"They tore down the Polo Grounds in ’64"

To be filed under: letters never sent

Hey,

I drove past the gallery today. I caught the red light at the end of the parking lot and spent a few seconds gazing into the empty black windows, staring back at me like hollowed eye sockets. The parking lot was mostly empty, although that’s the way it was most of the time when the gallery was open anyway.

I drove past the hotel, the fancy one where you said that one day you’d like to spend a weekend there. I always thought it looked a little incongruous. It would probably be better off on Michigan Avenue, downtown, and not just off the highway in the far west suburbs, not too far away from cornfields. I chucked at the notion that for the first time in a long time, I could probably afford a weekend in that hotel, although to do so now would be pointless. An empty bed with room service and a view is not that much better than the one I’ve got now.

I drove past the familiar intersection, where I knew that a left turn would bring me down the twisting road, past the field where you tiptoed through the grass because you were afraid of ticks, to a smaller twisting road that would bring me to your driveway. Of course I didn’t make that turn. I didn’t even really want to be there in the first place. Too many memories, you understand. I’ve been going out of my way to avoid that part of town since August, even if it meant driving longer to go around it. But today I was late getting out of work and I had some homework to finish before class, so I had no choice but to take the road that took me past the gallery.

I wonder what happened to my favourite painting there – the one to the top right of your desk, full of vivid smears of bright blues and reds. It was like a sunset if you looked at it through smoked glass, the tiny brush strokes almost indiscernible until you got so close that your nose almost touched it. There were other paintings too, like the obligatory Thomas Kinkades and those cheap-looking paintings of horses. But none held me like those swirls, waves, and blotches of red, blue, and everything in between.

In the back there was that bowl of mints I always stuffed my pockets with, and that soft leather chair I sometimes napped in whenever you were busy. I remember how you’d prop the door open and how you’d curse at the cottonwood fluff as it blew in from across the street and gathered in front of the paintings.

No need to get all nostalgic about the gallery, I suppose. Your dreams were in there as well as mine. Except your dreams were affixed to canvas and framed all up and down the walls. Mine were the flesh and blood at the center of it all, sitting behind the desk while your fingers danced away on the keyboard. That book you slaved over was the size of a phone book, or at least that’s how it seemed, and it grew with each passing day. I remember the day you triumphantly told me you’d figured out how to end it. It seemed so fitting at the time, although now you could certainly continue; keep adding chapter after chapter until the right guy comes along and writes the ending for you.

Anyway, back to the drive. As I sat there at that red light, I knew that the gallery was empty. The sun cast enough glow for me to see the hauntingly bare walls. Your desk, which seemed so solid and sturdy, as if it had been planted and grown there, was gone too. I don’t know where it all went, including my favourite painting, but I hope they’re all somewhere safe. If I could have kept all of our dreams sealed inside wooden frames, they would have filled that whole gallery. If all the hugs, kisses, and “I love you’s,” I showered you with were all brush strokes, each in magnificent blues, reds, greens, yellows, and every other colour, they would have covered all the walls, over the electrical sockets, down to the hardwood floors, spreading over more space than a million footprints could have ever smudged, up to the ceiling, over the rafters and sprinkler heads and through the cobwebs that collected in the corners, out to the parking lot, over all the cars and streetlamps, to the street with the paint sizzling on hot summer asphalt, and from there…well, to everywhere.

And if all the tears I have shed in the meantime have not washed it all away, then soon the snows will cover it, the spring rains will soften and loosen the paint of all those brush strokes, and the heat of another summer will dry it, crack it, and the August storms will blow it all away.

But at least, for those few months, the world was our painting. The colours…I can’t even describe them to you, they were so beautiful, and they were everywhere. The city, the countryside, the sunrise, the sunset, and the stars were all so incredible that it makes my heart race just to think of them. It was ours and it was wonderful.

I hope that somewhere, in the pages of your manuscript, there is a hint of that colour – some glimmer as you turn from one page to the next, just as I hope that I have managed to capture a faint touch of it here through these keystrokes. And I hope that regardless of where you go, who you marry, where you live, or what you do, you’ll always keep that with you, safely tucked away.

Just like my favourite painting.

Take care,
Frank

A few days ago, Ashley asked me if writing like this had a cathartic release. It does…it really does. But I wish the feeling of freedom it gives me wasn’t so temporary.