IF YOU'RE READING THIS,
I'M DEAD
J.G. Brister
He wrote her the first letter in the car because he had a premonition
he might die. It was his first kayak trip alone, and as he laced
his shoes before heading towards the river, he thought it a good
idea to write a line or two about his love for her, about how he
would find a strand of her hair in his mouth, on his food, even
if he hadn’t seen her for days. He pictured himself drowned,
his neck broken, lost, despairing, on his knees, praying for death
against the lightning of a dead tree’s roots. And she, in
their small house, alone in the dark room where they kept their
books, would cry silently and know herself to be forever and always
alone. To think of it actually made him want to cry. So he wrote
a beautifully sparse note and placed it in the glove compartment
of the old pickup, its seats cracked and blossoming with white fibers.
He lived, of course. He kept the letter in the truck in case he
ever did die, so that she would find it, going through their papers,
and would realize his love for her. One night, after they had fought
and he was drunk, he sat in the dark room where they kept their
books and worried she would never find the letter. Should he die
now, from heart failure perhaps, she would sit and sob because he
died while they fought, without apologies. The skin beside her would
be blue, and when she’d prod him with her finger, the oval
of her touch would never fade. In the dark he wrote her a letter
about his vanity and how the skin of her wrist and her iambic pulse
was the entirety of his joy. He folded the paper four times and
placed it in the Neruda book he bought for her when they were dating,
and thought of her as a gray-haired widow, thinking of him. Her
fingers on that slickly papered book would turn to find this lost
letter, folded like a secret between its scented pages.
As the years of their marriage passed, there were more scenes, more
letters. It really tore at him to think of her irredeemable sadness
and the inconsolable tears she would cry for him when he died. Who
would care for her? Who move the heavy furniture from the house?
She would be alone. But one Sunday, after a restless night, with
the scent of liquor in her mouth, she might find, behind the paneling,
behind the deco picture, in one of his never-worn dress shoes, one
of his letters, brittle and chipped at the corners—but, in
his childish scrawl, words that would help her to realize who he
was and help her to move on.
2.
After their divorce, when she could no longer stand the drinking
or his scenes, she boxed up everything he ever gave to her and her
father unloaded the boxes for the one-armed clerk at Goodwill. She
had found most of his letters, of course. Having lost a few pounds,
she put on an old wool coat and found the first one in the inside
pocket. She found it a little poignant and a little funny, and she
folded it again and put it back where she found it. There was the
one beneath the silverware tray, the one in the Ketty Lester album
sleeve. One was in her left wedding shoe, another in the atlas,
between Chile and Peru. 3.
Years later, in a small used bookstore overmastered by the smell
of pine, a girl with a new haircut closes her eyes to hear the heels
of her heavy shoes on the wooden floor. Her parents have just divorced
and she has no friends. She opens her eyes to the poetry section
and touches the spine of Neruda’s poems, and inside she will
find a letter that will save her life.
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