I wanted every cold night to last forever. I wanted to learn to let myself unravel like old gloves, held in your funny hands.

Dear Funny Hands,

I always feel a little silly writing letters to you. You’re just a phone call away, after all, and I call you quite a bit these days, when I’m walking home from the corner fast food place after another late shift, or when I’ve been staring too long at my reflection in the mirror and I start to get a little spooked by all the things rattling around behind my eyes. Your voice grounds me. Even when we don’t talk about anything in particular. Especially when we talk about everything I’ve never been able to tell anyone else.

I know I’m quiet– there’s a lot I’m scared of saying, because I’m afraid I won’t be understood, or I’ll have to diminish the intensity with which I feel things, just in case it throws people off guard, upsets this careful balance I cling to. I hold all my loves close to my chest, so no one can make me want to put them down.

Poetry helps. I can challenge myself to put all those jangling thoughts into words, challenge myself to break my own conventions, be more creative in the way I try to hint at all the heartbreak and desperation and terror, and then at the end of it I can decide if I want to give the poems to people, and when they’re sitting there in my outstretched hands, I can decide if I want to claim them as fact or fiction. But you know they’re all fact. Even the ones about the werewolves.

So it makes sense that most of the poems are written for you, too. So many were written with you as the “you,” and you know that, and you never tease me about that even though you could, but I think you know that they’re written like the voicemails I’d leave in your inbox if you ever didn’t pick up. But you always do.

I think about that night often: me, sitting by the fountain in my old neighborhood in New York, right on the edge of a frosty Spring, unable to stop the tears as I told you through the phone what abandonment tastes like, what the cold feels like when I lend someone else my jacket, only for them to never give it back. God, the cold. You fought to listen through my teeth chattering. I closed my eyes to concentrate. It needed to be said. I don’t know what would have happened that night if I didn’t.

I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you needed, when I could have been. I’m glad we can be what we are now. That we can figure it out together, even hundreds of miles apart, even when I haven’t seen your face in months. I used to spend almost every day at your side, in lectures and on winding walks home. I wanted every cold night to last forever. I wanted to learn to let myself unravel like old gloves, held in your funny hands.

This letter is to let you know that a lot of the new poems are for you, same as the old ones. Some aren’t quite happy, but I don’t think we’re afraid of the shaky fingers of our past anymore. I am grateful I don’t have to pretend it’s fiction. That I don’t have to hold myself out of your reach.

I am learning every day from your bravery, your forgiveness, your compassion. I am writing you, in every voicemail and every awkward meandering letter, because you always answer.

All my heart,

xx,
Meg.