The Fourteenth Letter

 
Tuesday, January 15, 2002                                                                11:05 AM
Dear Ducky,
            Going down the Russian River in a canoe with your father—getting caught upon the branch and tipping us over!  Your father says it is my fault, and yells, but is mostly concerned for you, and goes into survival mode.  I think it was the first time that I really saw Tom exhibiting any emotion towards you.  Did we have fun that day?  How old were we?  I can’t remember much about this day.  Could you even swim?  I don’t remember you ever really swimming.  I learned to swim almost before I learned to walk.  Did you ever go with us to Nino’s Agua Caliente swimming pool?  That is such a division between us.  I grew up loving the water, and you perhaps were deathly afraid.  So why did we go on the river?  Obviously Toni did not come along (not a swimmer at all!).  What possessed Tom to do this with us?  Could he swim either?  Why take us two young girls down?  Was I the best swimmer among us?  That is a frightening thought.  But I remember that a part of it was fun, once we got to the part where there were houses along the riverbank, because the water was deep and green.  Did we swim then?  I seem to remember swimming in the cool greenness with you; we were laughing @ each other with our eyes.  It was still, and silent, except for the faint hum of kids playing on the soft beaches.

The Thirteenth Letter

 
Monday, January 14, 2002                                                                            10:50 AM
Dear Ducky,
Oh Ducky, I haven’t written in so long!  And I have to admit that my mind has wandered from you as well.  I was back down in Sonoma for Christmas, after having gone to San Diego for my cousin Monica’s wedding.  It was a whirlwind holiday:  several trips between my family and Matt’s.  I barely slept, which wasn’t good at all, because I had just recovered from a bad case of pneumonia.  I still have to make up work for two of my classes from last quarter.
            One interesting thing:  Matt and I actually went to Christmas Eve Mass at St. Leo’s with both of our families.  And we sat over in the “Peanut Gallery,” and I saw Toni and Tom two rows in front of us.  Toni saw me and did a cheesy, weird wave.

The Twelfth Letter

 
Tuesday, November 6, 2001                                                               
3:10 PM
Dear Ducky,
            Today, again, I want to cry out to you.  I haven’t the strength to ask you many questions, or to tell you many things.  I just want to cry to you: “Where are you?”  I have been here in Seattle for one year, and I am getting used to my daily routine, and I feel less and less acquainted with the past.  I live sometimes as if it’s the future, as if everything is so far behind me I can’t hear its heavy footsteps.
            The city has made me less open, less noisy, less friendly.  The city has made me quiet.  I look at things more.  No, that’s not true.  I look at things the same amount, and I have always been very observant; it’s just pretty much all I do now—I just don’t interact with it all as much.  Sometimes when I speak to other people the sound of my voice surprises me.  I don’t recognize my external voice because I most often am using the voice in my head.  The Internal Monologue.  Sometimes I want to forget everything that has come before and start over.  Start from right here and become a whole new person.  Other times I yearn for the aches and pains of childhood, the easy tears, the difficult friendships, the comfort of the arms of my parents.  More than anything right now I want to crawl on the couch and snuggle between my father and my mother and get hugs and kisses.  They are getting older now, and are less inclined to cuddle and hug and kiss.  I remembered the night before I moved back up here I was in the living room crying to my dad because I knew that I would never be able to just sit and feel protected by him again.  Once you are in your twenties you can’t rely on your parents for snuggles and comfort.  It’s not acceptable.  Maybe it’s not because they are old that people don’t get hugs, maybe it’s because they don’t get hugs that they are old.  Hugs are so necessary.  Hugs and saying “I love you.”  My family would always say, “I love you,” no matter what, even if we were mad at each other, or said it 20 times a day.  Is it possible to say, “I love you” too much?  I don’t think so, but because Matt never heard it growing up, he doesn’t want to get used to saying it now.  You would think that it would actually be the opposite, that I would be the one not wanting to hear it.  Did I ever tell you that I love you, Ducky?  Probably we weren’t in the habit because we were so young.  I wish so much that I could see you to tell you.  I wish that we had been able to have a relationship of love and trust and could be growing old together.  I don’t have any childhood friends.  Who is going to be my maid of honor when I get married?  I don’t know if I have shared enough of my life with anyone.  But it’s not really as if I could have you do it either: we don’t know each other anymore if we knew each other at all to begin with.  I’m not going to get married any time soon anyway, don’t worry.  I’m not ready.  I don’t know if Matt is the right guy for me if he can’t say “goodnight” and “I love you” to me every night.

The Eleventh Letter

 
Monday, September 24, 2001                                                                10:59 AM
Dear Ducky,
            My friend Tenille came over yesterday after work, and we watched wrestling with Matt.  The thing that is interesting about her is that she was also adopted from Korea.  She and her three siblings are all from Korea, but only she and her sister Tara are actually blood-related.   Their “parents” are white and divorced when Tenille was about twelve.  She is the oldest of the four, and is currently 27.  Tenille, Tara, Tyler, and Tim.  Tenille is very smallàshe only comes up to my shoulder.  She doesn’t remind me of you in any way except that she was born in Korea and her hair has the same texture.  We have never really spoken about her being adopted until about a month and a half ago.  She told me about working on her parents’ farm in Eastern Washington—like actually slopping hogs, milking cows, sowing corn.  Completely different from her big city life now.  And she mentioned something about how growing up, everyone said she was always real afraid of men, especially her father, even though he had never done anything to harm her.  And she has a horrible fear of being grabbed from behind and things covering her head.  She still cannot wear hoods on sweatshirts or hats.  She will just start shrieking and thrashing.  She says her mother once said, “Tenille, something terrible must have happened to you.”  What could have happened to her?  She came over when she was two years old, half the age you were when you came.  And still she is having problems and feeling the effect of her infancy in Korea.  She has trouble getting close to people and can’t maintain a relationship.  She is also an alcoholic.  Is any of that related to her being adopted?  I don’t know.  But she is definitely experiencing things that others do not.
            It’s funny, because I never think of you as different, I never thought you looked strange, or anything.  I always thought you were much more beautiful than me. 
            I remember the scar on your forehead, between your eyes—I used to say that it looked like the top of a loaf of bread.  Where did you get that scar?!

I am beginning to realize that Anne of Green Gables meant something totally different to you than to me—of course!  Why did I never realize it before?!  Anne was adopted, just like you, and Anne’s hair made her look different, just like you looked different.  Did you get teased like Anne?  Did you feel alone like Anne?  And here I have been, all these years, selfishly thinking of myself as Anne, when really she was you all along.  I am an ASSHOLE!  Ugh!  No wonder you never told me anything—I was too stupid to understand!  Of course we fought over Gilbert!  He rightfully belonged to you because he always loved you—not me, ugly, stupid Diana.  Although I have been trying to read Ben Hur like Anne did.  It is thick and a little hard to get through, even for me, the avid reader.  And I guess with you being Anne, you stealing and secretly ordering pizza made you “corrupt,” just like her.  Oh, Duk Sook, I am so sorry.  I am so sorry.

Hey!  Wait a minute!  What about the summer after I graduated from 8th grade and we were at the St. Leo’s Parish Picnic, and I went swimming, and you refused to go?  We were at Hanna Boys Center, the home for “bad boys.”  Was there something going on then?  Were you somehow involved with someone there?  I remember I had thought that you were acting very strange that day.  You seemed very uncomfortable.  What happened?  Remember I was flirting with that black kid named Eric, who kept trying to call me and we were never home?  I had just had my first kiss on the last day of school some months before.  I was finally a woman.  But you had already had sex and drugs.  I must have seemed so young, so naïve, so boring, so unbearable.  And it’s funny, because out of all of my friends, I was the first one to have sex at 15 (exactly one month after my birthday) and it was a long while before anyone else caught up.  Fifteen was supposed to be really young.

The Tenth Letter

 
Sunday, September 23, 2001                                                               
11:35 AM
Dear Ducky,
            School starts in three days.  I am looking forward to being intellectually stimulated again.  I realize that it was my trips to school that prompted these letters to you.  I still miss you fervently—and it only seems to be when I have free time that I really start to think about you. 
I wonder…I have never known what drugs you were doing…was it marijuana and alcohol?  Or something worse, much worse?  I am imagining cocaine, heroin, LSD, ecstasy.  And that makes me sad.  I just watched Forrest Gump again last night.  I suddenly saw a lot of similarities between you and the character of Jenny.  I guess I know that there were some pretty terrible things that happened to you to make you run away and be so messed up.  I am still so very angry with Toni and Tom.  Why didn’t they know that they were hurting you?  Why did they even think that they could raise children?  From what I hear, Andrew is pretty messed up too.  He came back from Gonzaga and flipped out.  I applied to Gonzaga, and was accepted, but was a little afraid of the school that made Andrew even too crazy for your parents.

The Ninth Letter

 
Tuesday, September 18, 2001                                                               
2:07 PM
Dear Ducky,
            I am at work, being the host for the Turntable Restaurant @ EMP.  We are so slow today that I can steal a moment to write to you.  Everything still feels so funny after what happened on Tuesday.  I am still in shock and rather depressed.  Where were you, Ducky, when the planes hit the World Trade Center?  I realize that it’s entirely possible that you were in NY when all of this happened—because, of course, I have no idea where you really are or where you possibly could be.
            I haven’t found time for myself to write all summer.  I have worked myself into oblivion.  I am just all around tired and not feeling able to do anything at all.

The Eighth Letter

 
Monday, August 13, 2001                                                                           
8:28 PM
Dear Ducky,
            Do you remember when we had head lice, Ducky?  Remember when they “shaved” your head, and only cropped mine?
            Where do lice come from, I wonder?  How do they begin?  And who had lice first—you or me?  Whose school had the epidemic?  Who is to blame?  My memory wants to say that your parents blame me, that you could never be dirty enough to cause such…contamination.  Did we have to stay home from school?  I remember the word “quarantine,” and not quite understanding, and then a strange association with the word “turpentine.”  Where did that come from?  Perhaps I recall stories of children with lice having to dip their heads in turpentine.  Yuck.  The thought of that makes my stomach try to crawl up my throat for fresh air.
            I remember coming home from the barber (yes!  I actually went to my dad’s barber!) and all of our furniture was coated in plastic.  Our whole house felt ghost-like.  My father had rented “Dumbo” for my brother and I—I don’t know whether it was out of pity or for a distraction.
            I don’t remember much else at all—weird shampoo that made huge bugs fall out of my hair that I hadn’t even known were there.  They made a gruesome sound as they hit the porcelain tub.  How long were we out of school?  Your hair had been long and thick, and with the “epidemic,” your hair had to be cut like everyone else’s.  It was cut without rhyme or reason (because the hairdresser hadn’t known how to cut your “kind” of hair?).  Or maybe it was your father who cut it.  It stood straight out from your head as if you’d been shocked—and your eyes, no longer able to hide underneath your bangs, echoed that perception.
            With your hair gone, you looked different, and you acted different.  It was as if the loss of your hair killed a part of you in some way.  I only remember you with long or incredibly short hair—nothing in between.  And I realize that Toni had always had really short hair, and so she probably had no idea how to style your hair or make it pretty like the other girls in your school (or even how it would have been done in Korea).
            Was that hard, being different, being strange, and not looking like the other students?  I realize that we never talked about that—or it never came up.  I was never aware if anyone teased you or made fun of you.  I have no idea what school was really like for you.  Maybe part of the reason you ran away was because you were treated badly by your schoolmates?
            I guess growing up, I never realized that it could be hard for you, that you would experience different things than me and ultimately be hurt by these things: it never crossed my mind.
            Maybe I really wasn’t a good friend to you.  Maybe you were right in choosing not to confide in me.  Maybe there was no way for me to help you, or to even understand.  I couldn’t possibly have had any answers for you.

The Seventh Letter

 
Monday, July 30, 2001                                                                                 
3:24 PM
Dear Ducky,
            You will never guess…I have not had a day off in about 65 days.  I mean a scheduled day off.  I have missed one day at each job only right after I found out that Eleanor died, which was on July 7th.  So I guess it happened right on schedule.  The lack of time for myself is starting to catch up with me.  But I need to make up for the fact that I didn’t work much while I was in school.  But I don’t want to be a whiner.  I think a lot of people think that I am…the lack of time to myself has affected my writing.  I have not written anything since the very end of May.  I am the writer who never writes!!!  Oh Ducky, sometimes I feel that this is not what I am meant to do.  Why can’t I just buckle down and get it done?  I have neglected to write to you too, which saddens me.  There are so many times that I wanted to write, but I couldn’t find any time to spend.  Now I feel as if you are slipping away from me again.  Your face has lost its definition; its color is fading.  Where are you Ducky?  Why can’t I find you?  I wonder if I really have anything of value to say to you, as if my stories may be meaningless—or even dangerous.

The Sixth Letter

 
Thursday, May 31, 2001                                                                                 
4:55 PM
Dear Ducky,
            My last full day of school.  I am feeling absolutely ill, and I had been wanting to skip my last class, but I am glad that I decided to stay, even though I am not sure why.  It’s a beautiful day today: the sun is shining and it’s very mild—not too warm, just right.  It’s nice.  I only wish that I had a pair of shorts to wear so that I could enjoy it more.  But no shorts until I lose some weight!  The quarter is at an end, and I am feeling good because I know that I have accomplished much during my first year here.  Did I tell you that I got straight A’s last quarter?  Oh Ducky, are you getting ready for summer vacation too?  Tomorrow I have an oral presentation for my Spanish class, and then on Saturday morning I am catching a plane to California to see Tim’s graduation.  Oh yeah, and also to see Eleanor before she dies…Do you remember Eleanor at all?  She has…emphysema?  I’m not really sure.  I am excited to see my family—I miss them VERY much.  And I am excited to see the Sonoma hills and vineyards.  And at the same time I am nervous because I have been thinking about you so much and now I will be going home and you won’t be there.  I know that I am going to drive by your house—your old house…and shudder in grief because you are not there.  And I will keep trying to conjure you up, hoping that you will suddenly appear at the front door.

The Fifth Letter

 
Friday, May 25, 2001                                                                                         10:27 PM
Dear Ducky,
            What do you do, Ducky, when you know someone is going to die?  When you know that the next time that you see them, it will be the last time that you do?  What do you do, Ducky, when you are afraid to even visit them, afraid to see them actually dying, afraid to see the tubes, afraid, afraid, afraid…?  What do you do when you know that the timing of this death is going to interfere with your finals and your new job?  Any other time would be a bad time to die—but this time right now is especially bad.  Even worse than that because I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.  I keep trying to ask others, but no one seems to know.  Or maybe no one wants to tell?  What do you do, Ducky, when this will be the first death you have ever had?  What do you do when you can’t stop thinking about it, when your whole body feels heavy and SLOW, SLOW, SLOW?  When you realize that what you are feeling is really a complete lack of feeling--it’s a feeling of apathy, of disinterest in absolutely everything?  What do you do when you feel angry?  When you feel furious and unfocused?  What do you do when you feel tired, when you’re just too dang tired to do anything at all?  What do you do when you feel empty, hollow, like a silly, clichéd little shell?  What do you do when you can’t stop writing, when your fingers hurt and your raging mind takes over?

The Fourth Letter

 
Thursday, May 24, 2001                                                                      11:40AM
Dear Ducky,
            I had a weird dream about you last night, Ducky.  Actually, you were only in it for a few moments—the rest of it was with your parents, Toni and Tom.  Let me see if I can remember and explain. 
Basically I was riding a bike through your neighborhood—you know, Fano Lane and all that.  Although I guess it’s not your neighborhood anymore since even Toni and Tom have moved away.  Anyway, I was as old as I am now, riding that old pink bike I had with the banana seat (I have no idea how I recalled that item out of the recesses of my memory).  All of the houses looked like they belonged in Disneyland—they  were just a bit too small to look real.  And the houses were basically just facades: brightly painted and cheerful and pretty, but aside from the outside walls, there was nothing else inside.  They were like the empty sets at Universal Studios.  They all had amazing gardens with ponds and pools and waterfalls with very blue water.  I am realizing that it looked a lot like Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz. 
At the same time there seemed to be a lot of people…yet it was totally deserted and I was all alone.  Everything was moving in slow motion, and there was music coming from somewhere…I finally came to that little street your house is on from the other side, and there wasn’t a real road.  There were shallow canals of that bright blue water, and all the houses were very close together.  The only place for me to ride my bike on was on a very narrow, curvy catwalk-type thing.  I had to bike very slowly, and I ran the risk of falling in, which would obviously poison or kill me in some way (remember playing “Hot Lava” or “Poisonous Peanut Butter”?).  And for whatever reason, all the cows from the field across the street from your house were everywhere and they were big and colorful (red, yellow, blue, purple!) and robotic and they were mooing loudly and spraying milk everywhere and it was like a scary fun house.
I felt weird because I knew that I didn’t belong there—I felt like a spy, an infiltrator, and an outcast.  I was getting nearer to your house and there was mist, fog, everywhere even though there was lots of sun.  I knew I looked suspicious riding that children’s bike, and I kept telling myself that if I was questioned, I would just say that I “got lost,” or that I was just riding through the neighborhood by accidental childhood habit.  And then, there I was, in front of your house, and you were coming out of the front door and walking to the car, and you saw me and looked away and covered your face like those criminals who don’t want to be photographed.  It was you, but it wasn’t: you were very tall and thin, and your hair was short and pixie-ish.  Toni and Tom saw me and immediately started yelling at me and questioning me, trying to distract me from watching you get into the car and disappear.  They looked like they were made out of plastic. 
And although you had disappeared into the car, I seemed to be able to see you on the other side of a screen/window/partition.  Your image seemed to be projected, and it hovered and flickered, catching my eye, pulling my attention away from the admonishments of your parents.
We were standing on the lawn—and yet we were inside the house somehow—except there was no roof and the walls were not connected and there was an unusual amount of glaring sunlight: colors were pale and washed out, and the defining edges of everything seemed to be blurred into a halo of light.  Your robotic parents were talking, but I could barely hear them—I was too busy trying to look at you.  By the time you had walked by, the only sound was a kind of deep humming noise.
And then it just ended.  It stopped.  No more.  I was sad that the dream was over, and yet I was grateful.  I was pained to see you and not be able to touch you and talk with you.  And yet I was overjoyed to have had a brief glimpse of you.  But, overall, I am now confused.  Confused that you are still haunting me.  I believe that dreams are “real,” that they are mediums for the subconscious, a connection to another “world.”  I feel that you are trying to reach me in some way, that you are thinking about me, that you know that I am thinking about you.  We are still connected, Ducky.  I want to believe that we are still connected. I want to believe that you can feel my love for you even though we haven’t seen each other for eight years.

The Third Letter

 
Friday, April 20, 2001                                                                                  4:04 PM
Dear Ducky,
            I am back on the bus again.  I have so much to say and today I can’t say anything.  I couldn’t sleep last night. I tried to tell Matt about this letter—at  first I wasn’t going to because I was just too upset for letting myself write this much—and then I realized that the feeling inside me was just too big, and if it was going to be able to come out at all, I would have to let him know. He has to know how much you mean to me.
            I am angry that I just can’t call you up and talk to you right now.  I don’t think you and I ever had many telephone conversations—we were too young to say anything other than, “Hey, wanna come over and play?”  Real phone conversations didn’t start until junior high and only got really good and juicy in high school.  You were already gone by then.  Would I even know your voice now?  I would probably be expecting a child voice, just as I am expecting a child face.  I am trying to remember what you sounded like saying my name—but  I can’t.  I seem to recall that you had a slight gurgle in your voice, but that can’t be right.  I do remember, however, your thick, coarse, black hair; how there was just so much of it, and it smelled warm, like slate.  My hair is always brown, sticky, and horribly short in all of my memories.  I don’t know how reliable memory smells are.  The girl I tried unsuccessfully to replace you with swore to me at one time that she remembers me smelling of orange mint when I was in the second grade.  I wish it were you who had remembered that.  Oh God, why did you have to go away?  Why couldn’t we have grown apart normally like childhood chums do?  Why couldn’t we have tried to steal each other’s boyfriends and then hated each other?  Why do I have to miss you now when I haven’t played Barbies with you in ten years?
            You should see the Barbies they have now Ducky.  There are too many kinds of Barbies now to keep up with.  There’s basically a Barbie for every ethnicity and profession.  There’s even a Harley-Davidson Barbie.  And her clothes are worse than when we were kids: much sexier and revealing than before.  And our parents didn’t want us to play with Barbies because they would give us a bad model of self-image.  Barbie even has her own airplane and VW Beetle.  Oh, it’s awful.  You and I had to hide our lame Ballet Barbies from our parents.  We had to secretly buy them with our allowance money.
            …Allowance…remember when we would get one dollar a week and we would go to the Candyland store across the street from my house and then come home with little blue plastic bags of goodies?  I remember it was ten cents for those yummy candy sticks, so we could get ten each.  Watermelon was the best flavor of all!  I can still see it: bright green with tiny red and white stripes!  I can smell it! I can taste it!
            I remember too the bubble gum cigarettes; how cool we thought we looked blowing out the powdered sugar, how sophisticated, how chic.  And there were the push-pops and ring-pops, candy necklaces and War-Heads.
I remember rolling up socks and tying our shirts so that we could pretend that we had breasts, the ultimate dream of a pre-pubescent girl.  Everything about us seemed so grown up when out shirts would bulge like that.  We had to hide in your walk-in closet so that your mom wouldn’t see what we were up to, and the one time she found us in there, with those lumps, she was horrified that we would ever want such “things” and that we shouldn’t be pretending at such a young age.  Maybe I pretended too much, too hard.  I have more breasts now than can barely fit in a shirt.  Do you remember when we did the opera Hansel and Gretel and we were gingerbread children?  Do you remember how we would get dressed together in the bathroom of the Community Center?  Some of the older girls scolded me for not wearing a bra yet.  I was in the fourth grade and already had breasts bigger than most of them.  Do you remember me growing before everyone else?  I realize I must have even gotten my period long before you.  But then I don’t remember us ever talking about that type of thing.  Boobs yes, menstruation no.
            I do remember us watching the Anne of Green Gables movies and squealing together about how gorgeous and wonderful Gilbert was, and we would fight and argue over who would get to marry him.  I always thought that I was the rebellious Anne and you were the beautiful, proper Diana, and that I was always corrupting you and getting you into trouble.  I always thought your parents hated me, especially Toni.  I was afraid of your mother.  She was constantly correcting the way I talked, the way I walked, the way I ate, the way I sat.  I was never good enough for you.  I used to cry about it.  I cried a lot.  And I was tired of everyone always reminding me about the stupid soup story:  how four-year-old Sara wouldn’t eat her soup while dining at the Kuhrey-Haeuser house, and was reprimanded by having to sit at the kitchen table for hours, and she still refused to eat it because it was now “too cold.”  It was humiliating how your parents and your brother would laugh about it: how I was undisciplined, uncouth, and a blight on my parents’ name.  My parents never tried to discipline you, did they, Ducky?  I want to think that maybe coming over to my house was a kind of escape for you—that you could just be yourself and not have to worry about being quiet and proper and perfect.
            I was a good friend to you, wasn’t I?  I know that you stopped seeking me out for secrets and such…but I hope it wasn’t because I had in anyway betrayed your trust.  I wonder often why you didn’t tell me what was going on.  The fact that you didn’t makes me doubt the value of my friendship to you.  Did anyone else know what was really going on?  Who did you tell and why?  Who were your friends?  Why could you tell them and not me?  Was I really that naïve?  I can’t really think of myself that way after all of the things that I have experienced—and yet I know that I was innocent enough (or had the appearance of innocence enough) to give you the impression that you couldn’t confide in me and trust in me.  I wonder if everything that you told me as a child was a lie?  Were you friends with me only because our parents forced us to play with each other at the age of four?  Maybe I never confided in you either, maybe we both made the same mistake.  And your birthday—January 17th—is that really even your birthday?  Are you really one year younger than me, or could you possibly be older, or even the same exact age?  Maybe your birthday is really in July, or September.  Everything could be different.  (Although that’s not fair, since you were adopted, and we know that it was an arbitrary birth date.)
            I want to tell you all about what happened to me during adolescence, and yet I don’t want you to think that I am trying to make your struggle seem less horrific or hard.  I don’t want to invalidate your experiences.  I want to know every single sordid detail about what happened to you: I want the blood, the sweat, and the tears.  I want you to know that I still love you—that I will always love you—that I love you even more for what you have been through.  I want us to share our hurt, our suffering, our pain.  I want you to know that I have been hurt too.  I want you to know that your only mistake was not letting me go through it with you.  And yet I know that you have been through too much, and that to you I will represent childhood in Sonoma, I will be what you need to keep running from.  I know that by wanting to know what happened to you, and by wanting to be a part of your life that I am asking for the impossible: I want what you cannot give, I want our childhood back—I want the worst thing for you.
            I myself have had a hard time even thinking about Sonoma.  I have to block out several years just to be able to think “good things.”  Maybe I want to distance myself so much from my past that with hindsight it all seems worse.  When I think about adolescence I’m not sure what’s real and what’s a painful dream anymore.
            I am tired of running.  You must be too.  I don’t want to stop running and head back to where I was, but I don’t think I really need as much distance as I have created.  I think I am ready to accept the past for what lessons it has taught me.  That doesn’t mean that it’s not painful to think about.  It just means that I maybe won’t hate myself so much for experiencing it.

The Second Letter

 
Thursday, April 19, 2001                                                                      9:15AM
Dear Ducky,
            There are so many things that I want to say to you…I am on the bus right now, on my way to school, and my throat hurts.  My throat hurts because of you.  Because I miss you.  I have started this letter so many times—it is years overdue.  My throat hurts because I don’t know where you are—and because I didn’t write to you when I did know.  It’s been years…almost four…since I received that letter from you—the letter that sounded like you but wasn’t.  Or maybe it really was you for the first time ever.  My throat hurts because the older I get, the more you are all I can remember from being young.  My throat hurts because I am afraid that when you never got a letter back from me, you forgot about me forever.  I secretly wish that I was the only one that you wrote to—that I was the only one you could tell—and I know how selfish that sounds.  I was envious all through childhood of the friends you had at St. Francis de Solano, they got to see you all day, every day.  I was reserved for weekends.  I hated not being able to go the same school as you.  My throat hurts because I wonder if they were even good to you—were they good friends?  Did they love you as much as I did?
I realize that you know absolutely nothing about me since even before you ran away the first time.  You had thought that I was so wholesome—but I could share a few of my nightmares with you.  I think, arrogantly, that I had many experiences similar to yours.  I want desperately to tell you about them, but I have been told time and time again that I talk too much and don’t listen enough.  But there is so much to say!  There is eight years of catching up to do!  I console myself by saying that you need to know everything—that by knowing about me, I can somehow help you.  Do you even need help anymore?  I am afraid to ask certain questions—I am afraid of upsetting you—and then I realize that when I think about you, I am thinking both of the way you looked the last time I saw you (you were fifteen or sixteen?), and then I am mostly thinking of a child Duk Sook: when you were seven, eight, maybe even as old as twelve.  And if I had asked you these questions as a child, you would have been furious (I think).  Do I really know anything about you?  I feel that I should, since we have known each other since we were four years old.  Or was everything from when we were kids a façade?  I am angry with you for leaving me.  You were supposed to be the one I depended on, you were supposed to depend on me.  And you didn’t.  You walked out.  I wonder how many of my experiences occurred because of your absence.  How maybe I kept trying to fill the void that you had created, trying to have other friends that were like you, and then only ended up hurting myself in the process.  No one could replace you, even though I wanted them to.  The girl I tried to replace you with betrayed and hurt me worse than you did.  I have since been afraid of woman and the way they seem to dupe me time and again.
* * *
There is a little Asian woman who is at my second bus stop every morning.  She is small, and old and wrinkled, and moves with such precision and grace and curiosity.  I don’t know her.  But I want to imagine that she is your grandmother.  That she holds you in her arms and serves you tea.  That she brushes your hair and braids it and serves you platters of meaningful food.  She teaches you all about Korea.  She makes you proud to be who you are.  She fixes your hurts and makes it okay for you to also be American.
            I am imagining that your adoptive parents, Toni and Tom, were cruel to you, that you were treated like a Cinderella-slave-girl.  I am very angry at them—at the quiet, immaculate house, the precision, the fear of germs, the never-ending rolls of toilet paper for sneezes, how incompatible it seemed with children.  I am blaming your lack of exposure to G.I. Joe and Smurf cartoons.  I am thinking not enough TV and not enough candy.  Not enough laughing and not enough cuddling.  Not enough talking and not enough of the right type of arguing.  Not enough dress-up dolls, and not enough of what you wanted.  I still believe you never wanted to dance and never wanted to play the violin.  If she hadn’t already scared it out of you, Toni would have straightened your voice out too.
            What did she think was wrong with you?  I thought you were perfect.  I thought every word that came out of your mouth was funny and right.  Except when you gave me back that best-friend necklace because Toni said that you weren’t allowed to have just one best friend.  That was the worst thing you ever told me.  You broke my heart.  Did your “mother’s” words break your heart too, because you were forced to turn me away?  Or were you already pulling yourself away and believed your mother’s lies?  DAMN!!  It’s so easy to write “your mother”, but I don’t know if I believe that she really is your mother.  Do you still talk to Toni and Tom?  Do you love them?  Or do you resent them?  Do you have anyone whom you can call family?  I have heard rumors that you are living in Nebraska with cousins, aunts and uncles from Toni’s side.  Do you love them?  Or do you hate them because they don’t have your blood?  Will you ever love anyone? àI am now positive that your “mother’s” refusal to let you be “best friends” with me had a tremendous effect on the road that you went down.  I want to think that our forced separation, your lack of me, made it impossible for you to function: that you needed me so much that you shut down without me.
            If you are in Nebraska, what is it like?  How does it compare to California?  To Sonoma?  There must not be a lot of hills.  This would bother me.  I would never be able to get used to that.  I wouldn’t feel safe.  I need hills; growing up in Sonoma Valley made them a necessary part of my life.  Do you feel the same way?  I want you to, since you grew up next to one of the most beautiful hills in Sonoma.
* * *
            Sometimes it’s as if you are dead.  And then I realize that I am mourning for you as if you really are.  I think I know deep down that I will never see you again.  Or else I am not allowing myself to hope against hope that I will see you again.  I don’t want to set myself up for another failure.  I don’t want to wish for you and then lose you all over again.  That’s why my throat hurts—because I am still waiting for your funeral.  Because one day you were there, and the next you weren’t.  All I got was a letter while I was away at adventure/survival camp just after I had turned sixteen.  A small envelope with the desperate words of my mother:  “Say a prayer for Ducky.  She has run away.”  That was all I got: the only announcement of our separation.  They were strange, unfriendly words on peach stationary, trying to hide behind my mother’s small, beautiful script—harsh words that made my eyes blink over and over.  Even though I thought I had given up God and prayer, I prayed for you every single night that I was at camp—when I was backpacking thirty miles to the ocean, when I was huddled alone next to the Eel River in the middle of the night.  I never stopped wondering where you were, where you had gone off to, what possibly had gotten into your head.  This was years before I got your letter explaining it all, and I had no idea what was going on.  It was as if my eight-year-old best friend has run away without reason.  I have only seen you once since then, that brief morning at St. Leo’s Church, where I had you again for less than an hour, where I held you tight and cried with gratitude that I had found you.  I cried too much—my  tears blurred you and washed you away; so far away I have no idea where you are now.  I didn’t know my tears were quite so powerful.  I shouldn’t have cried so much.  I hate you for being so fragile that you let yourself be washed away.  I love you for trying to save yourself, for knowing that you had to get out.
6:07 PM
            I am back on the bus, now on my way home after school.  I have been writing to you all day.  I have barely paid attention in class because of you.  It’s funny—you affect my life even though you don’t exist anymore.  I wonder if you have gone to college, if you are in college right now, or if you have lost too many precious years.  

The First Dream

 
February 17, 2000
Dream:  Duk Sook and I, about seven, eight years oldàhow we are kept apart by her parents.  In the first part I am forced to run many miles.  I run continuously through a park with lots of redwood trees and as I run through, I see Duk Sook, clinging to a tree, crying for me.  It happens in flashes, as if lit by lightning.  It happens over and over again, where I have to run past her and see her crying.  No one will comfort her.  It is her mother who is making me run past Duk Sook.  I want to save her, to take her in my arms, but I am too young, too small, and I can’t.  The other part is where I have to watch her being put to bed and tied down.  She is miserable all the time.  I can only watch.  Duk Sook and the redwoods and shadows.  Why can’t I even touch her?  She seems so near and yet so far.  It almost hurts to look at her.  No sounds except for the faint echoes of crying.  “Flashbacks” of us playing together, dressing up, playacting.  Growing up together and yet apart.  It’s as if we are twins, sisters, who cannot live without each other.  We feel connected always.  All of this is more painful because I may never actually see her again.  

The First Letter

 
September 16, 1997
Dearest Duk Sook,
          There are so many things that I want to tell you, so many thoughts that I want to share with you, but I don’t know where to begin.  I was more than a little surprised to receive a letter from you, but I was also greatly pleased.
          Your letter greatly moved me, and touched my heart in a manner that I have been searching for for quite some time.  To say that I cried would be an understatement.  I shed tears of joy, happiness, understanding, frustration, compassion, sympathy, empathy…and the list goes on.  To finally hear your story in your own words, by your own desire was an honor.  To tell you the truth, I was taken aback by how much of your experience finally made clear, understandable and tangible a lot of the confusion and emptiness in my own life.  I have lived the past few years with no solid knowledge of why you suddenly disappeared from my life.  You were my dearest, truest friend.  And then, quite literally, one day you were gone, and I was left alone, hurt, and full of questions and fears.  I had originally thought that we became separated by the natural course of adolescent life—I went down one path and you another, all the while thinking, guessing, that your journey was parallel to my own, although perhaps not entirely similar.  I was naïve and ignorant of the truth, and, with hindsight, I am ashamed of my blindness.  I told myself a million times after reading your letter that, had I been a better friend to you, been more aware and alert to warning signs I now realize that you displayed, perhaps I could have somehow prevented you from being in danger and experiencing countless heartaches. 
          My own tales of occurrences during our childhood and teenage years would surprise you.  I actually traveled down the same nightmarish road as you did my dear, only later, and I was blessed enough to have been rescued before there was no hope left and no going back.  This again leads me to almost say that I could have helped you, but looking back, I know that we were both too scared of what the other might say, think, or do to genuinely reach out and admit that we endured profound struggles.
          Since receiving your letter, my mind has been on fire with recollections of the past: pictures, images of you and I at various stages of our young lives, involved in pertinent dreams and emotional upheavals.  The outpouring of memories from my brain overwhelms me; I am racing to find value and meaning for them all, in order to fully explain to you, my dear, sweet Duk Sook, my understanding of who you are, and of who I am as well.  But something else must be said first—I need to tell you (and I think that you probably need to hear this) that I love you, wholly and unconditionally.