue now, past Pearl, going home. You were gone one month when Audrey was born. You sent letters from Antarctica on my maternity leave; I read 23 books, saw 19 movies, corresponded with two strangers while your hands became raw learning dish-soap kitchen lessons, an artist experiencing the infinite white near the South Pole, the acid whites and yellow whites, the blue whites and Zhivago whites, all of them whiter until they dissipated into Pacific blue˜and then the postcards arrived, exotic and numbered, filling envelopes, half a dozen of them at a time telling treasure stories—like the malamute and the open Jeeps—or the olive trees flashing in the train windows˜how the frogs zipped through the water in the rainforests of Costa Rica—or in Nepal, how you found a wallet on the ground and reached for it, four kids laughing, the old money-on-a-string trick—and then the Sydney Opera House, its smooth texture, its shape like an exploding unpeeled globe, and how inside, everything is wide and empty and exposed.
You wrote from Italy about the crowded buses; the letter sat six days in a hospital room. I tried over and over as the mornings wired into five a.m. indigo, staring at a little baby full of tubes, trying to tell her the story of Rapunzel—but I couldn‚t even remember if Rapunzel ever escaped. I set my version on a Mediterranean island where the coral was the color of Antarctic ice. Friends brought sweatshirts when I realized I was cold. A fifth grade friend is a nurse now, she stood in the doorway saying my name over and over while I tried to place her voice, her face looking three a.m. white—your letter on the nightstand, my daughter maybe dying, as though opening your letter might take me into the sounds outside the window—and finally I walked out after weeks had passed, the New Orleans streets littered with sad Christmas lights, and I stood in CCs in a borrowed sweatshirt, ordering a triple latte, reading your letter as I moved toward the corner, the morning sun burning my cheeks, your letters in straight penmanship lines on the pages, and then there you are, on page three, waking up in a tent in Italy, the September stars around you, a glacier at your back, the sky a glittering canvas˜a sign of the things to come.
From Katie Bowler
Amy,
You have been gone twelve months. They have grown longer for you like a tiring museum, painting after painting, name after name, until you can't consume another stroke and instead look forward to the plane landing in Boston so you can fall into kitchen hours at your parents‚ turkey-dinner home and slip slowly across the country, east to west, flying quiet with the lights 9 p.m. airplane dark over my Mississippi River, reciting your crooked letter, crooked letter, humpback, humpback lines, going home, touching down beside the Rockies with them warm around you as you taxi home, past Arapahoe Avenue now, past Pearl, going home. You were gone one month when Audrey was born. You sent letters from Antarctica on my maternity leave; I read 23 books, saw 19 movies, corresponded with two strangers while your hands became raw learning dish-soap kitchen lessons, an artist experiencing the infinite white near the South Pole, the acid whites and yellow whites, the blue whites and Zhivago whites, all of them whiter until they dissipated into Pacific blue˜and then the postcards arrived, exotic and numbered, filling envelopes, half a dozen of them at a time telling treasure stories—like the malamute and the open Jeeps—or the olive trees flashing in the train windows˜how the frogs zipped through the water in the rainforests of Costa Rica—or in Nepal, how you found a wallet on the ground and reached for it, four kids laughing, the old money-on-a-string trick—and then the Sydney Opera House, its smooth texture, its shape like an exploding unpeeled globe, and how inside, everything is wide and empty and exposed.
You wrote from Italy about the crowded buses; the letter sat six days in a hospital room. I tried over and over as the mornings wired into five a.m. indigo, staring at a little baby full of tubes, trying to tell her the story of Rapunzel—but I couldn‚t even remember if Rapunzel ever escaped. I set my version on a Mediterranean island where the coral was the color of Antarctic ice. Friends brought sweatshirts when I realized I was cold. A fifth grade friend is a nurse now, she stood in the doorway saying my name over and over while I tried to place her voice, her face looking three a.m. white—your letter on the nightstand, my daughter maybe dying, as though opening your letter might take me into the sounds outside the window—and finally I walked out after weeks had passed, the New Orleans streets littered with sad Christmas lights, and I stood in CCs in a borrowed sweatshirt, ordering a triple latte, reading your letter as I moved toward the corner, the morning sun burning my cheeks, your letters in straight penmanship lines on the pages, and then there you are, on page three, waking up in a tent in Italy, the September stars around you, a glacier at your back, the sky a glittering canvas˜a sign of the things to come.
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