Letter from the Gulag IV
when you receive this...
Dear reader,
When you receive this, I will be at my halfway mark. I wish I could tell you what it’s been like. Or my excitement in the quiet moments just before my final surrender that I had waited and prayed for when no end seemed in sight save for the thought that “surely, this cannot last forever” as “this too shall pass.”
I had smoked my last cigarette, hopefully not fighting back tears, not for myself but for the disappointment I have been for those least deserving of the brunt of my depravity. Hopefully none came at all—because I had been waiting for this, relieved that it can finally start to end. Hopefully not a single drop dangled from its ledge, it exercised superhuman self-control, not leaping at the last moment spilling onto the collar of my shirt in its pity, its disgust; not reliving any moment that preceded it, asking how a child soothing his ear drinking from his bottle and watching cartoons, afraid to miss a day of school, in love with his first grade teacher, growing in love with every girl he saw, crying because he forgot to turn on the stove for the tea kettle, deciding to be late because he was sad, drowning himself in books and poetry, brimming with that expected potential on his first day of college, languishing thereafter in cocaine and drinking, could have possibly gotten here; but if it had fell at all, let it be because it was overcome with joy, the Kantian maturity that he chose this and did not ask for mercy, because that is cowardly, let it be because he said that if he were the villain, to let him face the world as such without prelude, without indictment, just, “Here am I.”
There is much to prosecute me for, it’s true. The time that I made you cry, I should have never done that. All you wanted was love. Yelling at my siblings when they were just babies—and they will always be my babies: Dear brother, I don’t hate marbles, and I’m sorry. Lying to myself and others, “no, it was just one time. I did it to stay awake.” The books left unfinished, disaster stricken across the pages in leaking blood from untreated wounds. The times I hurt myself and no one knew.
I’ve been short of breathing lately. It’s been fifteen years. As you read this, manifest a cigarette between my lips, inhaling deeply and smiling because if you want to live to one hundred you have to give up all the things that make you want to live to one hundred. Excising my degradations one by one, this is one I plan to keep, thank you. I once thought I was invincible; I’m now glad that I am not.
Joy comes from expiration. The expiatory breath from an influx of smoke, the thought of your lovers absence, the ensuing intolerance for the inevitable, but the consolation that when it comes time to die you do not realize you had not lived. So it was when my little sister was excited about a tent in the backyard and pulled me in with our stuffed animals for tea time, I was overcome with love and happiness because she will not be little forever. And her beautiful stuffed cat will one day be alone.
Jesus, when you receive this. I expect that I will be happier than I’ve ever been.
Earnestly yours,