Dear Mary

In the late afternoon sun, the kitchen floor is a mess of angles.  She picks her way through, sitting down at the table with one barefoot tucked under her and the other dangling behind the chair rungs, toes cut by a triangle of light.  When she saw this lilac colored envelope in the mail, hidden between the electric bill and an ad for Kohl’s Labor Day sale, she felt confused.  No one writes letters anymore.  As she reads, her confusion only grows.  She has to stop at the end of the first paragraph, go back to the beginning, and stare at that tiny, looping script, which now comes back to her, although she had forgotten, entirely, its origin. Who is this Mary?  Surely not her.  Mary is a ghost, an anachronism.  Yet here she sits, corporeal, reading this letter from a woman named Susan who used to be a girl who knew all about her and who wants to know all about her again.  She remembers Susan’s perfectly straight hair, those knees to die for pressed below a cigarette burn on the back of a maroon upholstered seat.  There was a smirk in the last row of the movie theater, eleventh grade, an almost evil upward turn of those Revlon red lips, a joke she had shared, although at whose expense she has long forgotten.  But the guilt remains, that sinking, hungry feeling at the pit of her stomach, the fear as Susan took her sweaty hand of being found out and becoming lost, irrevocably, to her beautiful friend.  Suddenly, in her own kitchen, she feels exposed.  She did not ask for this; she did nothing to bring it on.  Perhaps she should write her own letter, full of brutally honest half-truths, shocking, alarming even.  Payback for the original heartbreak.  She folds Susan’s letter in half and in half again, ruining the careful creases.