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There is a letter, sitting in the bottom of his mangled backpack.
There is a letter sitting unfinished in the bottom of his mangled backpack.
There is a letter sitting unfinished in the bottom of his mangled backpack and it has been sitting there in the bottom of his mangled backpack since even before he entered the forest, determined to chase down the ghosts of his past, and Jake hasn't been able to look at it since.
He knows what's written on it. He doesn't have to look to know what it says. He spent hours upon hours considering every word he wrote down in slick black ink, each word committed to memory, the very shape of each letter etched into his skull before he wrote it down on paper. Dad , it begins, crossed out in a frantic scribble of ink, replaced with Dear Father . Proper. Like his parents would have wanted. Dear Father, written in straight, purposeful letters, the lines leaving deep grooves in the paper. He almost punched through the page with how hard he was pressing the pen into it. Dear Father. Dear Father. Dear Father .
Dear Father, I want you to know I'm alive, and I'm not sorry.
The words are like thick syrup in his mind, choking and cloying. Is he not sorry? Is he? He's not sure. He wasn't when he wrote it.
There is a letter sitting in the bottom of his backpack, it is water-stained, and the black ink has run across its pages, and it is crumpled and tears when he tries to remove it from the bottom of his bag. It begins Dear Father, I want you to know I'm alive, and I'm not sorry. I needed answers that you wouldn't give me, so I went out and found them myself.
Jake isn't sure about whether or not he found the answers he went looking for either.
The letter is angry. He was angry when he wrote it, pen clutched too tightly in his fingers, hunched over the paper propped up on the flat side of his backpack, knuckles white with the effort of keeping the pen steady. The letter is bitter and full of resentment, words spilling out of his mind and onto the page like blood pouring out of his throat. Dear Father, repeats in his head, reverberating inside his skull, as he looks at the wet paper in his tired hands, the contents of the page present in front of him but not in his mind.
He wrote about Korea. About his grandfather. About the people he spoke to. All of it couched in anger and vitriol, that his own father had never tried to find out more, had never told him about his grandfather, had tried to move on. He's not sure he's as angry anymore. He's almost sure he isn't as angry anymore.
There is a letter clutched in his cracked and dirty and blood-stained hands, it is half-written, it is full of anger, and half unreadable where the ink bleeds off the page in swirling black rivulets. It doesn't matter. He won't send it. He can't send it.
Dear Father, I am sorry that we left things the way we did.
These words aren't in the letter. He stares at the page, like his gaze might burn them into the paper if he focuses hard enough. Like it will burn the hate and rage and anger off and out of existence. He doesn't have enough paper to write a new letter. Burned as fuel, white pages curling into ash and smoke, a desperate bid to light the waterlogged wood above it. He can't rewrite the letter. Not just now, anyway.
Dear Father, I am sorry that we left things the way we did. I wanted answers. I wanted a reason.
The words bleed into streams of black ink, drowned by the roaring of static in his head. His hands shake. The paper tears slightly. Jake swears, the words catching in his throat. He can barely remember the last time he said something aloud. His letter crumples in his grip, wrecked paper giving way under the strength of his fingers. He can't stop it from happening.
I wanted a reason to run away .
These are words he will not write. Cannot write. Can barely bring himself to admit in his own mind. His father cannot know this. His nails bite so deeply into his palms that they bleed, thin streams of blood running down his skin like ink running across the pages of his ruined letter.
There are the remains of a letter, clutched between his fingers. It is torn, damaged beyond repair, and full of hate and anger and words he is unsure he means anymore. Paper scraps drift between his knees, landing on the damp ground, becoming one with the earth.
He burns the paper. It doesn't matter. He will write another, and it will be better. Some day.
Some day.