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Then she said, “May was special, too, like you.”
I almost smiled at her. She said that I was like May.
But her big bug eyes started bugging out at me, like what she saw when she saw us was a tragedy. “I just don’t want you to waste your talent.” She paused again. “I don’t want you to go down the same road that May did.”
And then I was so angry that everything in my body clenched together. I didn’t know what “road” she thought May went down, or if she was trying to say that’s why she died. She wouldn’t know. No one did. She wasn’t there. No one was, no one but me. I was so angry that if my throat hadn’t been clenched too tight, I might have screamed at her. If she felt so bad about it and all, why didn’t she just give me an A? Grownups can be such fakes, I thought. They are always acting like they are trying to help you, and like they want to take care of you, but really they just want something from you. I wondered what exactly Mrs. Buster wanted. Finally I just nodded and forced myself to mumble something about I’m fine, just that one assignment was really hard.
The thing is, I can’t hate Mrs. Buster entirely, because she gives us things like your poems to read. Yesterday we read “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The poem is about an ancient urn with pictures on it. It sounds like it would be boring, but really it’s not. I like this part, where you are talking about two lovers, trapped in the instant just before they kiss:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though wi
She ca
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
The boy and the girl beneath the trees, they will forever be frozen into exactly what they are just then—they will never touch lips, but they will never lose each other, either. They will be full of possibility, immune to whatever sorrow might follow.
It’s like that, almost, when you look at any picture. Like this picture framed on my desk in my room, of May and me as kids in our yard in the summertime. We are swinging on the swing set. I’m just starting to pump, still near the ground, watching her. She’s high up, right in the moment before she jumps. But she’ll never fall off. It’s just after sunset, so the air is still warm. We will stay where the sky is deep electric blue, never turning to night—a place beyond time that can’t be touched. When I sit at my desk and see the November sky purring with snow, it doesn’t matter. I am seven years old in the summer dusk.
But what I love most is the end of your poem, when the urn talks to us. It says this: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I keep trying to figure out exactly what you mean, but that sentence is like a circle. If beauty is truth, and if truth is beauty, they are defined by each other, so how do we know the meaning of either? I think that we make our own meanings, by putting ourselves into them. I put the moon over the street lamp into the idea of beauty, and I put the feeling of Sky’s heartbeat like moths wings, and I put Ha
Then I just go around and around. And I still don’t know how to make sense of the world. But maybe it’s okay that it’s bigger than what we can hold on to. Because I think that by beauty, you don’t just mean something that’s pretty. You mean something that makes us human. The urn, you say, is a “friend to man.” It will live beyond its generation, and the next ones. And your poem is like that, too. You died almost two hundred years ago, when you were only twenty-five. But the words that you left are still alive.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
I was reading about you tonight, because I wondered what your life was like when you were a kid. You were the center of attention in your family, but after your parents divorced when you were eight, you were orphaned in a way. You were angry. You wrote on your wall: I hate Mom, I hate Dad, Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad, it simply makes you want to be sad. You said the pain of their split stayed with you for years. They passed you from one of them to the other. Your dad remarried, and your mom had a boyfriend who was bad to her. By the time you were a teenager, your dad had custody of you, but he passed you off to live with the family of your friend. Then you moved back to live with your mom. When you didn’t graduate high school or get a job, she packed your stuff into boxes and kicked you out. You were homeless then. You stayed on other people’s couches, or sometimes you slept under a bridge, or in the waiting room of the Grays Harbor Community Hospital—a teenager just becoming a man, sleeping alone in the hospital where you were born eighteen years before.
For me, it’s not as bad as it was for you. But I understand how it is when a family falls apart. Tonight is Sunday, the house-switching night. It makes the gloominess of the end of the weekend even worse, putting my things in the little Tinker Bell suitcase that I’ve had since I was eleven. Mom and Dad bought it for me as a consolation prize when they split up.
It was the summer before May started high school. She would turn fifteen at the begi
It was hard for me to understand at first what this meant. What I remember most is how hard May cried. She cried like someone had died. Dad kept trying to put his hand on her back, and Mom tried to hug her, but she didn’t want anyone to touch her. She walked away, into a corner of the yard, and curled up. I pulled out one of my eyelashes and hoped that it would count. I didn’t even wish for Mom and Dad to get back together. I wished for May to be okay.
Later that night she said to me, in a voice that was flatter than anything, “I failed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wasn’t good enough to keep them together.”
I wished I knew what to say back, but I didn’t. “You’re good enough for me,” I said meekly.
May smiled at me, although it was a sad smile. “Thanks, Laurel.” And then she added, “At least we always have each other.”
I made a decision right then that I would love her even more than I already did—enough to make up for everything else.
After that day our lives turned different. Dad stayed in the house, and Mom moved into an apartment, which sort of made it seem obvious that the split was her idea, although they never explained that part of it. The next month May went to high school, and she started to act happy again, but it wasn’t the same. Now she had a new world to be in, and it didn’t include any of us. Something invisible took her. She was there, but gone.