Forever Young [Vasco / Elias]

v a s c o

I can't open my mouth and forget how to talk
'Cause even if I could
Wouldn't know where to start
Wouldn't know when to stop

I started writing a letter to him the morning after she’d died.

Underneath the low lamp light first, tucked by the old oak desk in Mayor’s office, I scrawled out a few lines before sunrise. Except the pen between my fingers refused to move, as though grief was right there on my shoulder, threatening to pull the whole thing apart before I could even begin. So I took to sipping at a cup of strong coffee and turning over the pages of last week’s paper. I got stuck reading the same three paragraphs over and over again, something about the moon and the tides and how this time of year made for strange bedfellows.

When after two hours nothing else came and the page was blank, save for Dear Elias, I hope this finds you well… I crumpled up the whole piece of cardstock and chucked it into the bin at the far corner of the room. It’d knocked the rim before slipping down into the basket along all the other letters I’d tried to write that week. Somehow, they’d started the same, less melancholy, more hopeful, full of darling phrases and calls to come together, no matter how far I’d felt Elias had strayed from the rest of us.

But now –

My head a chemical blond, roots pushing out underneath and hair frayed, I felt as wild as energy between my fingertips.

I could think of all the years we’d spent in eleven trying to build up from the cracked foundation that’d been laid beneath us. Izars had been cursed since before the dark days, trapped within a patch of land destined to be burned and blighted. And worse, forgotten – long enough that we forgot about life for a while. My brothers benefitted the decades where our name was just another four-letter word on the district’s lips.

That’d let us cling to one another, to a history that’d been written so long ago. Pieces of a flag, colors that meant something because we believed we protected it from disappearing. Little dreams that grew from salted earth, hands held together with an old prayer, and a language that could bind. We heard stories of an old world that had been no more just and yet full of so much more color. People that could look like us and stand on their own two feet, not hobbled by a capitol that thought difference had disappeared or been beaten out of those who’d remained.

How many times had we been told that all of it would die – our language, our history, our love – to make way for what remained. The bland, unending march of time of a people that had forgotten who they had been, and were still waiting to see what they’d become. People who would never know struggle so much as they believed everyone was equal; that it was the measure of misery that bound us all together, and not what could set us apart.

So, they’d all held on – Xuxa, Marisol, Gero – and those of us who’d not wanted to let go, too.

And even if Sofia had rolled her eyes and Emmanuel had said that so much of it was so old, what was worth remembering if all it reminded us was of a world we’d never see –

It was about faith.

That we could save our history for our children and because of our children.

That they would know the wonder and joy of where they had come from without shame.

---

Elias - 

You never wanted to be anything like the rest of us.

And for a good deal of time, I thought that it had meant someone, or something, had hurt you. I prayed on forgiving and forgetting. I tried to understand why. I begged that you’d never know what it felt like to have held someone only to lose them. Or, that even if you’d have never known them, still have felt that loss.

I shouldn’t write in anger but maybe it’s what should have been said a long time ago. Lord knows that anger isn’t evil, not when you can be honest.

Does it hurt?

Did you think about how, when you saw it happening, that you only wanted more time? Did you scream out and wail or did you sit there and sob into a handkerchief, so that only God could hear you? Did you look at her eyes when she’d gone? Did you ask if it could’ve been you instead?

Did you know it was selfish but pray for it anyway? Because you could feel how the world dropped out beneath your feet, and that your whole body disappeared? That you were unimportant as you’d ever been without her. Because she’d deserved to live another sixty years, and you didn’t?

But I don’t suppose you thought of those things. I don’t suppose you thought about how scared she must have been, how the whole world she’d ever knew had changed, and yet she’d never had the chance to know a whole part of herself. Or you.

If you’d ever wanted to be a better man, I think we would have seen that by now.

But bless your heart, Elias.

I hope you find peace the way you want. I hope you find a great and vast horizon, one where the sun rises for you each day. I hope you live to be a hundred. I hope you have all the empty days you want to have, without needing to look back over your shoulder at what’s behind you.

I love you, Elias, even if I don’t understand who you are. I wish I could, but I don’t know how that’d come to be.

So bless your heart.

All my best to Laurel, Mateo, and Alfer.

Yours,
Vasco

---

I’d put down the pen and wiped the sweat from my brow when I’d finished. I folded the cardstock into three sections and tucked it into a yellowed envelope I found at the bottom of one of my desk drawers.

My stomach was still humming when I’d stepped outside into the crisp morning air.

I’d taken a few steps and already could feel how heavy the letter was between my fingers, weighing down my right hand at my side. But I kept marching forward. I gave a wave now and then to the scattered faces making their way to the fields for another morning. A part of me missed how much easier it was to disappear then. But then my lower back reminded me how much I didn’t, when by mid-August I’d have felt all the sharp pains running down my legs and sweat dripping across my back as I tried to pick as many strawberries as a man could carry.

He wouldn’t be home.

I’d told it to myself over and over again, because it’d be easier to slip the note underneath the front door and disappear. Not half as brave, but somehow the message felt as though it’d be better received mixed in with whatever else the post had brought to him. And maybe Laurel would read it before he did – Alfer or Mateo, too – to see that someone might actually hold him accountable.

The walk up the drive shouldn’t have been so hard. It’d been some time since I’d seen the tin roof or shutters. Too long since I’d come to call on his family, much longer since me and Emma had sat across their dinner table as though we weren’t all just kids playing pretend at being adults.

Hadn’t I been bouncing Raquel on my knee, and hadn’t Elias said something – how sweet she was?

We weren’t always so bad.

I’d crept up the stairs to the porch and heard every last creak of the floorboards under my boots. I’d stared at the crook of the door and at the letter in my hands for a while. Just standing there, ready to tell as much truth as I’d ever wanted, to say what felt like needed said, no matter how much it hurt.

But I curled the envelope in half and tucked it into my pocket.

Instead, I sat back against the railing of the porch, halfway between my head and my heart.