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.