A Letter to E

Coco Thompson

It blurs past me, too fast, too fleeting, for the moment. The yellow sign welcomes me back at the state line, and as I cross that border it feels like I am suddenly 16 again. The jaundiced winter grass, trees naked without their leaf coat. ‘It’s all… sticky’ is what I had said the first time I saw this version of December. The road continues on, curving, winding, fast. One lane each way. It feels like flying. They say water holds memory, maybe that’s why it starts to rain. I roll my windows down, letting the wind in, allowing it to play with my hair like a small child. I breathe in deeply. Maryland smells different to other places. The air feels like it could cleanse your lungs of the dirtiest things they have held. I remember every cigarette I have smoked, and I feel them dissipate. I can feel my heartbeat, as if it’s what’s leading me back and not the navigation. The road shows age. It is tired, it aches, it is an old man with a sun-bleached face. He’s beautiful because he exists. It has cavities and angry tree roots. It has weathered storms and tornadoes, but it goes on like it knows it must. The landscape speeds past showing me all that Maryland can offer, farm fields, forests, small towns with one outdoor shopping mall. Their teenagers probably play hide and seek in their Target like I used to in mine. With every one that I pass, I get closer. I turn across the traffic onto a road that I know. The potholes are different. The wear, the rain, the melted snow, has engraved them with foreign shapes. I don’t know which way my body will rock as I go over them. The road carves the same path through the pastures though. The white lines extend further than my eyes, and they are leading me by my hand. A stick to a blind man. The music I’m listening to is different, my tastes have changed. They have evolved. I’ve grown taller but my feet are still the same size. I’ve grown more comfortable in my skin, found a way to settle into it. It no longer feels like a sock that’s seam is pressing too hard at the edge of my toes. 

I’m five minutes from M’s house. She doesn’t live there anymore but part of me does. In that house I’m still 17. The lights are yellow, they feel like warm arms holding me, M and I are playing music loud. We bake cookies that don’t rise because we think you can substitute the baking soda with powder. We talk nonsense and we don’t pretend that it has substance, we know we’re young, and that we don’t know all that much. But we also know that we’ve been through more than others, not everyone. We’re not different. We’re still there, and M knows that I’ll hold her while her shoulders shake, and I know that M will hold me while mine do the same. Her pantry always had snacks, in a dedicated section, on one of its shelves, all for me. Her mama knew what I could and couldn’t eat. Always making sure that stuff was catered towards me. I never knocked; the door was always open. I don’t remember a time it felt foreign. It had always felt like home.  

I pass the street that leads to it.  

I can still feel the way her car would hug the curves, the breeze tunnelling through the rolled-down windows, music dial turned far around, and us laughing. The memory presses into me like the soft caress of a kiss to my cranium. Beneath it all, the bones, they are still the same. My atoms begin humming.  

I’m on Point Lookout Road, and the Big McKay’s is gone. It’s a Food Lion now, the fire truck red cursive writing replaced with white clinical block letters. I’ve never shopped in one of them before.  

Out the left side is where C’s old house is, in Clarks Rest where he lived before his family moved down to Florida. They really like Disney World. We made a cake in there during the wintertime when I was 18, because it seemed like his mum had a lot of baking accessories. It came out looking like a children’s drawing, messy lines, bright colours, flowers that resembled four-leaf clovers, adorned with sprinkles of blue and purple. I wore an oversized coat that day. It was one that I bought in a second-hand store on a trip away with my parents. It was vintage, and too big for me, and I drowned in it, then paid eighty dollars anyway for it. Simply because I loved it. His brother tried the coat on, walking around on their polished wood floors, pretending as if it was his. And I must admit that it fit him better than it could probably ever fit me. And I am sure that his sister made a comment about how ugly our decorating was.  

I’m bad at talking to C these days. I send a message to which he promptly returns, but his replies will always fall flat. Not because I don’t still adore him, but because it’s hard. Answering the simple questions, like how I am doing, when there’s so much to say, and I’m scared of it spilling out, since there’s no way to really say it. Because how do you say to someone who thinks you are wise, smart, and confident, that it feels like time has passed in such a way that if he were to see you again, he wouldn’t recognise you? That the clay shape of myself he knew, has been remoulded? That the wear of trying to be whole in this world is a lot, and that everything, yet nothing, is consuming you? And that it is hard. But despite all of that, the small moments where the sun filters through the window in the living room, while sitting on the floor with my cat curled in my lap, make up for all of it. That you aren’t wise, or smart, or confident, that you never were, and that you are truly terrified that deep down you’re a fraud. That by keeping distance, you can preserve the version of yourself that he has. Like homemade jam that wasn’t sealed properly before storing and has now since soured. I don’t want him to have a taste and realise there is something rotten with me.  

I wonder if at TownePlace Suites the water still runs cold for 15 minutes before warming, like it used to thirteen years ago.  

I stand in the bathroom, shivering under the harsh putrescent light while the water whistles out of the shower head. The waiting time has not changed. It’s been well over a decade since the intermission period of moving to Leonardtown, and having an actual house, where we called these worn-in carpeted halls home. But the plumbing still is insistent on teaching guests the art of patience. The light from the television is flickering over the white bed linen, turning it into a kaleidoscope of colours, every scene change a rotation of beads. The soft resonance of the guitar strum in ‘Back to the Old House’ is playing from my phone sitting on the bathroom counter, and I stick my hand under the water. It’s lukewarm, which is better than the turn-your-toes-blue freezing it was for the past 20 minutes. I get in. It changes pressures, and temperatures, like the rolls of a mountain range, and I take it all with the rain drip of the ends of my hair.  

The time is 5:48 and K will be here at 6, which really means 6:10. I sit on the edge of the bed, clicking the heels of my shoes together, biting my nails down, and when they’re finished, I begin peeling off the skin around them. It’s not done until my thumb is a massacre, a grotesque image, stitched up passively with a band-aid. My phone lights up with a message from K saying he’s out the front. It’s 6:12. And he is there, standing in front of his car, hands stuffed into his pockets, a pink durag protecting his waves. K has this way of presenting himself. It’s in the space he occupies. Where he seems to be drinking you in, debating with every step closer you take, whether you’re someone he wants to greet with a hug, or a swift uppercut. I know he has the capability for both.   

His arms are around me, in an embrace that is opposite to the blunt, roughened, way he talks. It’s like sinking into a timeworn chair in front of a fireplace, feeling the warmth roll over your body, pressing your palms as close to the flames as you can, knowing what they can do. His eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, trekking out like lightning contact to the ground, and they are still marvellously marbled in hazel. I get in the car, and we talk while he speeds off. He tells me about college track, how it didn’t feel like it fit him, how that’s when he found physiotherapy, that he likes doing it, how every road out led back to here. He talks about shoulder injuries, and his apartment. I tell him my own things. The scenery changes, while his foot presses down on the accelerator until he is scraping illegal.  

Hearts have their own electrical impulses, if you were to carve it out of your chest it would continue to beat. This would go on, the metrical inhale, and exhale, as it gasps for blood, until 5 minutes after removal. It’s been 10 years since I’ve left this place, since it’s left me, but it’s still going. Pumping.  

We pass the turn, the road unassuming, a barren island amidst two lanes of traffic. And I can almost see, far down the tar, where S’s house is. And I can almost see younger me standing at the front door. She is closer to whole than I am. I want to lunge out, to grab her wrist, to stop her fist from ever knocking. To rewrite history, to erase that door, to stop it from ever opening at all. Maybe it’s selfish, and maybe I am a bad person, but sometimes, when I still have to curl into myself to find a semblance of safety, I wish it had happened to somebody else. 

Someone will bring him up tonight, and I’ll have to pretend that he isn’t my ghost. That I’m not haunted.  

K parks the car, trying to do a parallel park that takes him around 4 tries before he just resigns himself to a crooked angle. We stand outside The Rex, the air is crisp, like the crunch of an apple. Frost lingers in the air, smoky breath with every exhale, and it feels like the promise of snow soon. We’re bickering about parking, how the driving standards must be really low.  

‘It’s because we don’t get tested on it.’  

A is there, with her dyed deep red hair, and sunflower smile. She has tattoos now, and more piercings, but the rest is the exact same as the day I met her. She was loud, boisterous. She commanded attention without declaration. She was 17 and so sure about herself, it felt like she knew that if everything fell away, or was taken from her, that the one thing she had was herself and like filter coffee she poured every ounce of watery cynicism, into strong self-confidence. She could do art, and knew about literature. She got good grades despite Tuesday being her self-designated skip day. But the composition of it all didn’t create an egotistical monster, as it so often can, but A, who is soft, and grounded, like the comforting cool roll of a marble between fingertips. And when she takes me in her arms for the first time, in a long time, I feel our hearts beat in time.  

The insides of The Rex are new to me. I only ever saw the awning sign that displayed the bar like a cinema, from the comfort of a car driving through to a different location. But I’m in now, and it smells like spilled beer, savoury, sour, sticky, the tables all have drink rings from someone forgetting about their coaster. A and K settle in with a comfortability, moving through the place with an air of knowing. Knowing what food they want, or what beer is good. This place has held them, fostered the creation of memories, rocked them into a daze, let them yell, and threaten, and flirt, and drink. I sit on the booth’s couch like an intruder making themself at home, while A talks about the bar’s new hires, and how their sister was in our grade, and who they dated, and although I should know who these people are, I don’t. K sits and nods, adding commentary occasionally about how someone was in one of his classes, or whether he finds them annoying. I feel myself slip, in and out of time, equilibrium, like I’m here, but I’m not, intangible, impalpable.  

We go around telling stories, making jokes and commentary.  

‘Yeah, well I’m older than you A,’ says K. 

 ‘You always do this, it’s 3 days,’ says A.  

‘Should’ve been born first,’ says K. 

‘Well, you’re old. Is that why your arm’s injured?’ says A.  

‘What, ha, no,’ says K.  

‘See this is what happens when you’re 3 days older, your bones get all frail,’ I say.  

The giggles bubble up, and when it pours out it sounds like champagne. We reach across the table to grab each other’s arms, partly for a soft emphasis towards something said, and partly for connection, to believe it is real. When the drinks are done, slammed down onto the table like shots, we grab each other, tossing down a tip, and walk out.   

I’m in A’s car, and she drives like it’s how she lives, and the dark forest trees melt into a midnight blue haze. The windows are cranked down a little at the top, and god, do I know this air. The cold chill, the way the wind rips through down into your bones. How the dirt smells after the rain. And what the snow feels like underfoot. It’s all here, rushing through me, like the current of the Patuxent River. We pull into the gravel road that leads up to A’s house but not the one I knew. This one’s different, it’s hers, it doesn’t have to fit 5 siblings, just her and her partner. Sitting on the couch, with their art prints up, I can feel how their tenderness has seeped into their walls, it’s the insulation that’s keeping this place warm. And while I don’t know this one, how it sounds when it breathes at night, I am happy to just be a little piece of decoration during this moment in their life.  

Headlights illuminate the room bright white, searing through the curtains. The sound of car doors slamming shut, diluted by brick and plaster walls. The door opens, it’s unlocked, and they don’t knock. Then she’s there, honeyed, and warm. Grounding techniques incarnate. It’s M, and she’s standing in the archway like sunshine after a harsh winter, thawing every part of myself that has ever been frozen. But when the snow melts, the waters run off, and the leaves have begun to return, there are also cracks, fissures in the dirt, and there is no amount of golden light that can hide those.  

Author: Coco Thompson

Coco Thompson is an emerging Brisbane based author, currently studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at QUT. Her writing is influenced by her relationship with the LGBTQIA+ community, and her lived experiences overseas. As a creative, she predominantly specialises in the exploration of queerness in literature, and contemporary prose works.

Artist: Kylie Thompson

 Edited by: Charley Anderson and Max Jenner

Editor: Tia Shang