The Impossible Language

Le Petite Livre For My Child Chapter One Once upon a time, in a kingdom very far away, there lived a Princess named Annabella who had dark hair and fair skin and eyes that were as dark as the night sky but as bright as the stars. She was no longer a child but not yet a woman when she convinced herself she had fallen in love with a traveler from another land. His name was Henry. He was as handsome as a King, but as privileged as a beggar. There was once a night when Annabella was fourteen and he was sixteen when he showed her his sword and taught her how to wield it. Her skirt swayed atop the floorboards and the sound of it and their dancing footsteps echoing off the ceilings was their music. There need not be another sound; this was enough. He would take her outside in the middle of the night and teach her about the stars that dimmed in comparison to her eyes, and about the planets with their own atmospheres and kingdoms and people and stars, and in his whispered “iloveyous” were also whispered“I'm going to build you a rocket ship, and I'm going to take you where nobody else has ever gone and I'm going to love you on this planet where it is only you and I and the more we love eachother the brighter our star will shine when you look at it from the garden miles and miles and miles below where the 'Iloveyous' were whispered in the first place.” So Annabella believed him, and he believed himself, too, and the only people that did not believe in their incandescent love were her parents, who saw his ragged shirt sleeves and dirt smeared cheeks and nothing else. So the beautiful Annabella tore her dress and tangled her hair and ran through puddles, and then the two of them ran away to where Henry had come from, and so it was easy for him not to look back, and she tried to be just like him and look only forward, as well. He took her to a place called America, where they spoke in tongues she did not understand and laughed at the nonsensical words she tried to speak to them. She would say Bonjour and understand, after a while, that their ears did not understand her, her purpose, her manner. And finally there came the day when every star in the sky burst and showered down around her as she watched men in uniform carry a wooden casket they insisted her Traveler boy was inside of down marble church steps and to grave yards that made her eyes very very dim. She cried and she pleaded for them to understand that they had made a mistake, that Henry was not in the casket or in the ground, that he was in the sky in her eyes, and he was so very much alive, and it was impossible for him to die because their love was infinite. But they laughed at the words they did not have the time to comprehend, and after every star and every moon had finally gone dark in her world, she stopped weeping. But it takes a very long time for every single star to go out, and so she wept for a very long time. She stayed in America, because when she had allowed herself to fall in love with the traveler boy she had also allowed herself to begin a new life, free from the constraints of corsets and powdered noses of Paris, and money was very hard to come by when you were an eighteen year old girl who spoke no more than five words of the country's tongue. Annabella knew very little of the world or of the stars, but she knew of love, and she knew of its fallacies, two, and she knew that if she needed it badly enough, money would come to her. So she summoned it, and men in alleys summoned her, also, and they tore her dress and her heart and her conscience and every piece of her, until all of these tattered pieces eventually came together to form something new and whole and unbreakable in its very fragility; a baby boy. She named me Henry, after the man she imagined would have been my father, had the stars in her eyes not fought as they crossed. So America stretched on, and so did her corsets, night after night, me watching, silently, cold and scared from keyholes or doors left just barely ajar. My mother, the once beautiful young Annabella, crying silently, being paid for her beauty and clean body, lonely men in tattered clothes paying for the shoes on my feet or the bread on our table. And there were nights I remember vividly so many years later, when our illegitimate breadwinners paid visits to me, too. One man, in particular. A tall and slender man with blonde hair and boots polished so perfectly I could see my reflection in the toes, so different than the others, so much luckier and so much meaner and so much more a devil because he could afford so very much and he chose my mother and her ten year old child. He would tell me not to make a sound and he would do things to me I did not, could not, will never understand, the same types of things I pretended I did not see him doing to my mother while she closed her eyes and dreamed of me and money. And I knew that without me, without the way I needed shoes or food or clothes, she may not need this man or the others in her life, and I felt as though I would have to live my entire life looking for ways to repay her. I am a man now, somehow a father, even, and I know I would never, no matter the consequences, want my child to feel as though he must repay me for being his father. But I cannot shake wanting to fix things for her, take them back because I know they are my fault, no matter if she believed they were or not. A little boy cannot look at his mother crying beneath a man she does not love for the sake of her child, and forget the way it looked. They pulled her and pushed her and she was silent because she did not know the words with which to speak to them, her tongue could not form the correct syllables of their crude English, and it did not matter, because if they could have understood her, I do not believe they would have been happy. But here is another reason I want to repay her: they could understand me. I'd grown up in this land, I was not foreign like my mother, the words I heard in markets or in schoolyards found ways to attach themselves to the words I learned at home, and I could understand the men, and my mother, too. But as the one with shined boots and blond hair killed bits and pieces of us off part by part, I said nothing. My mouth stayed closed, even when words boiled behind my teeth. There was so much I could have said and so many things I wish I would have, but I chose to make words impossible, and it did not matter that I could understand two languages, I spoke neither. By the time I was twelve, I'd forgotten what it felt like for words to vibrate between my lips, fly into someone's waiting ears. I was silent in a world where I understood too much, and she was silent in a world where she understood too little, two silent mouths in a screaming country, who could not even speak to eachother for fear of missing a consonant. So we spoke, my mother and I, through the mouths of other people. Writers, authors, storytellers, I'd go to the library and pick the thickest book I could find and when the men left us both alone, I would curl into her side as we spoke every word we could find into eachothers eyes instead of ears. I circled SORRY she circled Q and U and O and I until she had made a word, and I didn't know how to tell her what I was sorry for, and if I could have found a way, maybe we would have circled different words. So I circled LOVE, and I circled A and M and O, U, R, until she understood. And in circled letters of an English encyclopedia, she wrote me entire stories in French, about princesses named Anabella and Kings named Henry and love that was infinite, and I wrote her stories about kittens because kittens made her smile, and about rockets to stars, because stars made me see what her smile maybe used to look like, before me, and before she had to circle letters this way to be understood. We told eachother fiction because fiction was malleable and reality was not, and we needed to be able to control things for once. So we used words that no one else knew in a language no one else spoke to write about lives that no one actually lived. We wrote until we fell asleep. We did not let the other see us cry. We wrote until we forgot our language was as far away from home as fiction to reality. We wrote until we'd stopped noticing we were writing, words coming and frothing and boiling with a fluidity we'd forgotten how to speak with our mouths, and in the absence of inhibition or strangling thoughts, words flew out that we didn't know we were thinking in the first place, and if we had, maybe we'd have stopped ourselves from saying them. So we wrote until we fell asleep. And I dreamed about the stories. And I don't really know if she dreamed at all. But if she did she wasn't thinking about the stories. She was thinking about the nightmares she'd wake up to, not wake up from. a French mathematician and physicist of the late 19th century introduced an important insight in which he attempted to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to discover which geometry applies to space by experiment. He considered the predicament that would face scientists if they were confined to the surface of an imaginary large sphere with particular properties, known as a sphere-world. In this world, the temperature is taken to vary in such a way that all objects expand and contract in similar proportions in different places on the sphere. With a suitable falloff in temperature, if the scientists try to use measuring rods to determine the sum of the angles in a triangle, they can be deceived into thinking that they inhabit a plane, rather than a spherical surface. In fact, the scientists cannot in principle determine whether they inhabit a plane or sphere and, Poincaré argued, the same is true for the debate over whether real space is Euclidean or not. For him, which geometry was used to describe space, was a matter of convention. Since Euclidean geometry is simpler than non-Euclidean geometry, he assumed the former would always be used to describe the 'true' geometry of the world. To my child, your father writes books for you and I write letters to you. This is how it goes, it seems, though we didn't actually choose for our lives to end up like this. This is what we deserve for allowing our mouths to close and our eyes to shut when we looked at eachother. We forgot we had options, so we copped out. And my baby, I'm so sorry. I don't think you'll ever read these letters. That's another thing I would not have chosen if I'd realized I was choosing. But how could I not write them. And how could I not hope. When I met your father I was eighteen and he was nineteen. I never stopped talking, and he never started. I talked enough to fill both of our silences. I said The weather's really lovely. I used to think raindrops were little fairies. Did you ever believe in fairies? I had a professor that looked like Tinker Bell. Peter Pan was my favorite book when I was nine. I kept a copy under my pillow. That's how I found out about the tooth fairy. I felt my mom move the book out from under my head. She denied it, of course. Typical. I don't know why parents are so desperate for their kids to believe in fairy tales. And he said nothing, but because this was him, and he never said anything, anyways, I could not have understood that maybe I'd said something to add to the silence. But I know now that there are a lot of ways to subtract from zero, and I'm an expert of this art. Your father wrote books for me, too, a long time ago. This was how we fell in love. He was quiet with a stewing mind too thick for me to stir and I never stopped talking about little nothings that did not equate at all with what I was feeling. That's the kind of person I always was, I couldn't help myself. I talked to fill silences. But sometimes silences can't be filled, and I only made them bigger. But he wrote to me what he wouldn't say, or at least parts of it. He wrote about your grandmother leaving her home in France for a love that could not last in a country that could not comprehend a single word she said, about selling her body to feed her son. About the summer he stopped talking. About talking to his mother by circling letters in encyclopedias. And I always thought this was very, very sad. Two people that love eachother limitlessly but cannot speak to one another and will not even though, if they allowed themselves, they could. This seemed to me the dead end street of compromising happiness, of unfairness, of treachery. But it seems we've become this. We've become such traitors to what we deserve. Again, you won't read these letters. That was the choice we made in hopes that we'd forget about the first choice, the one we didn't think about nearly enough when we made it. We said we'd all be happier if you did not hear from us. That we could forget and move on and continue our lives of creating and filling silences. But we we wrong, honey. We were wrong, and I'm sorry, and you have every right to crave the letters we won't let you read, and hate us for having to write them in the first place. We didn't deserve the choice, but we deserve the consequences. So that's why he writes books for you. It's the same as when he wrote them for me. Because it is the only way. He could not speak to me because he had forgotten how. He cannot speak to you because I made the decision for him that he was not a father and I was not a mother and we did not need to pretend otherwise. So he writes to everyone in the world, in the vague hope that maybe you'll pick up a copy and know without saying that he loves you and he is sorry for the mistakes I made on his behalf. Fourteen days ago, after nine years of waiting, you found the book. I can't help myself, darling, I watch you. You go to the library on Thursdays at 4:15, just after your soccer practice. I know this because I, too, go to the library on Thursdays at 4:15, hiding myself behind shelves or computer screens, silently watching without speaking, so we're right back where we started. You're always wearing grass stained shin guards and jerseys, your hair tousled. The woman you call “mother”, I don't know if they've told you the truth yet or not, sometimes stands behind you with her hands on your shoulders, or twirling your hair between her fingers. Her dark golden hair matches yours well enough, and for a moment it all seems to make sense. A young mother and her handsome little boy at the library. And I feel out of place in this stage, my role unnecessary to the plot, and I want to rewrite my character out of existence in the pursuit that things would end with a happily ever after. But you're there in the fiction department and I'm here where things are so very deceivingly real, and there's always going to be that one member of the audience who cannot just pretend that my costume helps me to blend with the scenery. But you look happy. She calls you Andy. I like the name Andy. And honey, it fits you. You smile when she says something funny in your ear. She nudges you when she sees an interesting title for you to look at. But fourteen days ago she was speaking to the librarian at the other end of the building when you stumbled across the single copy of Le Petite Livre I had nestled between the books I'd seen you take out in the past, your favorites, I took the liberty of assuming. You looked at the cover for a moment, immediately flipped it over to read the back. I knew what it said, I'd memorized it. I recited it to myself when I woke up in an empty bed, when I got the mail, when I showered, when there were silences I'd run out of ways to fill. I liked the last line because it was a lie. “Speak and you'll be heard.” A lie from a liar who didn't listen to his own advice. This is what we all boil into. So you read the summary of a book about a fictional little boy with an aristocratic French mother and adventures between the lines of things already said, but what you were actually reading was “Dear Andy, I hear that's your name, I'm sorry this happened to us, and here's how it happened.” He didn't do a good job of remembering fiction versus reality. But maybe he did and the two just blur together after a while. But I want to show you my chapter. The one he didn't publish. I was young. That's not an explanation. That doesn't make anything better. That's not a reason. It's a cop out. I know that. But I need to fill silences. And I don't know what else to say. I was young. Eighteen. I'd known your father for four months. Month one I talked so we could get to know eachother. But I learned nothing of him because he didn't join in, and he learned nothing of me, because what was I saying to help him? I like root beer floats. When I was a kid I watched Jeopardy with my grandfather and he always ate cashews. The weather's bleak. This conversation is bleak. Maybe it's me that's bleak. I've turned everything fucking bleak. Month two he wrote me stories about his mother. He wrote so much about his mother. Like in telling me these stories there was something he gravely wanted me to understand, but I could not connect the dots. France. America. Henry. Rape. Prostitution. You. Silence. Silence. Everything's gone silent. What do you want me to say now? And that was where things got complicated: I didn't know what to say. Month three I told him I was sorry that sometimes bad things happen and no one ever deserves it and he circled in the newspaper HIS FAULT and jabbed a finger at his chest, and I said it was no ones fault that his mother was killed other than the killer's, and he pointed at HIS FAULT and I forgot to notice if he still pointed at himself, so I said Yes. His fault. It was his fault. Not yours. The Killer's. But this is what happens when we try to speak using other people words: we don't know for sure what they mean. So he pointed at OVER and I said Yes you can stop blaming yourself for what you couldn't control, it's over. But I don't know what he meant so I don't know if I responded correctly, does anyone ever respond correctly? We listen for what we want to hear, and when we get that, how do we know they meant it? It's an impossible language, love and living. Impossible but inevitable. And then month four came and for once there were a lot of things I didn't say, and the roles of ourselves started to reverse. He was circling a lot more words a lot faster, and I was seldom responding to any of them because I didn't understand a damn thing he tried to say and he wouldn't understand if I told him that, and even though he was fluent in two languages he was a foreigner to using them and if this was true then what was the point of him. And so then one sleepless night when I didn't speak and neither did he, you crawled inside me and tried to fill the silence but I stifled your sounds, because there were so many other things I could have done, but I was never one to think before I spoke or did. I hid behind big black shirts, pillows in my lap, circled PERFECTs and FINEs and NOTHING WRONGs. In eighteen years I'd never run out of things to say. I could tell the cashier at Pizza Hut my entire life story and somehow get her to tell me hers, I told him about my fifth grade crush on the boy from Phil of the Future, I told him how I organized my sock drawer, I told him about the carpet in the bedroom of my best friend from Kindergarten. I told him everything I thought to say, but this, this I could not tell him. My body refused to allow the knowledge of what was happening inside of me to translate into a communicable form and for the first time in my life, I could look in the mirror, and understand what it was like to be Henry Rousseau, with words brimming out of my every crevice only to be shoved back into the dark to fade away and lose meaning altogether. But then Andy, you came, and I could not hide it, but I tried, he knew what was happening even though I did not tell him because though he was mute his mind was unquiet, and he was only pretending to let me win at my own game. So here's the thing, I was young, and that's my only excuse, even though it's useless. I don't have an answer for you, and I don't even remember asking myself the question. You were there and then I was signing papers to send you away and then you were gone and I was back in our apartment and we were lying on our sides looking at eachother in a silence so heavy we nearly suffocated and somewhere across the city or the globe, I don't know which or why the measurable distance matters when what does matter is that my love should have been immeasurable, you were alive and asleep in someone else's crib or awake in someone else's arms. The point is you were not between us when you should have been and we both knew that but I wouldn't tell him and he wouldn't tell me that he knew it, either. He reached out and touched my stomach. And I knew that he knew. He said nothing. I said “Sorry.” He said nothing. I said “You could have stopped me.” He said nothing. I said “I guess I could have stopped you, too.” And he said nothing. And in the morning he did not look at me. And I heard his voice for the first time. He said “Sorry.” And I circled YOU And I pointed at the word to make him look. I pointed at him and myself and I don't know what I was trying to say. But the point is I said nothing. And he was gone. And so were you. And so was I. We're both sorry. That's the moral of what I'm trying to tell you, sweetheart. There are infinite words in our language, or any. But Sorry's the biggest. -Your mother. Amy I used to dream about growing up. I was never one of those kids who wanted to stay young forever. I believed in the future more than anything else, I believed in it too much, I guess. I had a romantic idea in my head of what my life would be. It didn't matter that how it was now didn't fork off in roads that would in any way lead to what I imagined. What mattered was that I imagined them anyway. Like the future, I believed too much in my imagination, but this idea was childish, and I wanted to be a grown up. So I tried to stop imagining and start living. Easier said than done. I flew through my childhood so fast the wind was tearing at my eyelids, so I didn't have much time to see what I was passing. I was pedaling too fast and I refused to use training wheels. I wanted to got to college in New York city, drink coffee on the subway, meet a boy with a briefcase full enough to pay for everything I wanted, marry him in Central Park, have two children with hair the same color as ours that I could lug around to piano lessons or soccer games or wherever it was he wanted to go. I wanted to leave my posh job at the Paper early to pick him up from school when his stomach ached. Take him home, heat him canned soup while we watched the Ellen Show from the living room couch. My husband would come home from work, singing as he walked through the door. We'd roll our eyes even though we loved the sound of his voice. He'd kick off his shoes, pull off his tie, undo his top two buttons, and collapse on top of us as the child giggled and tried to save his soup from spilling. The father and child would fall asleep to the television, hot with laughter, and I'd quietly get up to make dinner or take a shower or get to work on the latest hard hitting story I'd been assigned. The words would flow effortlessly, my story would unfold flawlessly, I'd be praised by the Editor in the morning over coffee, I'd be kissed as I walked through the apartment door in the evening. Life would be easy. Life would be simple. As black and white as a newspaper. That's what I wanted. I didn't want pink bicycles with streamers or rainbow wallpaper or hands sticky with glue and glitter. I wanted a type writer-esque dysfunction that I could write into perfection. But being a journalist is about getting the point across without planting flowers along the sidewalks. And life, I failed to realize, was having to fertilize the weeds until they became a jungle. So I sped through childhood and I blinked a lot and then it was over. I had the Journalism degree from Columbia. I had my dream job as Features Editor at the New York Times, in an office with a view of the Empire State building, where somewhere my husband sat in a black suit with a picture of me on his desk. I had an apartment twenty of my college dorm rooms could fit inside of. I had what I wanted. But I was missing the kid. The tickle fights before bedtime. The ears I would obligatorily tell to stay little forever, even though I thought this wish was petty. The little bath towel that had a hood and teddy bear ears I could wrap him up in so he wouldn't shiver while downstairs the father heated milk and honey in his son's favorite cup while shouting at the football game he didn't actually care about. I was missing the meat of my story. And I wanted to stop writing it and start reading it. “What's the Doc say?” my husband said into the phone. I could hear the microwave buzzing in the background. “He says we---why are you cooking? I told you I was bringing home takeout.” “Got hungry. I'll still eat. He said we what?” “I'm just saying we should have saved the left overs for—never mind. He said we need to 'explore other options.'” “Other options? The hell are other options? You have sex, you have a baby. And obviously that isn't working.” “You're making it sound like we should just give up.” “No, no.” I heard him take a bite of leftover lasagna. “I didn't mean that.” There was silence on the line. We met on the subway, just as I'd imagined. He'd joked about tourists. I'd joked about his Mets hat. He asked me out for coffee. I was three hours late to my interview with the Mayor of New York. It didn't matter. I could revise that part out in editing. Just like every other imperfection. I'd get the point across. I didn't need the extra words. We talked about everything. We pretended we loved everything about the other. It was the quintessential twentieth century marriage. It was everything I wanted and everything I understood without having to think about the words I was using. I could revise in Fact Checking. That's what I always did. I could make mistakes so long as I could fix them with white out and the backspace key. But our marriage was only colorful for as long as I could stand it. Then the blues started to turn into periwinkles and indigos and cyans, the reds to scarlets and crimsons and I wasn't permitted color in this issue so I had to turn things back to gray before I sent myself off to the printers. So I threw away my birth control pills, and we led eachother to bed, and we were quiet in the process. Because that's what it was to me, a process. For him it was making love, for me it was procreation and the mapping out of possible birthdays if we counted nine months from this night. And as this continued and the nine month deadline kept being pushed farther and farther back as we failed at what we were trying to do, I think it stopped being love for him, too. We were writing a story so vast and broad we were ants in comparison, and we didn't know what to say next, who to talk to, how to capture readers, how to pull it all together. We were floundering, missing deadlines, writing things we weren't proud of but refused to give up on. We believed in this story as if our lives depended on it, and maybe they did, because we made them that way. But we were running out of words. Conversations turned into “I'll get dinner tonight.” “How was your day?” “Fine. Yours?” “Fine.” “Your boss called.” “Okay, thanks.” “I'm heading into work early.” “Okay. I'll get dinner tonight.” and love and sex turned into this thing we reserved for that short period of time after dinner and before we were able to fall asleep that was mandatory and bleak and a process and a story with an angle determined before we did the research. And in editing I realized we weren't left with much to publish. We were a story without meaning. “So we can do what he says and 'explore other options'.” He was washing dishes in the background. “Do you really think it's worth it?” “Of course I think it's worth it.” “Okay.” “Okay. I'll see you at home.” We hung up without saying goodbye or I love you. Words without meaning. Things we meant but didn't say. Things we should have said. Infertile. That's the word we didn't use, among others. Not fertile, unable to reproduce, unsuccessful at achieving pregnancy. That's what it meant in black and white. I didn't understand the other colors. I was a journalist, remember. “You can always adopt.” The doctor had aged since we'd first started seeing him. We'd aged too. Our skin got looser. Our eyes got darker. The future I'd believed in my entire life stopped being the future and started being the present, and it wasn't how I'd pictured it, and just like I'd done every single other day of my existence, I sped through it with my eyes closed and waited impatiently for whatever was coming next, so long as what was happening right now could be over before I had the time to grow attached to it. I looked at the man I married, or at least at his face. Sex we didn't enjoy. Love we didn't express. Words without meaning. Things we meant but did not say. So two years later we were not in labor but in a court room. I was not giving birth but signing papers. The woman on the opposite side of the desk, with tired eyes and unbrushed hair and a cardigan two sizes too big had done these things for me, instead. She'd done what I'd been trying my entire life to accomplish, and she didn't care. She was lucky and she wished she wasn't. I couldn't wrap my head around what she was doing, what she was saying. She was a part of this story that didn't make sense. I wanted to delete her in editing. But I knew they'd bring her back up in the Fact Check. I didn't ask her why she didn't want him. I didn't ask her anything. I said “Thank you” and I shook her hand. She kissed her son's forehead and whispered something in his ear. And that was that. And we had a son. And she did, too. But that was off the record. We taught him how to eat, how to crawl and then walk. We waited impatiently for his first words and for him to fill the silence we were creating, but as the months became years, we stopped waiting, and the doctors told us that he was perfectly healthy, he could hear and see beautifully, and there was nothing awry in his brain or body that could physically prevent him from speaking, we just had to be patient and wait. But patience was a language I could not speak. And waiting was foreign. I love my child. I know he loves me, too. I am his Editor in chief and he is mine. I talk him to sleep and I tell him stories I didn't know I knew how to write, ones with flowers I didn't weed and people that weren't real and feelings that could be as editorial as I pleased and no one would write angry letters in response. He would smile when I used different voices for different characters. His face would stretch and his body would shake when he laughed, but you wouldn't hear the sounds. He drew a lot of pictures. He read a lot of books. We loved him and he became our reality. We loved him despite the fact that our story with him took a different angle than we anticipated. But we couldn't meet eachother halfway, my husband and I. We put every word we spoke and every emotion we felt into our child, and we didn't leave any left for eachother. “Honey.” I was knelt before him at the bus stop on his first day of Kindergarten. “You know that you can tell me anything, right? You can say whatever you think, and I will always love you no matter what it is.” he nodded his head, smiling quietly. “You don't have to be afraid.” he nodded. “Do you have your lunch?” He held up his brown paper bag, a banana sticking out of the top. “Do you have your notebooks?” he nodded. I kissed his forehead. “I love you.” and I knew that behind his barred teeth he wanted very badly to say something back, but he stopped himself before he could say it. And I didn't know what was happening to him or to me or to anyone. So I let the school bus take him away. And I went to work in an office where printers buzzed and phones rang. And I came home to the dishwasher humming along the walls and a husband who didn't sing when he walked through the door. Nothing was how I'd planned. Where could I have gone wrong. I'd written so many stories. Why wasn't this one working out? Why did I depend on ideas? Why did I decide the angle before I did the interviews? Why did I think life was a newspaper? Life was the farthest thing from a newspaper. I didn't let any flowers grow. I'd turned things black and white and read all over. “So what's for dinner?” “I don't know. What would you like?” “I don't care. What about Andy?” “Andy, what would you like for dinner, Sweety?” “Just write it down...” “Spaghetti, then.” “We had spaghetti on Monday.” “It doesn't matter, does it?” “I guess not.” “Right. It doesn't matter.” “Let's give you a bath, Andy!” “He had a bath this morning.” “He's got dirt on his face.” “He's a little boy, of course he's got dirt on his face.” “C'mere, honey, let me clean you up a little bit.” “There. That'll do. See, he's fine.” “He's fine. “He's absolutely fine.” “He's perfect.” “Absolutely perfect.” “Honey do you feel perfect?” “No one's forcing you to talk.” “We're all doing just perfect.” “Just fucking perfect.” “So spaghetti it is.” Andy Yesterday I read the book The Diary of Anne Frank and I really really liked it even though it made me very sad. I didn't like it because of the war things or the story particularly, but mostly because I think I'm a lot like Anne Frank in some ways. Apparently she was very dramatic and theatrical, that's a word I learned at my piano lesson. I'm not theatrical or dramatic, but what really hit me about her is when she said “I think a lot but I don't say much.” When I read that sentence in her diary, I understood Anne Frank a lot more, and also myself. And how even though maybe she did say a lot she probably wasn't really saying anything of real importance. She wasn't talking about what she was really thinking. And me, I guess I'm the same. I just don't know how to talk about all the things I'm feeling and I don't like when people talk about little nothings. So I guess I just don't talk at all. Mom and dad say it's okay, and that I can talk when I'm ready, but they took me to a speech therapist, anyways. Her name is Tracey and she talk and talks and talks. She asks me a lot of questions, about everything. About mom and dad and my house and my school and the kids in my class. I always write the truth, and it always puzzles her. I think she's waiting for me to write something that will give my not talking a reason. But the truth is I don't know the reason, or I do, but I don't know how to put words to it, even in writing. Sometimes there aren't words for feelings, and that's true for most of the things I feel, I guess. Or maybe I'm just scared. But anyways. At the library the other day I got out a new book. Mom said I only had a few minutes to look around because we had milk in the trunk and she didn't want it to spoil in the sun before we got home, so I had to hurry. She stayed at the front of the library so we could go right back out when I was done. I went to the back shelves to check in on my favorites, which is something I like to do every once in a while, though I'm not sure why. I went to the Magic Tree Houses, the Harry Potters, the Eragons, The Goosebumps. Everything was normal, except between two Goosebumps was a new book I'd never seen before, so I pulled it out. It was by some guy I'd never heard of named Henry Rousseau, and the title was in French; La Petite Livre. I don't speak french, but I think it means The Little something. I don't know the last word. The cover had a castle on it. It was probably a fantasy book because of the castle, and I like fantasy books a lot because I like to read about things I don't know about already. What's the point of reading about real life? You wont' learn a single new thing! “Are you ready?” On the way home mom played John Mayer on the stereo. I liked when she played John Mayer. My favorite song was Gravity. When that one came on, I looked out the window as it started to rain, and mom started singing. She was a good singer, but she only sang in the car and in the shower. I was the only one she sang to and that made me feel special. So I got even quieter than normal while the sky turned a calm kind of gray and the wheels sloshed through puddles and she sang softly out the windshield. Oh gravity, is working against me...and gravity, wants to bring me down... Mom and dad don't sing to eachother. I wish they did, I think they'd sound very nice together. I opened La Petite Livre to the first page. The dedication. For My Child The words were circled messily in red pen. I touched the page, the ink soaking through to the other side. I turned the page. Oh I'll never know what makes this man, with all the love that his heart can stand, dream of ways to throw it all away... My mom sang and wheels spun and pages turned and thoughts screamed but lips stayed together. Chapter One Once upon a time, in a kingdom very far away, there lived a Princess named Annabella who had dark hair and fair skin and eyes that were as dark as the night sky but as bright as the stars. She was no longer a child but not yet a woman when she convinced herself she had fallen in love with a traveler from another land. His name was Henry. He was as handsome as a King, but as privileged as a beggar. There was once a night when Annabella was fourteen and he was sixteen when he showed her his sword and taught her how to wield it. Her skirt swayed atop the floorboards and the sound of it and their dancing footsteps echoing off the ceilings was their music. There need not be another sound; this was enough. He would take her outside in the middle of the night and teach her about the stars that dimmed in comparison to her eyes, and about the planets with their own atmospheres and kingdoms and people and stars, and in his whispered “iloveyous” were also whispered“I'm going to build you a rocket ship, and I'm going to take you where nobody else has ever gone and I'm going to love you on this planet where it is only you and I and the more we love eachother the brighter our star will shine when you look at it from the garden miles and miles and miles below where the 'Iloveyous' were whispered in the first place.” So Annabella believed him, and he believed himself, too, and the only people that did not believe in their incandescent love were her parents, who saw his ragged shirt sleeves and dirt smeared cheeks and nothing else. So the beautiful Annabella tore her dress and tangled her hair and ran through puddles, and then the two of them ran away to where Henry had come from, and so it was easy for him not to Oh gravity, stay the hell away from me...and gravity has taken better men than me...now how can that be?... Words were circled, words were underlined, things were written in the margins. And the words in red told a story separate from the words in black, but both stories somehow worked together, and it was hard to tell which story was real and which was fake. It was like two people yelling two different things at the same time and your ears couldn't pick up what either of them were saying, you just heard noise and it wouldn't go away, and two people singing two different beautiful songs at the same time and it wasn't beautiful anymore it was just noise and it wouldn't go away and two televisions on in two rooms but loud enough you could hear both but it wasn't making sense anymore it was just noise and it wouldn't go away so you had to be as quiet as you could possibly be to try and make the noise go away but even then it was so loud, even with your hands tight over your ears it was so so loud and Oh gravity is working against me...and gravity wants to bring me down... And that's what it felt like in the car. The red pen marks screamed at the black letters and the black letters shouted back even louder and mom was singing to everyone and no one and dad was at home yelling at the football game and the rain was really loud on the roof, and the stereo sang even louder than mom, and everything was just so loud, and there was so much noise in the world and I wanted everyone to just be quiet for a minute, please just be quiet, I can't even hear myself think... “Is there anything you want to tell anyone, Andy?” the therapist pushed a dry erase board and marker towards me. I wrote I want to tell people to quiet down. “But if you won't tell them that you want them to quiet down, Andy, how will they know you want them to?” Dad tucked me into bed that night while mom did the dishes. He read La Petite Livre to me until I fell asleep. He muttered that the book was probably “too old” for me. I didn't care. I liked the story, even though it was very sad and very lonely and very scary and hard to understand. And I liked the story the red pen told, too. After a while the different colors, black and red, stopped fighting and started dancing. Black told a story about listening too much and red told a story about talking too much, and when you put them both together, it made sense. It was not a shout or a whisper, but a conversation. Both colors were very sad, though, that was obvious. They were sad at eachother, and at themselves. It felt like when I read the stories I made them feel better. They didn't have to be sad anymore. It was all okay. And when I read the last page I couldn't decide if they were arguing or dancing or just sleeping. There were blank pages at the end and red didn't write anything on them. And I turned them to try and figure out if they were hidden somewhere, but they weren't. It was just white. It was just quiet. No more arguing, no more singing. I didn't know if that was better or worse, but it felt worse, it felt empty, it felt sadder than red and black combined. So I started crying. And then I got out of bed. And then I did something really scary. But sometimes we have to stop the noise by adding to it. “He's asleep.” I took off my shirt, tossing it on the floor, even though I knew she hated that. She sighed and the sheets rose and fell with her breathing. That's all we'd say. That's not all that needed to be said. But it's all that was. I fell down next to her and I did something I hadn't done in almost ten years; I put my arm around her. For a minute it felt foreign. We were silent. Someone's car alarm went off down the block. Rain hit the roof. And then her head curved into my chest as she slept and I held her. And it wasn't like it used to be, where there were so many things we could have said but we didn't need to, because we didn't have to. Tonight we should have said everything to eachother. We should have said at least something. But we didn't know how. And we had to. “I'm sorry Amy.” I whispered. “I'm sorry, too.” she said or lied, I'm not sure. But it was something, and that was more than nothing. There were little feet shuffling across the carpet and climbing between us. His Star Wars pajamas glowed in the dark. His face was warm, and we pressed our cheeks against his as we held eachother. A dog barked in the apartment above us. Someone's car alarm was still going off. Rain hit the roof. The three of our heartbeats matched up. Amy stroked my arm. And then Andy whispered in a little, nervous voice, three words. He said “I love you.” And that wasn't enough, it wasn't everything he needed to say. But it was something, and that was more than nothing. And Amy kissed his cheeks as he fell asleep between us, and I smiled through tears into his neck. And someone's car alarm went off. And a dog barked. And music was coming from somewhere in the building. And these weren't all the sounds we should have made right then. But it was something. And that was more than nothing. To my child, Andy, I know you haven't read these letters, and you never will. But I think this might have to be the last one. You see, I will always love you. Always. Until the end of time, I will never stop loving you. But the thing is, if you knew this, it would hurt you. It would hurt you that I must love through unsent letters and red pens vandalizing your story books, instead of through hugs and hot meals and lullabies. And I don't want to hurt you, or me, either. So I'll stop now. But I'll never stop dreaming up things I wish I could say to you. It's unfair that I can't just say them. It's unfair I must imagine and not do. It's unfair, the world we live in, and the words it uses to spin. We're trying to live in an impossible world with an impossible language, and we get angry when we mix up the grammar. I'm sorry I don't have the book that can teach me how to speak and mean what I say. I'm sorry that's impossible for every single person on the planet, and that all your life, your going to meet people who lie to you, or say something wrong because they've mixed up the syllables. It's all very impossible, you see. Just like it's impossible that me writing these letters is going to help anything. So it's time it ended. But I'll always love you. I watch you, still, in the library, on Thursdays, at 4:15. Somethings changed in you, and also in the woman you call your mother, but I can't tell exactly what it is. But you're lighter, sweetie. I'm glad that whatever it was that made you lighter did its job. Every once in a while you come back to La Petite Livre on the shelf between Goosebumps and Eragon. You flip through the pages, your eyes catching on circled phrases. I know what we've written, your father and I, in the pages. But I don't know exactly what you're reading, and though I could spend my whole life wondering what you see, I can't. I have to move on. I have to let you live. I have to let myself live, too. When you left one day, I took the book with me. Don't worry. I'll return it. You'll never know it was gone. Your father and I sat across from eachother at a Starbucks table. We hadn't seen eachother in ten years. And now we looked at everything but the other. We looked at the baristas looking at the clock. We looked at teenagers taking pictures of their lattes. We looked at old men reading the paper alone. We looked at the artwork on the walls. We listened to people talking but saying nothing. We listened to whatever pointless song blared on the radio. We listened to so many sounds we heard nothing. I slid the book across the table to him. I pointed at FOR MY CHILD. He looked at the words. In red pen I wrote your name, ANDY, on the palm of his hand. He closed his fingers around you over and over again. I took his fingers, and we held onto you together. We looked at eachother in the eyes for the first time. You sweated beneath us. When we pulled our hands apart the red ink smeared onto my hand, too, illegible. We held onto our parts of you. I said nothing not because I didn't know what to say but because, finally, I did not have to say anything. He smiled and said nothing because the silence we made together was not loud or empty, but a tranquility we'd been waiting for since we'd met each other. A quiet where there was room for noise but loud enough you didn't turn up the volume. And he laughed a little. And I smiled. And we held you between our hands as we walked together down whatever street would lead us to the closest place that felt like home. And we didn't need to say anything. And the red and black words stopped arguing in my bag. You rubbed off between our fingers. When we pulled our hands apart, the ink was gone. And we didn't have to say anything. And neither did you. The language of love the language of letting go the language of giving up the language of moving on the language of forgiveness the language of saying what we mean the language of apology It's an impossible language but we can learn it together and I hope that's enough. I love you. I will always love you, Andy. -Your mother.