The Point is You

Saturday, July 28, 1984

My dearest Bertie,

I am coming to you now. 

That night we were together, Bertie, I believe we linked back to the stars from whence we came. I think we felt the Grand Beginning rumble in our tummies…dancing with the delicious meal we’d shared at Grimley’s On the Oceanside. (I love that you let me feed you a forkful of butter-soaked lobster…that you rolled your blue-sky eyes in taste-ecstasy as you chewed…) Did you know I’d saved three paychecks to afford the meal? I’d wanted to save every cent so I could share a fine-dining experience with you…and more. 

Oh, Bertie. I’m sorry but I had to make a choice between life and death. 

My father, whom you’d never had a chance to meet, was a man of odd tendencies. He was an inventor, a tightrope walker, a singer, and a follower-of-wild-dreams. One such dream he had involved my entire family. He’d wanted us to have a ‘stop-everything-and-go’ life experience. He said we wouldn’t know when it was coming. That only ‘he’d know’, and when that Knowing came, we would have to literally stop everything in our lives and ‘go’. He’d had a pristine red VW Westfalia stored in a friend’s garage. When I was five, he’d taken me there to show me, and told me about his dream. I hadn’t quite understood what it meant, but from that point on, a stone of dread had taken residence in my stomach. My three sisters (two older, one younger), had been brought to the same location and told the same thing when they were five as well. 

I’d asked my oldest sister, Jane, about our father’s wild dream, and she’d shrugged it off saying it was just one of his silly quirks. She’d been fifteen at the time. My other siblings had treated me much the same when I’d inquired about the possibility of our father’s dream coming to fruition – shoulders were shrugged, hands were waved. 

I’d asked my mother about it while she was getting ready for work one morning. I remember she’d been taking out curlers; these metal monstrosities that looked like tubular spiders, wrapped in her long brown hair and pinned with a fine pink stick. She’d had a curler in her hand, a pink stick between her lips. She’d turned to me, and very slowly unraveled the curler, then put it and the pink stick down on the vanity. Her lovely face she’d pushed so close to mine I could smell bitter coffee in her breath. 

What she’d said was in a whisper: Oh yes, it will happen. And it will happen when we least want it to. That is the entire point. Then she’d kissed me gently on my forehead, beginning the sweep of a terrified chill over my entire 10-year-old body that, I swear, had lasted the entire day. 

I’d done my best to not think about this ghostly disruption. Because, you see, I hadn't been able to breathe when I’d thought of it. I’d made myself push the thought down, down, down into the depths of my belly with the stone of dread that never stopped shivering. 

I’d done well in school. Played on the volleyball team and excelled. Scouts from the Ivy League schools had come to watch me play. And then…

There You Were. 

Seated in the bleachers, green floppy knitted hat atop your perfect golden curls. I’d felt the sharp air of the ball whiz past my cheek. I’d lost our team the point. And what was the point of anything without you after that? 

You’d covered your brilliant smile, attempting to hide a laugh, I’m sure, but you’d looked me right in my eyes and I. Was. Doomed. I’d played my heart out that game…for you. Not for the scouts or my teammates, but for you. 

Before you, I’d been a kid with a dread stone and cautious hopes. A kid with a father I couldn’t understand…

I’d wanted to tell you, Bertie. I’d wanted to tell you so badly about my father’s wild dream. I’d wanted to tell you that my father’s wild dream was not my wild dream. 

Buzzing in the bliss of our first magical kiss, I’d decided that I would create my own wild dreams. What would be more wild than to escape with you and remove myself from the grips of my father’s odd desire to make us suffer by his whims? 

Oh yes, Bertie. I’d gotten two jobs and saved and saved so I could afford to take us away. To take us to some glittering chapel or marble-floored city hall and make you my wife. And that had been my plan, Bertie. That had been my wild dream. 

Our night along the ocean was Everything. That night, I’d driven home with the prideful gumption of a young man in true-love, determined to stand before my father and mother, declaring my love for you, and cementing my plans to marry you. 

But when I’d arrived home, Bertie, it had been there. 

The red VW Westfalia had been parked on the front lawn like a tumor. The dread stone in my stomach had tripled in size as I tried to blink what I was seeing away, away, away. My foot had pushed the gas, but before I could speed away, my father came bursting out the front door of our house, waving wildly, smiling madly. My mother had followed closely behind him, her arms laden with bags of food. I’d hit the brakes in a great screeching weep. 

No, no. This is not happening. The van door had slid open, and out tumbled my siblings like forlorn aliens – they had bodies like my family members, but their eyes…their eyes, Bertie, had been blanker than fresh paper. 

We’d been living our own lives, Bertie, working, and loving people…tangled inside my father’s devastating dreams. And poor Helen, the youngest of us at age sixteen, had wept into the backside of Jane, as they’d exited the van. 

I’d had a moment then. A vital, slow-motion moment that held in front of me a movie screen on which our future played like an award-winning romance picture. It had lasted and lasted, our glorious love story until the banging had broken the moment. 

My father’s fists had pounded against the driver’s side window.

“It’s time to stop everything and go, son!” he’d yelled, elated like an escaped prisoner. 

I’d shaken my head. Locked the doors. 

Then it had been my mother knocking on the passenger-side window. “It’s happening,” she’d said, her voice shaky with fear or excitement or some new part of her that I hadn’t known existed. 

I’d looked away from them, and saw sweet Helen standing in front of my car. The skin around her eyes puffy with emotion, but her eyes – Oh Bertie! – her eyes had yelled at me something awful, something terrible. Kill me, they’d pleaded, kill me now. 

And that stone of dread had turned to lava, burning holes in my determination to escape, charring my declarations like they were dry bones. 

I’d gotten out of the car and scooped up my sister, though she was too old to be scooped, I’d done it anyway. I’d felt her heartbeat, rapid like a frightened rabbit’s, and I matched my thumping heart to hers…and the lava had warmed us. 

It had been eighteen days. We were in a small town that looked like all the other small towns – dusty and sadly charming. We’d find a camping area, real or decidedly so in my father’s mad, mad mind. We’d sit along earthy edges, and it would take all my will to not jump, leap, fly into a fatherless abyss. His rules were outrageous – he forbade us communication with anyone from the life that we’d left. We abided, and it was breaking us. My mother’s smile had been lost since day four. Soon after, poor Helen had stopped talking to my father, and his maniacal laugh in response was grating our souls. 

I had been searching for the point, Bertie. The point of his tiresome disruption. And I heard my heart scream. It was you, Bertie. It was utterly and completely you. How had I forgotten? You were the point since that day in the gym...when your ravishing smile attached to my soul.

I spoke in hushed whispers to my siblings. We devised a plan. I left on a full moon, taking my clothes and what was left of my sanity, to make my way back to you. 

Two weeks from now, on August 11, I will return.

I have collected Forget-Me-Nots in every field we traversed, crushed and dried them between the pages of a heavy map book. I have included some here in this letter…so you will not forget me, Bertie. 

I am coming to you. For the loss from whence I began this letter is held in a hope so violently perfect, it is leading me back to your arms. I have found work in various fields, money slowly affording me a train ticket, this paper and pen, and enough food that keeps my stomach growling for more buttery lobster that, soon, we will share again. 

I promise to explain to you how it was possible that I left you, Bertie, my true love. That it was a different love for my sisters, for my mother, that urged my heart in a different direction. How it was possible that a father’s dreams could gorge a son’s belief in himself and make him weaken under the slippery guise of manic-driven-adventure.

They are still out there, my family. Webbed in the sticky grips of loss at someone else’s demand…perhaps my leaving will crack open a space for them to make their own…no, force their own release. 

Oh, Bertie. There’s so much I want to talk to you about…and so much I want to listen to…from your voice, from your heart.

So meet me, please. Meet me at the oceanside where we shared our first kiss. I’ll be there under the full moon…reaching for you. 

And we’ll make a point to create our dreams together. None of them involving a VW Westfalia. 

Your beloved in transit,

Nathan Michael Graham