“You want to find yourself in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance.”
Outside the neighborhood buzzed with the roar of cars relieved of their mufflers and women hawking coconuts and avocados. Stray dogs lay on the sidewalks, their bellies inflating and deflating in the heat. This was not his life, but it was the life of the man he wrote to. Or the life, anyway, that the man had before he’d gone to prison.
The boy had wanted to feel useful, charitable, less alone than he was in his suburban house outside Minneapolis when he saw a flier in his local coffee shop. WRITE TO A PRISONER it said in bold letters. The first letter he sent was a short introductory letter. It said how old he was—seventeen—what state he lived in and what he liked to do on the weekends, what he liked about school. He ended the letter with an all-encompassing question: what about you? Later on, this first letter would seem silly and far too upbeat for a letter to someone in prison, but he didn’t know. He had never been and it was hard to know what was right.
The boy learned lots of things in his letters. He learned about what food was served in the prison, what it felt like to be in solitary confinement, he learned that the man had grown up in Colombia and moved to the Midwest when he was twenty-five. He’d had a wife once, and a child in Medellin. He’d lost track of both of them. For a while, news of them came occasionally, unpredictably from relatives or friends. But since he’d gone to prison, this loose news never came. He learned about the cable cars in Medellin and the small barber shops and the fat Botero statues everywhere. The man liked potatoes but loved plantains, missed them now that he was in the land of Swedish immigrants and white soybean farmers. The boy told him things too. He wrote about how his mother and father fought most nights, he wrote about how he wanted to tear the cream vinyl siding off of his house because he thought it represented his family as plain and unimaginative, how he was gay but only his brother knew, how he’d grown up going to summer camp for so many years that he was adept at tying sailor’s knots and archery, but had never worked a summer job or done anything he thought might be practically useful for his life.
Sometimes the boy re-read the letters from the man when he was lonely or when he came home from a party a little drunk. Once, the man sent him a photo. It felt like such a sacred object and he was almost afraid to look at it. What if he looked nothing like he’d thought he would? But of course the boy looked and after that he could hardly remember how he had pictured him before. What he really liked about writing to the man is that it made him feel like he was part of something, like his life extended beyond his cul-de-sac and his high school parties and watching television in the basement.
The first time the man wrote to him about wanting to feel his hands on his face, his fingers in his ass, it was a particularly cold day and the letter was slimmer than normal. He hid the letter under his bed and read it only at night. He felt like he could feel it glowing like a hot coal under his mattress when he wasn’t reading it.
They wrote like that—which is to say, explicitly, sexually—for a while. Their letters were laced with sex. Once, the man suggested the boy visit him and the boy never responded to this part of the letter, but after that, all letters, the ones about the Colombian summer and the ones about how much he wanted to worship at the feet, the cock, the ass of the boy seemed to have a silent echo. Visit me, visit me, visit me, they said. Once loosed on the world, that desire couldn’t be taken back.
For a while the boy carried around a version of love for the man he’d written to. But visiting seemed too hard, too much to explain to his parents and his friends and so he never went. For a while he forgot about it, but once, on the bus, years later when he’d gone home to visit his parents, he thought he saw a man who looked like the photo of the man he’d written too. His heart flipped over. The boy had a boyfriend then and was living in another, larger city on one of the coasts. Things had worked out for him. For the whole bus ride, he stared at the man from behind, wondering. Then, like most secret things, he let it back into the small place he kept for it in his heart.
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