Spoiler
17 November 2010
My dearest daughter,
Sometimes, if I’m paying attention, I’ll see little pieces of her in you.
A sigh of tingling air scatters intricate frost patterns on the glass. Your small fingers wipes away a circle of winter’s breath from the pane to reveal a snow-blanketed town and nothing but a wonderful shade of white for miles into the distance.
Fiddling with the latch and sliding the window open, you inhale a gust of frigid oxygen, streaming through your red hair in its purest form. As a soft tinge of pink perfuses across your cheeks and the tip of your nose, you marvel at the thought of nothing but open ice and snow, all for you to explore.
In my contemplation of closing the window or letting you admire the view, I recall your mother’s quiet smile on that first morning.
Temperatures reached all time lows in the winter of 2007, yet she felt a warm tingling sensation on that morning and most mornings after.
“I don’t know what it is, but- but it’s like electric ecstasy whirling around my chest,” she hummed when I asked why she was smiling, “like a sort of enlivening warmth…”
To my dismay, nothing could ever translate her impulsive sentimentality into terms that I understood. Maybe she’s coming down with something, I thought, before returning to my paperwork while she blissfully watched the morning monotony unfold from the front porch. Just dropping in to say no feedback so far, a really smooth piece!
“Sure, just come in soon, honey. You’re going to catch a cold.” I mumbled, reaching to draw the window shut before she suddenly turned on her heels to face me.
“You’re going to be a great father, Truman” she remarked, round frost-coated glasses magnifying excitement in her olive green eyes.
The polished blueprint of my life seemed suddenly reduced to ashes. I analysed the pace of her breathing, the slight upward curl of her lips, the way that she anxiously fiddled with the ends of her vibrant red hair – all the symptoms of an overwhelming happiness.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I said,” she chuckled lightly, “you are going to be a great father!”
She repeated this reassurance for months, the words always laced with a sincerity that echoed her innately maternal compassion. I love this - you've moved from the initial hearing to the months ahead. Very smooth. I had trouble believing it, but her white-hot positivity was a kindness nonetheless. Her glowing, perhaps delusional, confidence may have even outshone my uncertainty at times. That’s simply how infectiously immune she was to my defeatist attitude. Hence the magnitude of the unexpected torment when she suddenly fell ill.
The word ‘eclampsia’ was a sudden burst of electric light that drowned out the rest of the doctor’s careful words into empty static. The medical statistics and subsequent uncertainties were the ravenous boom. And nothing - not a million self-care brochures or late-night Google searches - could conquer the helplessness and confusion that clouded your mother’s once-beaming sense of hope.
The mattress burned cold when she woke up each morning. Remnants of lucid nightmares would hang from her eyes as she adjusted to the synthetic hospital room glow. The scent of crisp sterility seeped into the bleak, white walls that confined her to disinfected bed sheets and non-solid foods for 2 eternal months. As if forgetting to nurture a flame before it dissipated into smoke, I watched as she declined rapidly, to the point where her brilliant smile was just a hazy memory with fading warmth. Your mother's body recovered in slow, turbulent progression after you were born, but what is there to do when your soul is poisoned?
You came to us 10 weeks too soon.
Suddenly the hospital became home. Every morning I would visit you. The neonatal intensive care unit that they kept you in was another world to your mother's hospital room. A kaleidoscope of delicate colours dispersed against anesthetic whites. The floral curtains were always spread, allowing sunlight to caress your skin in gentle Summer zephyr. On the best days you would hold my finger in your hand through a hole in the side of the incubator. You were, you are, phosphorescent, my dear. But oh, how you made me melt. After a cherished hour of watching you thrive, hanging onto life by a dozen winding tubes, I’d pry myself away to a part-time job at a nearby grocery store. A three-minute walk from the hospital through winding alleyways, often under callous rain.
And then every night, stumbling against the pavement in aching exhaustion, I would visit your mother.
"Lucille"
Meaning light, a French variation of Lucy. Your mother whispered it to me one night, squeezing my hand delicately with a kind smile that betrayed the melancholia in her eyes. Stroking the red hair that draped messily over her pale, porcelain skin, I breathed a shaky "okay” and said nothing more.
At first, I blamed myself for her death. Not eclampsia. Not postpartum depression. Not an intentional lithium overdose. Refusing to accept the bitter truth, I wondered; if I had somehow saw on that first morning how her last night would end, would I have been able to save her?
But even as I lost her, I found you. And I know now that I was the one needing to be saved.
I was the one trapped inside an isolated eternal winter of my own making. But ice melts, and so too do bittersweet delusions of security. She saved me from a dull, purposeless, comfortable existence simply by bringing me out into the world. By giving me the brightest sunshine. The light of my life.
I see so much of her in you.
“I’m sorry, Pa.” you mumble as the thermometer beeps softly and I place the warm cloth on your forehead.
“That’s okay, sweetheart. We’ll play outside together for as long as you’d like after you feel better. Say goodnight to your Mama, Lu.” I gesture towards the picture on the bedside table.
“Goodnight, Mama” you hum, revealing a smile identical to that of the woman in the photo – one that is glowing, kind and procures an enlivening warmth.
I do adore you, Lucille.
Love always,
Dad
Wow. Your careful control of language and features of language is really wonderful to read. It's so clear to me you've tried to capture a very delicate atmosphere in this work. There's absolutely nothing I want to say about your structure or your words, I only want to say how wonderful I think this is in terms of the way you've created a fragile and frosty, yet meaningful, tone. Classic!
In terms of discovery, we are seeing an emotional discovery, spiritual, and physical discovery. I think if you need to develop an intellectual discovery more, then you'd need to tap into his faculty of reasoning a bit more. The way he reasoned life and the meaning of life, and his responsibility to his wife's life. Obviously these aren't the only categories of discoveries, but it's a good place to analyse the ways you are looking at discovery (I took this from the rubric). Your next step is about looking at the rubric like I have here, and taking on little chunks and thinking "if this was my stimulus - could I adapt? How would I adapt?" And because your writing style is so delicate, it is important you practice adding little bits and pieces that is still in line with the work you have produced. I don't at all think you've confused the plot, nor do I think you have overwritten. But I'm wondering why the letter was written - could you engage with why the letter was written, with discovery? Like, could there be a particular discovery (emotional, physical, spiritual), that prompted the letter being written?