My turn.
What you said in your letter, about always writing your notes addressed to me -
I notice it the most when I’m away from you. Your mind is the closest tether i have to the world. I remember being in Big Bear and calling you nearly every day. We bring each other back to Earth when we are floating in a way that transcends the physical. The close link between our minds, the distances we’ve gone in and out, expanding the lengths of our cognitions, it’s the conversations that keep us forever linked. It’s when we get high and cry or analyze society or end up laughing at some elaborate joke that will never make sense to anyone else. I am trying to keep this from being cliché and finding it impossible. Maybe this is how it is for all friends. We are not like others, but maybe we love the same. our connection is the weirdest and most normal thing about us. The way you said, when someone has someone like them around them, it makes them more digestible to others. We found each other when we were floating and incomprehensible and made sense of each other, labelled each other, found a self in the distance between us, the distance between us and the world. Normal People said something like - all these years they’ve been growing in the same pot, twisting and bending to keep growing together. All these years we’ve been in each other’s orbits like planets or moons, never leaving the solar system even to go across the world, we are a door the other can walk through to get to the world. We are a portal. We are the key to our own humanity. We are older now with more friends, moons, planets, doors, tethers, homes, ways to be understood. We are learning to love and not to fear. We learned it together. You will always be a home to me Holly, a native planet, a place I can come back to, a plane ride away. That feeling of driving home in the night after a long car ride, and seeing your home, quiet, the garage light turning on, coming back to life at the sight of you. Walking inside and taking off your shoes, mumbling perfunctories, opening doors, the bed waiting upstairs to disappear into. I ran away from home. I don’t have a home anymore. I have you.
I have watched you grow up. I felt sometimes like your older sister, sometimes like your twin, sometimes guiding you into virgin territory (LOL) with my half-baked torn up tear-stained knowledge, sometimes walking with you, clueless, into the darkness, hand in hand. I have seen you go from being lost to being found. I have seen you be brave and tear yourself open in all of your darkness, your wildness, your violence, your tenderness, to a world that had beaten you into hiding, and demand to be seen, heard, even loved. You wrote your story. You will be published. You will step before me and lead me into the darkness. I glow with pride at your blossoming. We wouldn’t be sisters if we didn’t piss each other off. We wouldn’t be sisters if we didn’t sit outside each other’s doors, waiting for the other to come home.
Our stories, our lovers, our friends, our words, our steps into the world. our ways we’ve found to be alive. We will write a play and make it real. From now on, things will be real and enormous like a planet of coloured gas. You will graduate and we will grasp for a branch that won’t break. We will call to each other in the dark when we find a soft place to land. We will be fearless and inquenchable, we will eat the world whole and shit it out.
I thought I was alone and always would be. I lived my life this way. I lived my life running away. I ran from my parents, my sister, my friends, my lovers, you. I never loved anyone more than I loved the world. You were the first person who’s ever stuck to me. You shattered my lifelong frigid singularity. Here, now, running away for the last time, I see that I’m not alone and I never will be. I can’t be. I don’t have a home anymore. I have you.
I’m coming home, Holly. I’ll see you soon.
in perpetuity,
