With Love

How to keep yourself warm in the winter?

For Dummies

By Dawn and Binky

Learn to:

- Gather a great assortment of firewood – big and medium logs, kindling, and so on

- Arrange newspaper and wood under and over a grate

- Use a lighter safely to set the paper to flames

- Choose the most cosy and comfortable winter clothing – socks, mittens, earmuffs, and a coat

- Ask your mother nicely for hot chocolate and healthy chips

- Ask your aunt nicely to read or sing to you something while rocking on the rocking chair

Dawn held out the yellow crinkly paper, taking in the view of what she thought was a well-done imitation of a typical ‘For Dummies’ front cover. The fireplace cackled in agreement, its light giving the cover the golden aura of a forbidden treasure map. Binky thought Dawn’s boxy, macaroni-like handwriting was screaming to sprawl all over the page and be cornered by little daisies, but Dawn was a professional, published authoress. It didn’t matter that Binky was a co-author. At the ripe age of ten, Dawn couldn’t give in to the childlike amusements and whims of her wide-eyed friend.

The next time they met six months later, Dawn explained to Binky about how outdated keeping warm was in the thick of summer. They had to write a ‘For Dummies’ book that was timeless and would be a bestseller in every season of the year. Binky suggested the title ‘How to be a pen pal? For Dummies’, assuring Dawn that there were no intended undertones of becoming one unless Dawn wanted to.

A subtly motioned agenda is a well-motioned agenda, nonetheless. While Dawn didn’t live in Middlebury, her aunt, her heart, and her countless letters detailing the pains of growing up lived there. Stories of her first heart palpitations for some sick and twisted bad boy, her first painful kick from what would become a monthly dose of cramps, and her first mean girl encounter in middle school for the crime of having long arms were all read and sympathised with through response letters written back and signed ‘With Love, Binky’.

Dawn thought Binky used the word ‘Love’ too lightly when it was the emotion people lived and died for, but she never told her that. As it is, Binky was not the sharing sort. When Dawn was just shy of fifteen, she heard for the first time of a self-professed wrinkle in Binky’s life:

Dear Dawn,

How are you? How is Molly Mommy? And how is Papa Bash?

I say, it is a shame how Daniel just spurted his ink all over you and got your new white uniform all blue. The boy must be living in the 1950s because no one uses an ink pen, especially not high schoolers. And I’ve already told you to ignore Maddox – that girl is asking for trouble! You don’t need a big grey cloud parading in your sunshine. If you need help seeing the silver lining, Cousin Shelly just came to me with a complaint on the gum mania that has taken over her seventh-grade class, and how icky gum can be, especially when you unsuspectingly sit on it and discover it on your skirt hours later in the wash.  

I’m not one to lay out my troubles, but I do feel weaker these days, and I’m only telling you this because I might not be able to write as much as I used to. The last doctor visit was positively tiring, and I can’t feel my hands anymore, let alone my chest (even if that’s where the problem lies according to the doctor). I’ve been told to go out more and feel the sun, but I’d rather stay cooped up indoors and feel the heat from the fireplace so that I can fill my days with endless thoughts of the lives that could have been. A daydreamer's paradise is oddly only in their head.

I know growing up sucks, but growing old is the worst, so don’t worry too much about gum or ink or Maddox – these troubles will pass.

Till next time and with loads of Love,

Binky

Somehow, Binky got on in years faster than Dawn did. The published and serious authoress was growing up but still lived partly in her days of obsessing over ‘For Dummies’ self-help books, throwing treasure hunt themed birthday parties, and speaking with an imaginary friend to cope with the drop in correspondences with Binky. Nothing worrying to warrant a doctor’s visit. Just a tease of the soon-to-be full-blown Peter Pan syndrome.

It was on a wet and grey August afternoon that the first prominent signs of the malady revealed itself under the guise of grief. Ms. Peter Pan was standing in a sea of black umbrellas at her aunt’s funeral service, watching Cousin Shelly sob through her mother’s touching goodbye letter that sounded an awful lot like something Binky would have written. Binky had not only skirted around playing the role of Wendy that afternoon, but she had stopped writing letters altogether to Dawn in the past couple of months.

Later, at night, the confrontation took place in the hearth room, loud enough for the entire house to hear. Spare logs and ‘For Dummies’ books were tossed around as Dawn angrily screamed for the tenth time “You didn’t write back! I wrote you a letter every week and I needed you to write back, and you didn’t!”. No one could quite hear what Binky said in retort, but Uncle Bernard guessed that it would have been along the lines of “I told you I couldn’t write, I was sick!” or “You attended a funeral today for a reason!”. An onlooker would have only seen a girl in tears, hurling things onto a rocking chair.

So, that fall, when Ms. Peter Pan entered college, she read the first letter from Binky since their falling-out. It sounded quite different, almost too short for it to be written by a girlfriend:

Dear Dawn,

I hope you are doing alright. How is the new college dorm? If you need any help shifting anymore things, do let me know. And if you want a break from the college environment, you can always drop by home – it’s just a 20-minute drive away.

I hope you are happy to see a letter from me after so long. I’ll try to write more frequently.

From your friend,

Binky

But Dawn wasn’t complaining – there wasn’t an excessive use (or, in fact, a complete removal) of ‘Love’, and an impersonation was better than not hearing back at all. After all, it is hard to be sincere when you are feeding into someone’s disillusionment. Binky also never wrote about her chest pains anymore, and no news on the matter was good news to Dawn.

In the quaint village-like town of Middlebury where isolation was no longer a threat but a reality, Dawn treasured the out-of-courtesy invites of Binky, dropping by at her uncle’s home every other day. She never felt welcome, which was the only difference she could make out from when she was ten, but that never deterred her from visitations. She would do it until she would become the reason for visitations.

It was a good thing that, over the years, Dawn had collected the memorable bits from the letters where Binky used to sound like herself. On the days that she would worry about six years of college closing in and the impending fate of 'Dropout' written on her degree scroll, Dawn would search her treasure trove of ‘How to be a pen pal? For Dummies’ for Binky’s timeless words of wisdom:

A daydreamer is a character who is either seen from miles away for who they are, or whom you stand shoulder to shoulder with and think of as an enigma for a lifetime. The one whose thoughts you can’t read but whose heart you want to own.

As a self-proclaimed “soul at liberty” (for lack of a more euphemistic expression for being unemployed) who finally settled on a measly income from stacking books in the college library, nothing but the daydreamer in Dawn could explain the attraction she bore onto Robert. He let her stay in his home rather than in the library after six, washed her dishes while she worked through the mail for any semblance of a letter from Binky, and carried her to bed when she was wasted courtesy of the lack of one.

He would have watched her walk down the aisle to him, but Dawn had never been emotionally available for anything more than a platonic relationship with Robert. If she were to take him as her man, the possibility of another fallout rattled her cage more than any inkling of a bleak and unimaginative future as a wife did. With Binky’s letters growing tasteless and pointedly unnecessary as the distance to Uncle Bernard’s house reduced from a 20-minute drive to a 20-minute walk, Dawn needed someone to fill the growing void of a kindred spirit in her life. So, Robert became Wendy and Dawn became his future bride-never-to-be.

Old age crept in soon too. The greying hairs that peeped through Dawn’s blonde curls in her twenties morphed into a frosty white by the time she was forty, matching the four white walls of her new home. The soft board plastered with creations of ‘For Dummies’ front covers were the only keepsakes that gave the room some colour.

Dear Binky,

White walls really do look paradise. You could cave into your deepest thoughts of endless fulfilment and achievement.

‘Paradise in your thoughts with paradise in the backdrop’ - bet you wouldn’t have thought of that.

Yours truly,

Dawn

Dawn blamed Binky entirely for the lack of warning. Yes, she had mentioned that growing old was more painful than growing up, but where had the urgency in her tone been on its stealth and speed? Especially when Binky herself was prey to its friends: chest pains and imminent death? Now, because of Binky, Dawn was all too soon a decrepit woman in sheets, staring out the window.

They all told Dawn that she had chosen to be out of touch with reality, that she had chosen to retrograde to cope with the loss. Cousin Shelly would drop by alone with red roses, too embarrassed to bring her husband or kids to see a relative who had lost her mind. Uncle Bernard never bothered. He thought that not visiting might stop the letters, but they only flowed in more casually, stamped and bordered with daisies, awaiting their fate as part of the recyclable waste for the day. Dawn’s parents had long lost her and thrust too much of their faith in the proximity of Uncle Bernard’s house. They didn’t know much about Robert or that his home was Dawn’s for fifteen years before she was taken away. But no one could fault Dawn for paying heed to Uncle Bernard’s false promises of a better life in the asylum. Because Binky had trusted Uncle Bernard. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Until the funeral service did them apart.

The day when the visions blurred around Dawn came like a ghost. There wasn’t any pain in her chest, just the sky behind the trees slowly uniting into a golden glow, so much that Dawn could hear the cackle of the fireplace in the cold hospital room and see a boxy yet debatably sprawly handwriting over her closing eyelids. She felt less like Ms. Peter Pan and more like Ms. Peter Going-To-Heaven. Robert was by her side, and she would have put in a word on how that meant so much to her, but the excitement to see Binky after all these years overshadowed every other feeling in her mortal recesses. She imagined her in a floral gown, dolled up, with a rose-coloured lip to match the roses tucked in her hair, just like the ones Cousin Shelly would pick out. She would smile with her eyes and reveal her part of the treasure trove of ‘How to be a pen pal? For Dummies’ that she had been secretly guarding and silently reading. They would sit within a foot of each other and write letters, scheme more ‘For Dummies’ ideas, or maybe even light a fire together.

It all seemed too true to be that good.

Dear Binky,

I know my letters have gotten shorter over time, but that’s only because it’s been really long since I’ve heard from you. But today I feel that that’s going to change. Today we might be close enough to not need a letter to talk to each other. I could open my mouth, and you could complete my sentences for me. Then and there. 

I’ve asked Robert to post this one because I might not be around tomorrow when the mailman shows up. I might reach you before the letter does. The walls are white all around, but all I’ve been seeing today is a black figure dance some distance away my body, with a noose in hand and a whisper of a future with you. I might look very different – I hope you are not taken aback. You still wore blonde and youth when you left while I’m dressed for death in wrinkles, white hair, and other deceiving indications of old age.

I never said this enough and I squirmed at your letters for saying it so much. But I feel obliged to return the favour today.

With Love and hope for tomorrow,

Dawn