2023.07.07 [transcribed by archivbot3.0 on 2105.11.01]

Brooks K. Eisenbise is a two-time Hopwood Award-winning writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores fractured memory through non-linear narrative, with an emphasis on personal history and interactions with space. Their writing has most recently been featured in Black Fox Literary Magazine. Brooks hails from Kalamazoo, MI and resides in Chicago, IL.

Instagram: @eyesnbyes

2023.07.07 [transcribed by archivbot3.0 on 2105.11.01]

This (assumed) letter was discovered by University of Michigan PhD Candidate in Environmental Tragedy Erid Angret during zer study of Westnedge Hill (Kalamazoo, MI’s last remaining intact land mass). According to Angret, it was “among a collection of waterlogged items inside a wooden box. This box was found in the partially flooded basement of an abandoned Arts and Crafts-style home on the west side of Westnedge Avenue. While not relevant to my work studying the Second Lake Michigan Meteotsunami of 2073, this letter may be of interest to those studying the history and lives of Michiganders in the early twenty-first century.” Angret also noted that this was the only piece of ephemera within said collection in this handwriting.

Archivist’s note: Words and phrases originally underlined for emphasis have been italicized for clarity. There were a lot of underlines. 

Hi. It’s been a while.

I should thank you for your message, and apologize for waiting so long to write you back. I should, and I would if I were still the person you remember from five summers (or ten years) ago. But I’m not grateful, and I’m not sorry — when I said I couldn’t stand your cold and unpredictable gusts of conversation any longer, I meant it. My heart is a slow cooker whose contents oxidize and rot from your lid-lifting. I ask that after you receive this letter, you leave me to stew.

(I’m glad that I no longer have to pretend that my bitterness, self-flagellation, retrophilia, and headache-inducing verbosity make me any worse than human; and that I no longer have to pretend that one 2am text message from you can even begin to bridge the gap between your reality and mine.)

Let me start by sharing some things I am sorry for. I’m sorry for curdling your feelings about the dumb little hill we grew up on, the soft wooded place overlooking our town. I’m sorry for showing up as a specter on that hill, strolling in the shadows of the alley by your parents’ garage or eating shit on roller skates in front of their house. You deserve peace as much as this ghost does, and I’m glad someone performed the séance that spirited me across Lake Michigan to somewhere new.

I’m sorry for seeing your childhood home as more than a house, and seeing you as more than a person. I’m sorry for tangling you up in the mundane symbology that once kept me alive, the saudade I now only indulge in as a pastime. (I’m doing so now; I hope you’ll forgive me.) I was wrong to turn my summer with you into a soliloquy, a narrative I wrote by candlelight without your editorial input; and I was wrong to let it break my heart like a good story always does.

•••

This isn't to imply that I set out to write us into a fairytale romance. I knew from the beginning that you didn’t love me the way I’d seen in the movies. (Nor I you, although I tried my damndest.) That whole summer, I was waiting for you to tell me so, to get down on one knee and propose that we find new people to hold. You never did; you kept pulling at my strings until I had wholly unraveled, a once-warm sweater now sitting in a spindly heap around your feet. I made a meal of your hollow romantic notions; I put them into jars and pickled them until they got too sour to stand. It seems you regret it now — how you wrapped your apathy in crepe-thin promises — but I’m left with these shelves of your rotting words.

And I knew about her; of course I did. I knew the way one knows without knowing, the way I saw my father pull up to the house, his 2012 Toyota Corolla filled to the ceiling with blankets and bankers boxes, and knew that my life had been changed. The headlights of your love for her flashed into my eyes the day you came home from that mid-month road trip and didn’t look at me, just sliced the thick air with your switchblade as you told your parents that San Francisco missed them. They blinded me when I repeated her name three times like Betelgeuse and you turned ghostly white, guilt-colored. They cut through me the night I reached up to touch you and you slapped my hand away, spreading my thighs and working within me like a third-shift mechanic. She glowed in you — your body an empty church, your eyes south-facing cathedral window images of the Virgin Mother — and I knew, and it filled my throat with bile and my mind with pictures of heart-shaped sunglasses, and I pretended I did not know.

Ours was a summer of heavy silences. You knew that there were secret things I stored in my chest, in my solar plexus, in place of a womb. (You called me the Human Pregnant Pause and your words struck me like a fist.) There, they bloomed and fermented and festered. They flowed through my hands and became sentences in shaky handwriting and pencil marks on craft store paper. You said you wanted to know, but what scraps you saw scared you.

Let me scare you a little more. For old time’s sake.

You know about the portrait I drew of you from that move-in day photograph: deep black tracing your aquiline nose on cardboard-colored paper, your curls contoured by a bright green halo; your favorite color creating the shape of you. (Did you keep it? If I dug through your parents’ garbage bins — always the archeologist — would I find it there?)

But you don’t know that I also sketched you while you slept. Just the one time, with a care and reverence I would have called tender and you would likely call obsessive. I cursed my mechanical pencil for squeaking as I crosshatched your still, sunblushed [sic] face, your matted chestnut curls cherub-like in the early May sun. I marveled at your shoulders, lean and pancaked into the pillow but still rounded and gleaming like armor. You were peaceful and smooth like stone, your body softened edges around something strong. My own body, my personhood too, was like sand, appearing solid but ready to crumble at your touch, disappear through your fingers; there was no core to me. I longed to borrow a piece of yours, if you’d let me.

•••

You also don’t know how much time I spent lying on the Crane Park tennis courts, feeling the forest-colored sun-warmed cement cook my back and imagining being buried there under cool moist soil. The landscape was changing that summer: mounds of sand taller than two of me punctuated the horizon, and construction barrels rose from the upturned ground like oblong pumpkins ready for Halloween harvest. I floated among the dusty green, unmoored and waiting for my childhood backdrop to become unrecognizable. I was half-convinced that before the summer was through, the tennis courts — that rendezvous spot we claimed before we knew Lorde had sung about it, that box whose chain-linked walls your sister and I scaled blind drunk on five-dollar-vodka screwdrivers — would be buried under soft loam the way my lanky boybody [sic] had begun to bury itself under layers of progesteronated [sic] womanfat [sic], leaving a grassy knoll in its place, a grave without a headstone. 

You can’t have known that for me, being smothered by my own curves by an unconcealable femininity I suddenly despised was a fate worse than blanket-close earth-wet death; that I would grab at my hips and stomach and thighs in the shower until the flesh I didn’t want was encircled by the blood-flushed crescent moons of my nail indentations, a skin-suspended ecliptic. I never told you about the night I spent on the bathroom floor of my student apartment in Copenhagen with a Sharpie and a throat full of curses, writing messages to you on the parchment of my body. RUN FROM ME, SAVE YOURSELF, NOT ONE STEP CLOSER, begged the black letters I wrote on the places my clothes would cover, as if you weren’t already four thousand one hundred and sixty one miles away; as if you hadn’t already been saved by someone new.

Bury me with the tennis courts, make me structurally sound, of invisible use, I prayed. You don’t know how much I prayed that summer.

•••

I could fill a book with things you do not know, and I did for a while. I kept a journal of the feelings that boiled and bubbled out of me, scalding hot and too alive to house in the hollows of my body. I promised myself that I would not show you this book unless I had won you fully and forever. (What were we to each other but prizes, objects? What was a relationship but a trophy given to the desirable, the normal, the blessed?) 

I charted our saga like a fangirl’s viral Tumblr post, romanticizing five years of panic attacks and closed-mouth kisses and bone-shaking horniness that defied fidelity and curfew. I molded my pain into poems, hoping that in their lyricism you would forgive me for being hurt by your broken promises, your date-night delinquency, your many-edged words that cut me like paper, quick and bloodless and stinging. I wrote you letters I never sent, nauseating myself with the sentimentality of the act, communicating with some future version of you who could see my correspondence as more than naïve and terrifying devotion.

Those letters, that notebook, the ticket stubs from movies we watched stiffly without touching hands, live in a box under my bed. Sometimes I wonder where they would be now if I had given them to you. Would they be in your own hidden box, the one where you keep offerings from your exes? Has your girlfriend rifled through that box’s contents, just like I did when I found it all those years ago, attempting to create a narrative from Sour Patch Kids wrappers and corner store receipts and Skype messages transcribed in glitter gel pen? Is she feeling that blade between her ribs, just like I did?

I hope not. I hope that, in her world, things are just things.

•••

During, and for some time after, I wondered what I was to you. Was I an old friend? A rebound lover? A ghost haunting your parents’ house in panties and your white button-up shirt? You once told me that I looked like an old photograph of someone’s grandmother. Is that what I was to you — a captured memory, stiff and static, already fading?

I didn’t know it then, but to me, you were the medium through which I could experience boyhood. I studied you like an anthropologist, documenting the curl of your smile, the curve of your nose, the lilt of your laugh. I burned them underneath my eyelids and etched them into brown paper with charcoal pencil. I stood before the picture of you that your father took when you were ten, your angled body and Margaret Keene eyes tinted red in the low light of the late-night living room, and brought it to life in my mind like a zoetrope.

What was he like, this barefoot boy with the woods in his backyard? I sometimes click through your dad’s Flickr account searching for the answer, where your baby face frozen in black and white film is shuffled between photos of the man you’ve become, right eyebrow perpetually cocked like a finger on some sarcastic trigger. How does a boy become a man, and how can I avoid growing up forever, Peter-Pan myself like Mary Martin? These photos provide no answers; they only cut me open the way I expect — right down the middle, flayed.

I wish I saw myself in those photos — in your prepubescent freckles, your piercing green-turned-gray eyes, your sandy hair still pin-straight at the ends. I wish I saw myself in the little boy’s shadow you left behind (Peter Pan again); instead I jumpscare [sic] myself with an image of my own slim teenage-girl shoulders, my excess hair condensed and discarded behind haphazard victory curls. Your father called that photo A Walk in the Park; I wouldn’t have, but the art is never permitted to title itself.

“The view from behind her is distinctly American,” comments some stranger on the Flicker post that features my façade. Is there something distinctly American about hiding the parts of yourself that you hate; about turning away from the camera, wishing you were born with the face of the photographer’s son in place of your own? What’s more American than letting womanhood slice the flesh off your bones so that He [sic] has something to consume?

I wonder how I taste. I suppose you know.

•••

By the end of it, we were both cowards. You, for failing to tell me that somewhere in the Utah desert, you’d let me go; and me, for failing to share why I couldn't do the same.

I hope you know, that night on the curb in front of my house, spotlit [sic] by the orange glow of a Rose Street lamppost, with the late-August mosquitos biting our ankles raw… I hope you know that your confession, the true answer to the question I posed (“You’ve never been sure about me, have you?” “No, I haven’t, but I’m sure about somebody else”), wouldn’t have shattered my poor fragile drowning girlheart [sic]. I, too, wanted to be set free. Behind the white Cadillac taking us from our wedding to our honeymoon clattered the tin cans of regret and burden and motherhood and compromise — empty words, his and hers: I do, I do. I could hear that car revving its engine in the distance and it filled me with dread.

But this was a game of chicken, and I couldn’t give in first. It would unanimously rule my valiant attempt at girl(friend)hood a failure, five years of star-crossed love deemed utter delusion. I couldn’t admit to you that I had fashioned my siren song from Lana Del Rey tracks and scraps of your high school girlfriend’s enviable femininity, that the girl whose eyes you couldn’t meet was nothing more than a character I was tired of playing. You alone had taught me the ways I could matter to a(nother) boy: I was a distraction in a floral print button-up dress, a music taste charity case, a tutee of Bruce Willis’ cinematic prowess. I was the silent audience for your restless night guitar riffs. 

I couldn’t admit that I’d spent five years stuck on you like a shadow and didn’t have the strength to slam the bedroom window shut and tear myself away. I guess I needed to hear it from you first: that I wasn’t the girl you wanted, a girl worth wanting.

•••

If I ended this letter by assuring you that it accuses you of nothing, and that my words are flowing onto the page because they have to, I can't stop them, they're more living than I've ever been, I doubt you'd believe me. Feelings like these look hard as stone, although I know them to be yielding like clay, reshaped by memory and fantasy and years that have doubtless created a chasm between us. Everything seems so much more solid before it's touched.

And if I told you that the bravest thing I've ever done is ask you to stop texting me, to tell you that no, I won't explain to you why your random wyd's tighten the muscles of my neck like a thick leather belt, if I told you that I've never been braver, I bet you wouldn't believe me then, either. Or maybe you would, and you'd pity me — you, who enters the Sprinkle Road on-ramp at one hundred miles per hour for something to do; your Aries-Moon heart will choke your lungs with smoke long before the cigarettes catch up with you. 

(Forgive me for waxing poetic at the end here. Yet another thing to apologize for.)

 — The Boy You Lost

This transcription and the archival material(s) from which it originated are the sole intellectual property of the University of Michigan Institute of Human-Derived Sensation, Affect, and Self (IHDSAS) Historical Archives. To browse our collection, link your NeuraNode® to our server here.