Dear Trevor,

I’m sitting here at The Laughing Gull again, trying to get up my courage to go into the woods.

No, courage is not the right word. I’m trying to break through my walls of inactivity. Gordon would call my state The Modern Malaise. “We’re too separated from necessity,” he would say. “We don’t need anything. We don’t go hungry enough. We don’t fight for survival enough. No one’s trying to burn our village or kill our family. We’ve got nothing worth fighting for, worth working for.” I’ve been wallowing in this meaningless existence for so long that I don’t how to step out of it. I’m going to, though.

Do you have these kinds of days? I remember as a kid getting together with a friend and asking the inevitable question: “So what do you wanna do?” And he’d say, “I dunno. What do YOU wanna do?” We’d swap that question back and forth half a day without doing anything. Every option, no matter how stupid, would have been better than sitting there doing nothing. Drawing hand turkeys. Making toast. Trying to break the record for standing on one foot. Sometimes it doesn’t matter so much what you do, but just that you do, right?

Speaking of broken records, I’m starting to sound like one. Or how would I say that in a way that makes sense to you? I’m starting to sound like a parrot. Or a repeating sound bite.

I pretended that the reason I came down here to the Laughing Gull was to ask Sung-Hee precisely which direction Martin and Julia headed when they went into the woods. She told me that in the first 60 seconds. Right past Martin’s cabin and straight through into the shadows. Since then, I’ve been here for what would probably equal many hours in your world, trying to figure out how to get off of my ass, onto my feet and into the trees.

Instead I’ve been sitting here painting a portrait of Sung-Hee with her own awful coffee. If the picture is imperfect, it serves her right. I’ll include the picture with my letter to you. Hopefully it will be a going away present, as I go away into the woods.

Sometimes—today is one of those times—Sung-Hee sings while she cooks. She has a love of awful, old, pop songs and she sings them in her rickety voice with a Chinese accent. “IF-a you want my baw-dee AND-a you think I’m sex-eee, COME on sugar, let-a me knowwww…” She’s like a siren. I don’t mean a police siren, although that’s about how bad she sounds. She’s like an ugly mermaid, wooing me into her crummy restaurant with her warbly voice.

It’s time for me to cram my ears with wax and get the hell out of here.

Hopefully, you won’t hear from me soon.

Dad

I got your letter in the mail today! I stayed home from school again and when I saw the mailman come, I went out to check the mail and there it was, in this plain white envelope!

I don’t even know what to say, except that I really hope this is really you, and not some prankster or do-gooder down at the post office. And I hope it’s not Mom writing, just to help me cope.

I want to know where you are and what it’s like. Are you in heaven? Are the streets really paved with gold? Is there a house with many mansions? Do you have wings? Does it hurt to be dead or are all your tears really washed away?

I’m assuming you’re not in hell, because I just can’t picture a post office in hell.

I was surprised your letter wasn’t written in gold ink or that it didn’t come floating down from the clouds or something. It was just sitting in the mailbox, resting on top of the latest issue of Readers’ Digest.

I don’t know what else to write! Please write back, Dad!

Your son,

Trevor

Kiss the girl and fight the boy. Is this good advice? I don’t know. But I do know that I miss the pain of a bloody nose almost as much as I miss the wet and tender press of a pretty girl’s lips on mine. And there’s nothing else I miss more than that.

In case this letter disappears and all you ever hear from me are those lines, I want you to hear them. I filled a house with children and loved your mother more than I loved anyone, but I still feel I squandered most of my life. Don’t do it. Go back to school. Kiss the girl and fight the boy.

Dad

P.S. There is a post office here. I’ve never gone there before today, when I just happened to wander in. I discovered all your letters there, in a post office box with my name on it. There is even a postman.

I hope you keep writing. There isn’t much to do here, and I’ve enjoyed every word on every letter. As soon as I send this off, I plan on reading them all again.

Mr. Schick announced the starters and captain for our first soccer game. Guess what? I am NOT the team captain! And guess what again? I am NOT a starter.

I don’t blame you for not coaching me when I was younger, like you did with Steffan and Keith. You weren’t here. Not your fault, except in the sense that you smoked and then died from cancer. But Uncle Felix smokes at least two packs a day and he’s still alive and he’s way older than you. And he’s super fat, too, so by all rights he should be dead and you should be alive, smoking or not.

Here’s a question: How do I know if I have the right address on these letters? Or the right amount of postage? This will be the ninth one I sent and I have yet to get one back. I figured at least one would be sent back by the mailman by now. I keep waiting for Mom to walk all teary-eyed into my bedroom with a return-to-sender letter in my hand, asking me if I want to talk.

For your address, I’ve kept it simple. It says:

Hugh E. Griffiths, Jr., deceased.

The Afterlife

Why didn’t I address it to heaven? No offense, but I’m not 100% certain you made it in. Mom is. She says you asked Jesus into your heart and that you’re definitely there. But she says it a bit like she’s trying to convince herself. I really hope Mom doesn’t read this, because she would definitely start crying about that sentence.

I’m only using one first-class stamp, because I figure that if that’s not enough, the letter will come back with one of those insufficient postage marks on it.

I wonder, if in all the history of the world, anyone has ever tried to mail a letter to heaven. Or wherever. Or gotten a reply back.

Skip Hendrickson is the captain of our soccer team. I like Skip. Everyone likes Skip. Teachers loooove him. His dad is a doctor who did the physicals for all the team players for free, which is good because I don’t think we have medical insurance right now, because Mom’s job is kind of lame and you didn’t exactly leave us with loads of money.

Skip’s mom is the school nurse. Skip’s a straight-A student and is good at sports, but his hair looks like a Brillo pad is sitting on the top of his head, and sometimes he has a booger hanging out of his nose and no one tells him. If it was Larry Melding with the booger, he’d get pounded for it. But with Skip, people just pretend the booger isn’t there.

I guess if you’re as wonderful as Skip is, people don’t mind overlooking something like a booger.

Your son,

Trevor