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The first Christmas I remember, I must have been 7. My parents asked me to write down what I wanted so they could mail it to Santa. It is a standard custom. It’s possible I had been given this opportunity in years past; if I had, whatever I asked for must have been reasonable, or at least forgettable because it takes up no space in my memory. But that year was different. The question left me euphoric: What do I want?
Sometimes at night I still feel it rumbling, like a train miles away, thundering in the distance. I know one day it may come, rip through whatever home I have built. But for now, it stays quiet, it rumbles meekly.
I thought Iceland would be lonely. Doesn’t it seem, after all, like a place built for loneliness? Deserted up there with nothing to warm it but the threat of volcanic eruption, all wind and sleet and sky, and less people in the entire country than the population of Tampa? It is a landscape carved by lava and ice. Why shouldn’t hearts and souls be carved by the same?
She told me I could do anything, and I believed her. She was strong, and her strength made me strong, too. Sometimes we were both so strong that we repelled like the wrong sides of magnets; but we always eventually latched, compelled by some unseen indelibility. Life without her is what I imagine life must be like for a magnet with nothing to hold onto, waiting, hoping for connection.
I bought the smallest men’s astronaut costume I could find, and it is still so big that I have to cinch it with a fanny pack to keep it in place. I take a special, nerdy kind of pride in this costume, which I have continued to wear every Halloween since. It’s just a cheap polyester jumpsuit with a bunch of straps and fake zippers and patches denoting that I am an Important Space Person, but I love it.
There is a pause that takes us into the heart of any truly beautiful thing: the swell. When something touches us, makes us stop, makes us live in that moment a little longer and a little more deeply so that we can know it, makes us think about life and perhaps also death and in so doing makes life actually feel like a precious thing, makes us know gratitude and weightlessness. We only know that feeling in rare, lucky pockets. Norman knows it here. And he invites us in. In 11 words. My god, that is everything.
A letter isn’t a book. A letter is simple. A letter is something you can write throughout the week or in one great, long breath. And if a few people expected it at a certain time on a certain day—well, that I could do. And I have loved it.
The first time a boy pinched my ass I was in the fifth grade. His name was Spencer. He probably did it on a dare. I slapped him across the cheek as hard as a 10-year-old girl can slap. I stomped away, red-faced, to find a corner where I could cry.
The day we found Rokan, the sky was blue, that sort of crisp, surreal cerulean that might only exist in New Mexico and other arid, sweeping landscapes that offer nearly nothing in the airways between you and the vastness of the beyond.