Platonic

A short story
by Kathryn Kulpa

I'm writing a letter to a man I've never met.

Two in the morning and there you are, in the tiny bedroom in the house you have lived in forever and will leave soon, windows open to the night, high school heroes still on the walls, and three green milk bins stuffed with records because you wouldn't give up on vinyl, wanted to hang on for the long last note. You're writing a letter to a man you've never met. He lives on an island and you'll never meet him, or perhaps you will, perhaps geography will soon be as extinct as vinyl, as ephemeral as the pulped-wood paper you fill with ink and longing. Paper burns: you've seen the old paperbacks, ten cents a copy at the used bookstore, yellow-brown pages flaking little dry bits of themselves like Vincent Price in some old monster movie you watched once on a rainy Saturday afternoon. You know, already, the impermanence of objects.

Tonight, though, the letter exists. And the man exists, though you may never meet him. Maybe you don't want to meet him. Tonight you feel something better than loved. You feel known, drawn by some unreal yet limitlessly imaginable connection. You would like to believe this feeling can last. You would like to believe that ordinary life, the life shared by other people, can be as strangely thrilling as the secret inward world in which you have always more than half lived. That something in the world can survive impermanence: you would like to believe in that one thing, most of all.

In fifth grade, your best friend's father left for good. He moved to a city ten miles away. He moved into an "apartment." You never saw this apartment but sometimes tried to picture it. A tall building like a hive with cells of windows. Maybe it had a swimming pool. Her father had grown a beard. You saw him a few times picking your friend up for the weekend. Was he in disguise? you wondered. A hunted man. He had moved out so that when the Russian Mafia or the Colombian drug cartel men fired a single bullet into his head, his family would not have to be shot as witnesses.

What was it like? you asked your friend. She told you she missed seeing her father every day but that she was glad her parents weren't fighting, that she was happy they were happy, that even though they didn't love each other anymore, she knew they still loved her. Years later, caught between laughter and horror, you would read The Kids' Book About DIVORCE:

Sometimes I miss having my dad around. But I'm glad my parents aren't fighting anymore.

I know my mom and dad both love me. I'm happy they're happy.

What doesn't end in fire ends in ice. The library at Alexandria. The floods of Florence.

It is the middle of July. Your cotton T-shirt, with its surf shop logo cracked and peeling after many washings, lies limp against your body. This is the weather that makes clean sheets feel damp and long-used. Only the crickets refuse to sleep: the crickets, and you. You think of all the times you have looked out this window at this same moon on these same trees.

You want to tell the man what it means to you. You don't know why it should mean anything. Why these trees, this moon should seem like secret echoes of some greater tree, some ultimate moon.

There is something I had, that I could never touch, that I still can't reach, that all my life will be calling me. And I try to hold it but it falls away like air, like sand. It is the bare lightbulb that supports my magic-lantern show. Something I was born knowing, that I can only try not to unlearn.

Somewhere in another time zone it is also night, and you imagine that the man, on his northern island, is also awake, watching and waiting, and filled with the same strange, lonely elation. Elation for nothing more than the sudden stirring to attention of the dark grass, a coolness that somewhere nudges wind chimes into sound. You watch the tiny bumps prickling your arms, small hairs, like the grass, standing up.

Your mother and father and all the good mothers and fathers of your town are long asleep, clammy sheets mounded around their knees or blankets pulled close against the air-conditioned chill that just dipped a shade colder. You are waiting for the storm.

I want it to rain—rain thick as waterfalls, thunder louder than fireworks, with that same faint ozone smell, lightning slashing through summer skies, roads that rise and ripple up, ripple up waving, the air alive with expectation—what charges the air charges me.

What charges the air charges you. I wrote these songs when I was young and believed in love, the man on the island said in the note he sent with the tape he mailed.

He doesn't write songs now. He never recorded another album after the one you found at Mystic Disc. By the time he was your age he had "made mistakes," a phrase you read as a veiled reference to his wife, or son, or both.

He speaks often and wistfully of your youth, as though everything you are is a finite quality, as though what he calls your "intensity" will be dulled and tamed by time, and you tell him no. You will never turn into someone who will fear to turn her face to summer rain. Never learn not to love, not to feel it all, not to see and want to remember everything: green smells, wood rot, grass cut, wet leaves. The bird that calls three times, the stillness and waiting of the day. Tall green bottles of Sprite with paper straws. White socks and white, flat sneakers stained from last year's lawn. The trampled path to the river and boys who dive from a bridge, people who come and go in your life and who, though you may not want them with you again, you can never forget. You want to tell him that you will never forget watching your own breath in a small house made of snow, or the taste of apples, red-veined, as your hands shaped a bowl of clay. Or walking home late at night and hearing a blue guitar coming from someone's garage, a single sad passage, long and plaintive as Roy Orbison holding that note on Crying, the pain of a man who loved (her motorcycle sliding in the rain)—but he did love.

Now the first lighting flashes, and for a moment you see your hand on the windowsill outlined in pale blue light. You hear the dry cracks of thunder and you slip outside barefoot, wanting to be blessed by the rain, but the rain doesn't come. You're left standing in the cooling dark as the thunder fades to a distant grumble, watching the heat lightning flashes fade away west, still waiting.