Dear L-
Your mother sent me a letter for my high school graduation. She said you considered me a little sister and loved me dearly. I almost cried. Years ago, when I first heard a garbled account of your death, I wanted to find your boyfriend and avenge you even though I was twelve years old and had never killed anything but spiders. I felt that way for a year even though I knew it was not what you would have wanted. When I saw the letter, when our mothers finally talked about us on the eve of graduation and each realized the other's daughter was an Aspie, too, a smaller tragedy was unearthed inside the larger.
When I was three years old, I knew I was different. I had no word to describe it, but I thought differently than the other children. I did not know anyone else like me. I assumed I was the only one. I realized that other people might not like the strange, unquantifiable way in which I deviated from the norm. I knew I had to hide and mimic the behavior of the other children as well as I could. It was terrifying. You were one of the only people with whom I felt safe.
When you came to babysit, I never felt like an outcast. You knew me better than my own parents, and you loved me anyway. You helped me play knights, lions, gypsies, Native Americans, pirates, princesses, superheros, dragons, sailors, and witches. You drove me to Paint-Your-Own-Pottery and went on innumerable gargoyle safaris. You taught me how to swim. You comforted me when I cried, deciphered behavior that was incomprehensible to neurotypical adults, and fostered my love of learning. You helped me explore the world when it was all so big and new. When diagnoses and changing attitudes of my parents were beginning to erode my childhood, you fought for it. You stood against a rising tide of misery and managed to preserve pockets of it long after it had been destroyed everywhere outside of my relationship with you.
If, sometime during the years we spent together, you had heard my parents talking about my labels and said you were an Aspie, things might have been different. I might have learned before my teens that there is a word for what I am, and there are other people on earth like me. I might not have picked up a warrior mentality, a sense that life is threatening and it will be me against the world as long as I live. If you had spoken up-if my parents had said something in front of you-my whole life might have been different. Maybe they did. Maybe, like me, you were afraid to tell people what you were. Did you wonder if you would lose your job and access to the children you had come to love if they found out?
Did your parents bother you about your less-than-feminine dress like mine do? When I was a child, the only way I knew you were a woman was your name, but I never minded. Like me, you loved a Mormon, but I think mine is the better of the two. It took Mom six months to trust mine because of what happened with yours. Did you pine away and die for want of him because you thought few men could love a girl like you? I have grappled with that fear. Were you the sort of lifelong showman I am? Did you pretend to confidence you never had? Did you learn a fake smile that shone brighter than real ones, to laugh in the right places, say the right things, and look people in the eye? Did you know what it feels like to get up every morning and put on a show? Did you feel like an outcast, too? I wish you were alive to ask.
Your death changed my perception of eating disorders. I used to think smart girls like us were safe from them. Now I know better. Once in a while, I still want half an hour alone in a room with the man you loved, alone except for my knives and a good source of heat. I try to imagine what you think of what I have become. You knew me before I had thoughts like that. You knew me when I was a different person, when I could not move a cast-iron bench across the yard but could trust people. I was a lover then, not a fighter. I sat with my back to doors and slept better at night. I was driven more by compassion than rage, but then, despite everything, the noblest and best things I have ever done were for love. Some of the love that is still in me is there because of you.
I wish I had a picture of you. I would put it on my Dia de lost Muertos altera every year. Maybe, since I will be eighteen by that time this year, I can at least buy a pack of Camels to put on the shrine. You probably took ten years off of my life with the second-hand smoke. As much as I would like a real photograph, I am blessed with more and better pictures of you in my mind than all the neurotypicals who love you will ever have. I can see your face, your baggy jeans, the way the sun glittered on your nose ring. I can smell those cigarettes in the upholstery of the seats of your car and feel the fabric between my fingers. I can see you in a courtyard that was torn down almost ten years ago sitting in one of those old, wooden lawn chairs that were slowly destroyed by Chicago winters. I can see you standing at the pinball machines, which may be why I play them so well today. I remember how you reassured me, ten seconds before anyone else would have noticed I was getting upset, that “The Man that Never Returned” was just a song people made up when they got angry about an increase in public transportation fares. You knew I would take it literally and told me no one really got stuck on the subway and had to ride forever. I can still hear you look at me as I was playing and tell me, suddenly serious, not to be a gypsy forever.
God bless you, L-. Never think that your short life was wasted. The parts of my childhood, and my humanity, that you preserved are a lot of what separates me from the monsters I plan to hunt and hound for the rest of my life. If I have a son someday, one of his names will be Johnathan after another good person whose life was too short. If I have a daughter, I will call her after you. If she is anything like you, I will be thrilled. I hope that my children, or my generation's children, will live in a world that is less cruel to people who are different. I hope you and I look down together one hundred years from now on a world in which the way labels work today is bound like an evil spirit in the history books.
I thought about you today. For the first time since your death, I was able to cry about the way you died and how you likely suffered while you lived. I cried for the lost possibility of my life, the one that might have been if I had realized that I was not alone. God loves outcasts, so I know I will see you again one of these days. Until then, I will never forget you,
Love,
Arminius
“We thought she was a gift from God and found she was but lent.”
-old epitaph
23 May 2010, 2:54 pm
Heh!
