I'm sorry your teenaged son is having a hard time with his bipolar disorder, and that he tried to burn down that building, and that now he might be going to jail. We're the same age pretty much, and have kind of similar problems, though I'm not really bipolar, or at least not the arsonist kind. I'm sure the two of us (meaning your son and I) could have a very interesting conversation about things, and that maybe I might understand the desire to watch something huge go up in flames, and that maybe he might understand the desire to rebuild your body and make it inaccessible to feelings shaped like clawed and faceless animals. But I will never tell you all of this outside of this letter, which you will probably never read. You seem like a good mother, you don't seem angry with your son, you respect him. I hope that everything turns out okay, and I'm sorry for listening in. It's just that his name happens to be the same name as someone who lives approximately 12 blocks down and then up and then left from here, in a weirdly painted house that I'll be walking to shortly, where they used to have four chickens but then killed and ate two that turned out to be roosters. I helped eat them. We sat at the kitchen counter next to the mess of the living room we'd tried to redecorate, and ate animals formerly named after New York City boroughs. Sitting there pulling chicken apart with our fingers, I felt kind of at ease, and did not think about the lives of the men next to me or the way that I fit into them. I just sort of accepted that I did, and hoped very much that I would continue to. That was a sticky night in August. The house was always too hot in the summer. Another night, when the real owner of the chickens was out of town, I lay next to the man with the same name as your son while the voice of an Indian singer spidered out of the stereo and his hands spilled down my neck, when the air was too thick for normal breathing. He walked me halfway home and left me at Huron St. I never know what to think about that intersection now, but I look at it through the window when I'm running at the YMCA, and wonder if it was just something about August that made it possible to stand with someone under a street lamp and think that things would proceed in a way that made sense. Driving home from college some weeks ago, for perhaps the same reasons that you allude to in referencing the way you sent your son once to rehab, I thought about those nights in the house off of Sunset St., in that part of town across Huron. I don't know what I'm trying to get to in going there still, and what seemingly obvious facts of the matter I'm happily denying even as it is so clearly no longer August. I don't know what I mean to say here. I guess the point of this all is that I hope that your son gets better, and I hope that everyone does. I'm worried your son's name is jinxed. And I'm worried we're both kind of wound up with these jinxed named people, and are fated to lament loudly about it in too-warm cafes. Oh well. Here's to it.
-Abby
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