The List
A Sunday letter.
Dear Friend,
Here is a thing you can actually do. You can sit down and make a list of every person you have ever loved in your life. You can put on it your childhood friends, the ones you knew before you knew yourself, when you were still in the sandbox, when you were still in diapers. You can put the girl who stood beside you in lines for movies at the mall, your hands clutching Orange Julius. You can put the boy with an eye patch who had too many sisters. You can put the girl whose house you knew as well as your own, whose mother bought canisters of pre-made crescent rolls that popped when you twisted them open, and served them hot from the oven on a regular weekend like it was nothing, their forbidden taste narcotic and slightly chemical. You can put the girls whose bodies you knew as well as your own, or almost, from the paddling pool to the teenage bedroom where you tried on each other’s clothes and the clothes of your mothers’, attempting glamour with lip gloss, eye shadow, stuffed bras.
How often has love cracked through you? How often has it formed softly, like a honey, like a natural glue, adhering you to the person you walked with, played with, laughed with, kissed?
There will be lovers on your list. Or there might be. Young loves. First loves. Young men or women whose eyes drifted down to your mouth as you talked. There will be lovers whose names don’t belong on the list, even if you said the words I love you. There will be names for whom I love you was not enough. There will be names that you keep pressed to your chest, even now, that will be pressed to your chest when the trumpets sound on the last day of judgement, as the last stars burn out and all of matter prepares to gather and explode again and start the whole thing over from the top—their names will still be there, in the electron-charged space where your chest once was.
On your list there will be people you still talk to every day, and people you haven’t talked to in decades. People who hurt you. People who saved you. Your blood relations, or some of them. Maybe not all. There will be loves expressed in coffee cups, in dishwashers, in packed lunches, in rides to soccer practice, in awkward birthday cards, in long distance calls. Polyester loves. Butterscotch loves. Eggnog and sugar cookie loves.
Some of them will be mad. Some of them will be dead. Some of them might be dangerous. Some of them won’t know you. They’ll know your name, but if they were to look at you, they wouldn’t see the child you were, the teen you were, the young woman or young man you were, even though she or he is right there, no fundamental change at all, just hidden behind the mask of years.
One name might belong on the list, at least technically, but the sight of that name will burn like an acid across your vision, will ring in your ears like the aftermath of a bomb, caught in a gust of shrapnel, and you can erase that name if you want. Go ahead. Do it now, even if just in your mind. Erase it. Imagine the letters dissolved into white paper, into a white mist with the sound of the ocean behind. Gone.
Where are they all? In offices and urns, walking down streets or lifting their children from the bath, scrolling social media, some crying, some laughing, some asleep, some buried under white stones in cemeteries far away.
Not everyone will want to hear from you. Some of them won’t be able to hear you. If you reach out, some of them will reply tepidly or not at all. Some of them you won’t be able to reach, won’t be able to find. You’ll send messages to LinkedIn and dormant Facebook accounts, delivery status unknown. Some of them will know exactly the room you’re standing in and when you write to them they will stand in it with you, even if just for a moment, the great lie of time revealing itself in a little flash of silver.
The list is a portrait. It is a portrait of you, just as you are a brush stroke in the portraits of others. A whole tree in the landscape of some lives, and in others the whole sky. This list of names is a recipe.
These are the loves of your life. These loves are your life.
Yours truly,
Summer
Although I never met you, our souls are friends .You are on my list. Write on and on.
I love how the list becomes a portrait of oneself. As I read your letter, I felt that I didn’t want to make a list of all those I loved. Sadly, too much pain, not enough joy. But when I reached the end of your letter and read that the list would be a portrait of me, I experienced that delightful “Aha” moment. Still kind of painful since many of my loves were ill-chosen, but all these loves have shaped me and reflecting on them allows me a deeper understanding of myself. Probably a bit narcissistic of me, but even at nearly 69, I’m still trying to understand me.