Dear Rachael,

I was walking around the old neighbourhood tonight and decided to head down Bronson to Flora. You know the corner. The snow was piled pretty high by then. It was late, and the occasional car would take advantage of the empty lanes, sending slush airborne with a satisfying sound akin to tearing cloth. I lit a cigarette and stood, watching the smoke collect in clouds in front of the streetlights.

Have you ever hung out in a childhood haunt years later and felt disturbed by the way you don’t quite fit there anymore? Like your shirt’s too tight. You look around and wonder if people are staring at the straining buttons. But no one knew me there. An older man passed by without nodding. I held my breath as he crossed the street, and let it out as I took a few more paces toward your old apartment halfway down the block.

The windows were black. I looked up and pictured us on the second-floor balcony, sitting in wicker chairs, you with your cup of tea and long flowing hair and virgin pixie countenance, myself dumb and over-experienced, an ogre trying desperately not to crush a baby bird. That night I couldn’t sleep and made the trek back to your place, stuffing a blue jay feather I’d found into an envelope before leaving it in your mailbox, along with a little note about flight. Christ.

You’d always meet my declarations of love with quiet acceptance. Maybe I kept dishing it out because I knew you wouldn’t get mad. You’d talk me down with poetry. And I couldn’t say anything, do anything to get my ire back to that passionate pitch that used to guarantee me a bed for the night with other women. Our rare kisses had to be cut short. Always the want. It scares me now to think of it, how you bore the unfairness of my advances with infinite grace.

There I was, the smoke dancing in my lungs; I started thinking on getting older, and how people fall away from us like shriveling leaves. (That we can be both leaf and tree is an intense contradiction that I’ve never been able to wrap my head around, probably for fear of blowing away.) I watched you grow and find independence, the way a father might. It’s hard to explain. There’s a world of difference between your early and late 20s. Adulthood is an ever-shifting threshold. Sometimes you turn to look back across it and can’t believe your eyes.

I’m here, Rachael. Where are you? On to something new, fulfilled on a living room sofa, having moved on from tea and now sipping champagne in front of a stereo somewhere in Southern Ontario, sharing a laugh about God knows what. How hairy your legs used to get. The time you posed nude for a cut-rate literary calendar, but only because they shot you from behind and from afar. That night you met a writer on an elevator and put up with him as he walked you back across campus, pining, pining.

I’ve given up. I can’t take the deafening silence that comes from moving on. You’ll tell me I shouldn’t, hand me a cryptic line about the goodness of my soul and how you’ve always appreciated my words, the kind of thing that always undercut my early quests for your lips. I didn’t quit trying out of a lack of desire. Knowing you necessitated knowing a gaping deficiency that could only be filled by standing aside impatiently and watching you unfold, like a creased sheet of paper with fresh words at the ready.

This letter is a greedy thing. A stone skipped under the pitch black of midnight. I hummed a tune we used to listen to on the way back to a buddy’s place, pausing in the middle of the road because traffic allowed it, watching the snow blow down from the nearby rooftops. It felt good to leave footprints, to know I was there. I don’t think I’ll be coming back this way again.

Cal

Dearest Alan,

There’s something nice about icicle lights, don’t you think?

I never thought you’d tell me this much, give me this much – about the small of my back, the red wall, all those tiny details we’d normally ignore or forget by morning.

I’ve been thinking about what to say to you ever since I got your letter. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. What must you have thought, as I was taking my time? In any case, I hope this helps. I hope I can answer some of my own questions too. I sometimes wonder if my creeping into your dreams is just another way of chipping away at this friendship we’ve built.

I can’t remember the last time I trusted myself fully. Can you? I trust you, but in an abstract way. Like I’d trust you to dial 911 if I cut my hand while slicing a bagel. Any more than that and it all gets fuzzy in my mind.

I took this class once at a junior college, all about social science, how people relate to each other as animals do. Before language, all we had were our instincts. We could trust those.

And it’s true, even about you and me, that we might never talk about these things, might ignore them for another ten years of friendship, but right now, we’re just two lions pawing at each other from inside a cage at the zoo. Your letter was a little girl tapping on the glass, saying, Notice me.

And I notice you. But before your letter, I don’t think I realized just how much and how well you noticed me.

I may never be that girl walking up the stairs, petals falling by the wayside. I may fall short. But I figure, what the hell? Who’s to say who will fall and who will fly? If not now, when?

My number hasn’t changed.

Love, Elise

Dear Elise,

I had a dream about you last night.

We were at a house party, hosted by some friend of yours over in the village, that guy I met that one time. Remember? He kept getting my name wrong. Kept calling me Alex. I knew it was his place, even though I’ve never been there, and he wasn’t in the dream.

The details are starting to wear off. I remember the place was lit low, with icicle lights. Intimate and kind of cheesy. We were talking with a bunch of people in the kitchen. Laura was there, and Mike, holding drinks and laughing. Two guys we didn’t know started fighting and crashed into the kitchen table. You grabbed my hand and we left the room, giggling.

You made for the second floor with me on your tail, and for some reason I have a vivid recollection of your shirt rising and falling over the skin at the small of your back as you climbed the stairs. You were wearing a belt with a rose embroidered along it, and you were shedding petals as you took the steps two at a time. On the landing we paused for a moment and looked back. I don’t remember what I saw.

In an instant we were in a room with each other. The walls were red and a comforter lay splayed out on the bed. You had a look on your face like you were choking on a song. I asked you what the matter was. You smiled one of those inside-joke smiles as you put your arms around my neck and brought our mouths together. And we made love.

Maybe this all comes as a humourous surprise. But it’s what happened next that shook me, and it’s the reason I’m putting word to page right now. After we finished, we rejoined the party, but you wouldn’t stay still. You kept walking, just ahead of me, out of reach. I kept asking you to slow down, but you acted as if you couldn’t hear me. I followed you throughout the house, from room to room, trying to catch up. It’s mostly a blur now. All I recall is the sight of the back of your head moving away from me, hiding your determination, like the autopilot in your brain had been switched on.

You walked out the front door and I followed. Down the front steps, out into the street. There were other people, out for walks and leering from café windows along the Square, wondering what we were up to. I looked around at them, feeling embarrassed and confused. I started to jog, but so did you. We came to the park down on Water Street, and you started gaining more ground. My heart beat with the panic at your leaving. As you became smaller in the distance, I slowed gradually, sat down, and wept. And then I woke up.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I know. But I want this dream to mean something, even if it’s an excuse to be perfectly honest with you. Elise, when I came out of the dream this morning, I wanted you more than air. I know you’d never even begin to think of me in that way. But I’ve always thought of you as someone I’d follow upstairs, if only she’d reach out and grab me.

Now that I’ve told you all this, please don’t go away. If that’s the result, I’d understand. But I can’t ever go through another moment like the one I had this morning, when I thought I’d lost you.

Love Alan

Dear Casey,

The boat I made up. I’m sorry. Talking to you these days is painful. But maybe I owe you this. The truth, that is. So that you won’t be waiting on a dispatch.

I do remember that night. Your laugh, mostly. The moonlight on your puffy cheek and the golden strands of your hair pulled back. The sight of your breath against the stadium lights we jimmied into shimmering before running away, cackling.

The next day I was talking to Michelle, just before English class. She told me you were laid up that day. You’d caught a cold. I skipped out and jumped in my car, peeled from the parking lot like James Dean with the intent to swing by your place. I felt bad for dragging you out for kicks, partly, but it was also this feeling I’d been carrying with me the entire night before.

I pulled up to the curb and stared, unable to walk to your front door. The shades were drawn and it struck me how dumb a house looks when you know someone’s at home, but you can’t tell from the outside. I sat there for a good 10 minutes before I left.

Too many thwarted opportunities, too many missed boats. I guess that’s where I got the castaway idea. That and “Old Man and the Sea.” Everyone laughed when you nailed that metaphor, even Mr. Garskey. I love you more than literature, you gigantic teacher’s pet. Maybe that’s what I would have said to you that morning. Maybe that would have been the way that would have worked.

I’m a coward for doing it this way and not to your face. I hope you understand if we don’t talk for a while. You said you felt guilty for not feeling the same things I was feeling that night. Don’t. I’m the one who has some changing to do.

Kevin

Dear Kevin,

Do you remember the time we hopped that chain link fence at the high school on your block? We didn’t even know it was there – the fog always so thick, you so new to the neighborhood. I remember thinking: how funny, how strange to break into a football field at night, years out of school, when neither one of us ever had before.

You didn’t even laugh when I ripped my jeans open on the way back down. Laughing, all breathless, red-faced, I was colder than I was embarrassed. You helped me down, and I felt guilty for not feeling exactly what you felt that night. Maybe it was bliss – a quiet, complete kind; doesn’t need to announce itself when it enters a room.

But you’re leaving this summer, maybe forever. You’re going to live or work on a boat, something along those lines, catch lobsters instead of letter grades. And if our phone calls get fewer and farther between, I hope you at least remember nights like that pants-ripping night, back when we were the realest of friends . I’ll stay that person if you’ll come back to land someday.

Much love,

Casey

P.S. Wear sunblock out there.

P.P.S. Is “realest” even a word? It’s the “irregardless” of adjectives. Christ.

Dear J,

I found this, an email in a sea of spam and junk, buoyant after three years. I’m sorry we haven’t spoken in so long. What is there to answer to now? This ghost of a writer, this husk of a sentiment. Words on a screen, long since out of context. Nevertheless, at one point or another, you felt them. Used your fingers to bring them to life. That’s worth something, I guess, even after all this time.

I don’t know. What’s there to say? I still get sick, but not for the same reasons. Different ones, chills brought on by inclement weather and holes in my shoes. If only I’d had the heart to count the cups of NeoCitran since. Here’s the tale of one: On New Year’s Eve last year, I caught a cold at full speed and spent the night on my couch in front of the TV, watching Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin crack awkward jokes in between sips and bites of digestive cookie.

What I can’t get over is that nobody called me that night to find out how I was. Not a flicker of concern in the souls of the champagne saturated, out at their parties, people I championed as friends. I don’t get down that often, not the way I used to, but I was down when the ball dropped. Another year.

What am I on about? Maybe I’m down tonight, with no holiday excuses in sight. Maybe I’m nostalgic over a night spent sick in a bed with a person who cared for me. Love. You always cut to the quick. Terrifying. It doesn’t scare me anymore, I swear. But I guess I’ve accepted that mistake, the one I made with you, the many. I was always one to avoid ports in a storm, even if it meant I had no idea where the wind would sweep me.

I feel like I haven’t taken a breath in ages. Does that make sense?

Write me back sometime. I miss you.

Steph

Dear Steph,

Our love is without question. I was thinking that, that exact phrase, as you were lying awake next to me, hair pulled back so you could get sick if you needed to. From the wrong side of my bed, you looked like a tiny angel, only crippled, wings clipped. You kept saying you were sorry, sorry for being sick in my room – sorry, and you’d wash the sheets tomorrow. I said it was fine and I meant it, the same way I always mean it.

Real love, love like that of hot water in a mug for the sole purpose of feeling better, is hard to come by. I wondered about that, though you were already asleep and couldn’t echo my sentiment. But that’s exactly it – that moment when you’re beside me and I am the breaths you take without thinking – that’s when I know I am as necessary as passing time.

When you left, ready for a night away, sheets in tow, you took those breaths with you. You packed them in your trunk, tucked beneath a bag of laundry and a pair of boots. That was the moment I knew that whatever you do, I do it too. My compass is yours, though the needle always sticks.

And anyway, thanks for washing my sheets.

Love,

J