The Letter

Dearest Jerry,

You will be surprised to know that I am giving up the wall. I am giving up the way it grew to fit my bottom, the way it was firm and sturdy. I am giving up the way it felt beneath my palms, always left them much whiter, it was a bit hard to climb.

In my mind it was always golden and the air around it always crisp. It was always three o’ clock in the morning and my thoughts were always meandering. I am done now and it’s all over, no more will I look over the city, no more will I try to balance as I walk the makeshift plank.

I will miss it. I was always well dressed when I was there. I will miss the young you that had come to find a sense of amusement in staring at me breaking my head over fixing things that weren’t broken. I still miss the young man that I could never imagine being without on that golden wall, till this day I think I made the right call.

I am giving up on that innocence and leaving a little room for knowledge, I am letting go of nostalgia and trying to open the door to new experiences. I always lectured you on who you should be, I was trying to make a better you, really more, a better me. I hope always that you will be kind, that’s how I remember you. I hope that you will be a great listener and teach someone else a thing or two. I hope that wherever it is you end up you never give up, because ours was a story of perseverance and coming to terms with all the ugly things and how no matter how mysterious they made us look they still meant that we were broken.

I am giving up the mystery of it all and reading new stories, filling my head with other enchanted lights and not only those facing Dorado Park. I am giving up always looking for you in the corner of my eye, waiting. The wall I hope will always be there but I will no longer go there. If I am lucky I might see it again one day glistening in the distance and wonder about time and its effects, if I am smart I will forget it ever existed. I will still have you after all, in all your true magnificence.

I am climbing down one last time and never looking back. I just thought I’d write to tell you that I came and said goodbye so that the next time we have lunch or dinner or just happen upon each other it will be an unspoken truth, that the wall has been conquered and all will soon be forgot. No more will I hurt myself making that climb; no more will I come away with white stained clothes and hands. I want you to know that I am not at all sad, just relieved in a sense. I think I was stuck there between reason and nonsense. It was my chosen prison, my pilgrimage. But there are new roads now and new inanimate objects to clamber onto.They may not be golden walls but I am pretty sure they will hurt just as much should I fall.

I considered what would be a fitting goodbye, a last chapter in my own catcher in the rye. I closed my eyes real tight and thought of you and the very best parts of what I remember manifested and we stared out together from the wall and your silent ghost reached out and helped me down. I got a little teary eyed in the end and couldn’t maintain the façade and just like that I stood alone and you were gone.

I will be coming to visit you soon, I miss the greenery and I can go out with the kids, I hope the weather isn’t dreary. Send my love to your sweet wife, I have missed her dearly.

Always yours,

Sincerely.