Lost Letter

I

I had wanted to write my uncle a letter in which I equated his solitude with my own. That week, a woman

leapt off the high bridge in St. Paul. I thought if I opened with the Mississippi it would lead to the barrenness

of Northeastern Colorado. A mother’s third attempt at suicide to one twin’s phone call to the other.

The week my uncle told my father he was dying, I ravaged slow all the things I’d never said—

What if our family is doomed to silence? As children, my sisters and I scoured Colorado’s horizon for trees,

so in love with the scarcity of water we didn’t consider its consequences. It had been ten years

since my father spoke to his twin. When we arrived at the house, yard torn up and muddy after sewage

had erupted the bathroom floor, I barely recognized the man who was almost my father.

II

I thought if I could connect the history of ghost towns to my own life, the relation between us

would become clear: a world once renowned for wealth now nearly forgotten. The first time I left

this country, bacteria ate my body to less than a hundred pounds. I was a skeleton hobbling

a mountainside where at the center men blew from their mouths fire and young tourists met the buildings

their ancestors had made happen. Some say our family once owned whole counties in Northeastern

Colorado. What I remember is cattle farms. I can no longer describe the stench

of my uncle dying, only how quickly his body stilled and yellowed once he did.

What I remember is the powdered scent of my grandmother, the splotched foundation of her face,

how her entire apartment seemed blue even amidst the sand- painted tan of her furniture.