Dear Blue,

Driving across America. Alone. Writing you letters from empty gas stations. Rest stops. Roadside lodges. 

Watch for their coming. Or don’t. Or pull them from your metal mailbox and throw them in the trash. Slip them under your bed sheets. Hang them on your fridge.

There will be more than one so make space. In your trash can. In between box spring and bed sheets.

There will be more than one because there will be more than one occasion on which I think of you. 

____________

Dear Blue,

It was afternoon when I left Virginia. I drove into the night. The hours rolled off my car wheels. The layers of busywork I built up to keep from noticing your absence peeled away too. So when I stood under the shower head in room 207 at the Red Roof Inn in Pigeon Ford Tennessee and let the hot water drum onto my scalp and let the fluorescent light buzz in the background and let the sound of the TV rise and fall from the next room and let all of it get behind these thoughts of you…when I did that and you were still there I knew I had to write you.

I remember reading once, in a book called “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most” that my mother left on my bed in high school with a note that said, Maybe this will help this get out what neither of us want to talk about, that one way to broach a conflictual subject or one that you are afraid of, is to write it first. Sometimes, the book told me in its sing songy prose, it’s best to write to the person you need to speak to. That way you can clearly lay out what you mean to say without the heat of the moment, which oftentimes makes one forgetful or flustered! So next time, try an email in place of a phone call. And always remember, you don’t have to press the send button!

I am licking a stamp, I am slipping this letter through a slot at the Gatlinburg Post Office. I am pressing the send button.

And I am 205.17 miles and seven months away from the heat of the moment but still have not clearly laid out what I mean to say to you.

________________

Dear Blue,

Do you remember. We hiked to the top of that mountain last year.

I do. Remember, I mean.

There was a furrowed mark on the ridge of your nose where eyeglasses had pressed into sweaty skin. You’d taken them off to rub at the mark with your thumb and pointer finger and I watched you and thought how different you looked without the windows of thickly rimmed bifocals blocking your eyes.

They are grey, your eyes, greenish sometimes.

Mine are blue. Boringly so because I am blonde and pale skinned and I wonder if you know that. That they are blue, I mean.

We’d been walking all morning. The sun had just starting to slide past noon and it seemed like a good time to break so we sat on a log where you cleaned sweat and sunscreen off your glasses and I unwrapped sandwiches.

A bird called, one drawn out hoot followed by three caws repeating. I think that’ s my favorite summer sound, I said and you looked up, still wiping your glasses, but said nothing.

My eyes are blue but there’s this speck of brown in one iris that shows up golden on sunny days and makes them a different shade, I guess. A special shade.

Did you know that?

It was your idea, the epic hike. I agreed to go amiably as I always did, being in love with you like I was then.

I’d have gone halfway down the gullet of Mount Vesuvius if you thought it might be fun.

But it was the view from Cold Mountain that you figured would be worth our time. You bought a map and marked in careful detail the path we might take to the summit.

The sandwiches were home made. Chick pea, olive oil and eggplant I carefully cuisinarted into hummus. It’d been sopped up by wheat bread and sprouts and turned soggy, but in a creamy way that still tasted good.

Juice box? I said, holding out a carton.

You took it and I watched you slide off the plastic wrapping, fold it into the pocket of your jeans and stab the straw into the box and sip.

I said something about the grape being good and took a pull at my own straw and you nodded like you do and when you aren’t going to say anything.

________________

Dear Blue,

I am driving the Talimena Byway through Arkansas and into Oklahoma. I am in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart superstore where I just bought a watch. I also bought the book on tape of some shadowy detective story read aloud by a man named D.W. Moffett, a box of granola bars and a three pack of plastic wrapped panties. The kind I never wore - would never wear, even now - when I thought that you might see them. I held out hope for you. A perpetually outstretched palm.

I will eat the eight granola bars in this box one after the next. I will crinkle their wrappers, ball them up and chuck them to the floor. I will do this because there is no vegetarian food to be found in this state and I am hungry and I am tired of feeling alone on this drive and somehow chewing substitutes talking the way listening to D.W. Moffett’s gravely Southern accent makes the absence of your silence less real.

_______________

Dear Blue,

I can admit to being purely happy

That night I met

Your niece

Who was five then and older now but wore a blue taffeta dress with puffed sleeves and a full skirt that rustled when we danced – her tiny hands holding my cold ones – and sounded like corn husks unzipped too early from still green ears.

It was thrilling

They way she slipped her little fingers into

The spaces between my long ones.

The way she wanted them there

Returned them there

Each time we pulled apart.

___________________

Blue,

In New Mexico the sunrises are blue too. It’s not just the night here. Orange rises in the east, casts shadows over red rock, and blue falls in triangular shapes where these colors collide.

Blue, Joni says songs are like tattoos. I have pounded them into my skin this drive. Pounded my fist on the steering wheel and tried to be moved to tears by lyrics and lines.

Case of You comes on and it’s always the song I have been waiting for.

And it’s always about you.

So I cry, or try to, and the mesas pass by, flat and sunburned and relentless.

It should be sunset but it’s just dust and dry earth.

__________________

Dear Blue,

Sometimes I think about myself as a baby, a newborn.

Sometimes I think about you.

And I wonder how we are possibly the same person as the infant we grew up from.

We aren’t of course and then,

Who else would we be?

When we sat on the wicker sofa on your front porch lined with ash trays and potted succulents and you showed me your baby pictures, I smiled and pointed and said, I know this face but I never showed you mine because that naked person stood with her knees touching and her fingers in her mouth and her belly sticking out like a baby chimp and that little person couldn’t possibly be me.

________________

Dear Blue,

I am driving through the Dakotas now.

In Buffalo Girls, the Larry McMurtry novel I read and loved and read again ages ago as a prepubescent cowgirl, there is a character called Blue for his indigo eyes.

He is quiet, a rancher and in love with Dora Dufran so fiercely that he builds her a ranch and a barn full of beef on the most beautiful piece of land outside Deadwood.

But Dora’s damaged goods, afraid to live outside town. She’d been born a rancher’s daughter until her daddy died of smallpox when she was five and her mother and sisters too.

So Dora walked mile after mile on her own through the wild till she found the nearest town but never got over the fear of being left.

She didn’t tell Blue this.

Because she knew he’d move to town to marry her and that’d break his wild heart.

Teddy Blue needed the sun and the sky and the rocky mountains the way the mountains need the sun, the sky. The way the air needs the mountains. 

So she refuses him over and again until they part in the saddest scene I’ve ever read and Blue marries Granville Stuart’s half Indian daughter and Dora marries Ogden Purdue because Blue got married and moved on so she has to as well.

But neither love their spouses and can’t keep apart and Dora dies giving birth to a baby with eyes of brilliant indigo.

________________

Dear Blue,

The arches in Utah are unmerciless.

The sunsets are explosive.

My toenails are unpainted.

I have taken to buying coconut popsicles from jiffy marts each time I stop for gas. I must eat five or more a day. These popsicles come in clear, crinkly wrappers and are made too sweet but have little chunks of white meat frozen into their centers and drool coconut milk down my wrists that I lick off, let drip down my chin, let stick to my cheeks and think how nice it is, not having someone here to see me make such a mess. How nice it is not to care.

Still, there have been so many moments in which I’ve wanted you here, to watch me. I’ve wanted you to see me when I think I’m looking particularly pretty. Or when I’m driving along with the radio on and some song you love comes on and I sing to it especially well. Or that night at the Quality Inn in Charleston that I checked in, stripped down to my undies and floated on my back in the outdoor pool looking up at the stars spread across the wide Missouri sky and thinking how that very moment could be a movie scene or a snippet from the abstract of my life.

In moments such as these - those times when I’m alone and so alive, so alive inside the world -I used to think of you and how if you could only see me, could peer from a private window into my world, you’d fall in love. And I’d want you more then, propelled into desire by the frustrated feeling that you’d never know, never see me singing freely or floating under stars.

My next thought might be how in love with you I was and by then, of course, I’d have stopped singing, stopped floating, I think I may be realizing now the degree to which I displaced my love. Maybe it was me I was falling for all along.