Letter from my husband...

Kurt wrote this to me today and I thought it was good and beautiful. I don't care how much we make you barf. My husband and I love each other.

I’ve got a picture of you set as the wallpaper on my phone. I pilfered it off the computer while you and Scouty were camping. The picture, at first glance, could be black and white – your skin is ivory, your hair is midnight. But there’s just the slightest hint of pink to your lips, just a tiny bit of blue around your eyes. There’s something silver tied in your hair.



All day, I check my phone, and all day, I keep falling in love..



You’re as beautiful as a movie star, and being in love with you can feel like having a crush on something greater than reality. No way, this woman exists. No way, she’s my wife. No way, I’ve touched this girl. It’s impossible, until it isn’t.

It was, you know, fun to be alone with Louisey, this weekend. It’s fun in a way that I’d rather it was the other way around and that my wife and Scouty were home with me, but fun that I’m getting to do this thing that’s out of the ordinary. And I loved taking her to Squirrel Hill. I parked at My Little Outback, but then we walked up to Ten Thousand Villages, and then we got ice cream at Cold Stone, and then we went to play. And when we got done playing, I walked us to the car. But as we were about to get in, I saw that we still had twenty minutes left on the parking slip, and Louisey was happily chirping away in her stroller, and my favorite thing in the world to do is to walk around a place like Squirrel Hill, so that’s what we did. We walked ten minutes in one direction, and then ten minutes back.



And...

Walking around something like Squirrel Hill… oh my, it’ll break my heart for thinking about you. I push the baby stroller pass the hip, disenfranchised youth sitting outside of some coffee shop with a name too funky to be any sort of chain, and I want you so bad.


Ultimately, I look at the time that we spent together, alone – and it’s perfect. And the thought of losing our youth altogether, will make me shudder. So I breathe a sigh of relief. Thank God that Amanda and I had that time together, because it was truly the most exciting time of my life. Which I will never tire of telling you.

All youth must have its own conquer of Mount Everest – the thing that, as you age, you look back on and say, “Ah, now that was a time. If I didn’t do anything else, at least I did that.” And you bore everybody with the stories, and you dream of it every time you’re left alone in silence. And you are my exciting thing that made my youth worthwhile. You are… I mean… my everything. You justify me.

So you be grateful for what you have and all that. It’s shitty human nature to win a million and say, “That’s awesome… I wish I had won two million.”


So our time together was awesome… I wish we could go back in time and have-



I’m twenty-one, you’re twenty-three. Everybody told us that we’d not be able to find an affordable apartment in Squirrel Hill, but everybody tells us a lot of nonsensical gibberish. Our apartment is fucking amazing. Yesterday was your payday, so we woke up in a good mood. We listened to David Bowie all the way to the ghetto, sitting side-by-side on the bus, one earphone plug in your ear, one in mine. And then we listened to Velvet Underground all the way back and into the night.

Today, we’re broke, but tomorrow is my payday. So with our last couple of dollars, we compromised on a brand for a pack of cigarettes to share, which we smoke one after the other sitting along Murray Avenue, outside of our favorite coffee shop, drinking tea and knowing, even if we wouldn’t admit it, that we look fucking cool. And no matter how many times we vow to stop thinking about it, we just keep talk, talk, talking about tomorrow, and another payday slide into nothingness.

That’s the one side. The other side is this-



Minutes before our city walk, we’re at My Little Outback. Little Louisey is walk, walk, walking all over the place, hanging onto little miniature shopping carts, and what not. She even learned how to climb up the puffy steps, and then drop herself down the slide, at which point, upon landing, she would blink a dozen times real fast, as though dazed and trying to figure out what happened, and to get her bearings.



And being in these little kid playroom places, I can feel how it’s a new memory staple, for me. Which is to say, all of these places sort of feel alike, and I can so see how this is a time of my life, and how I’ll miss it when it’s gone, and how I should enjoy every minute of it while it’s here.

And so I did. I don’t get the opportunity in walking around Squirrel Hill to not let those other thoughts leak in. But I was also thinking a thought of, “This has been a good day.” And, “Things are really good, right now.”

I missed you and Scouty all weekend. I love you guys in a way that I can’t explain or describe, but I also know that, to you, I don’t have to.




What company was it that I had you call at three in the morning, that one time after I bombed an interview, right out of college? How was that the way that life was, once? Amanda King wrapped in my sheet in my dark little apartment in the city. Sure, go ahead, give them a call and tell them to fuck off.

See what I mean? I’m glad that I have that memory. When I’m sitting here, at this job, it is… wow… it’s dehumanizing. These meetings. I was just in one. And while I was in it, I was thinking about finding a new job. I was thinking about how it would be weird to work for this legal service, if I could go back and tell 2006 Amanda that, “Hey, I’m going to be working at some sort of legal service deal… with lawyers and judges and such.” Which made me think of the above memory, which made me smile, and feel above these people that drone onto me at these meetings.


I like remembering you as a girl in a skirt in my passenger seat. Your legs reach for the dashboard, and you’re stone naked beneath that thin material. I can touch you whenever I want.

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