As you get older, you get more comfortable being uncomfortable.

Dear Trevor,

Was it hard to be me? It IS hard to be me. The only wisdom I have for you is that I think it’s hard for each person to be themselves. As you get older, you get more comfortable being uncomfortable.

There’s another guy who lives up here that goes by the name of Dr. Jones. He’s not sure if that’s his real name, but he thinks it is. He was either a psychologist or a psychiatrist when he was where you are. He can’t remember which and he can’t remember the difference between the two. In fact, if you could look that up and let me know, I could pass the information on to him. I bet old Jones would appreciate it.

Anyway, Dr. Jones does occasionally remember some really specific things about his area of expertise. A while ago, he was telling me about this idea of his—that we’re all at the center of our own universes. And that feeling of being the center—of having the whole of existence focused on us—is strongest during adolescence, because that’s when we’re most focused on our identity.

Stick with me here.

Jones said that right about at your age, two feelings occur. The first one he called “imaginary audience.” That is the feeling that everyone you know is intimately interested in just about everything you do. This is why when I was a teenager, I used to get so upset when I got a zit, because I thought that the whole world noticed. Nobody did. Why? Because each person is so focused on their own faces that they rarely notice flaws in others.

The other idea is what Jones called “imaginary fable,” which is that no one—not even any of these people interested in your zits—ever understand you. No one does. They don’t know what you’re going through. How could your parents or teachers understand you? They’re so old, right?

I don’t mean to get in the least bit preachy—what right have I?—but you are not alone in your experiences—in your suffering. Life is hard for everyone. Hell, even this existence I have is hard for everyone up here, including me. Even now I struggle with the stupidest of vanities. So I check my kitchen-shear-chopped hair before I venture out. I sweep off my porch in case of visitors. I check my breath before I visit Sung-Hee at the Laughing Gull and Sung-Hee is just about the manliest, most sexless woman I have ever met.

Even someone as foreign to you as—dare I say it?—your mother, probably understands what you’re going through far more than you would guess. She was a girl once, who worried about what boys thought of her. Once upon a time, a million years ago, she moved to a new school and put up with all the uneasy stares of other kids.

I know your mom tends to try to make everything all right. I know she wants you to always look on the bright side. Believe me, there is more value to that outlook than you may understand right now. But believe me about another thing as well: your mom understands pain. She understands hard times. She understands loneliness.

There was a day there at the end, when I was at my weakest. I’d finished a round of chemo and had come back home. We were in the middle of a conversation. I was talking to your mom about a piece of real estate property we owned—down the dead end road on the end of our street. I was giving her advice on how long to hold it before selling it, when I just nodded off to sleep right in the middle of a sentence. Of course, I don’t remember going to sleep or much at all about the conversation, but I do remember waking up and seeing your mom there. She was bawling. What I mean is she wasn’t just crying. She was racked with sobs, shaking away. Her face was all puffy. Her hands were buried in her hair and she was hanging on by the roots.

When she noticed me awake, she quickly wiped her face with a sopping wet Kleenex, pulled her hair back into place and tried to smile at me. She apologized for crying and asked if she could get me a glass of water or a sandwich.

When I try to remember what your mom looked like, I see her at a dozen different ages. I see her when we first met, when she was still in high school and skinny as a fencepost. I see her in her wedding dress, with the little pillbox hat and the veil that came even with her chin. I see her in a pair of clam diggers down on the beach, with your sister pulling her by the hand as they turned over rocks, looking for families of crabs. And I see her sitting on the side of the bed, sobbing away when she thought I couldn’t hear. I don’t mind the image, because she was feeling so much and now I understand how much feeling matters—how much I miss it. Your mom let it all loose, all alone when she thought no one was watching.

Would you ever open up to your mom, the way you’ve opened up to me in these letters? I never did with my mom, your grandma. And if you did, I have no idea how she’d react. She’d probably want to pray for you.

If she did, you’d survive just fine.

Dad

The boat was called Violence.

Dear Trevor,

Misty Lee is definitely not doing it right. But give her a chance. She’s in seventh grade. She’s a beginner. At least she’s enthusiastic. You should go to school tomorrow. You should kiss her. Kiss her once for me.

Sung-Hee would probably give me free meals for a month if I shared your letters with her. Especially if she knew they covered the subject of French kissing. No one likes a bit of steamy gossip as much as Sung-Hee, and there is so little to gossip about around here, steamy or otherwise.

Before she moved here, Sung-Hee ran a hamburger joint off the Interstate, between Centralia and Rochester. It was basically a drive-up stand and she took orders, flipped burgers and tried to pedal teriyaki to the rednecks. Now she does the same thing, plus waits tables, with lousy fish instead of lousy burgers, but like she says, at least she’s indoors. And there are chairs for the customers instead of just a walk-up counter.

What was it like to die? I don’t know. I don’t think of myself as having died, because nothing stopped. I just moved from one place to another. It felt more like moving—like changing jobs and houses—than it felt like anything even close to dying. Dying sounds so final. I don’t feel like anything final has happened.

Before the move, as I’ll call it, I remember having a couple of rough days at home. Evelyn—your mom–relocated me from our upstairs room down to the bedroom on the main floor. The one right next to the one you shared with Rhett. I was back in the original bedroom your Mom and I shared before we had the second story added to the house. God, I miss that drafty old place. I especially liked that downstairs room, because the windows faced west and I could see the sunset behind the Olympics through most of the spring and summer.

So I’d moved down there, partly because I couldn’t do the stairs anymore and partly so your mom didn’t have to keep walking up and down them all day every time I needed a glass or water or had to pee. I’d been there for a couple of weeks and Dr. Bruell—is he still alive?—finally convinced me I wasn’t going to pull out. Then the pain got so bad that I went from wanting to survive to wanting to die. Pain can be your friend in that way. It can help you come to terms with passing. Pain is your final friend on earth. It’s funny, but now that I’m up here in this foggy land where I feel next to nothing, I miss that pain almost as much as I miss your mom. O to feel something! Anything!

I remember having one really bad night. Your mom had to help me out of bed to go to the bathroom, and with one good grunt I filled the toilet bowl with blood. I flushed it quick so Evelyn wouldn’t see it, but I wasn’t quick enough and she started crying. She cleaned me up and helped me back to the bed. I remember that we laid there together as I struggled to catch my breath. I cussed a couple of times and she asked me to stop. Your mom never could stomach rough language. So I gritted my teeth and said nothing and fell asleep like that.

When I woke up, your mom was gone. The house was gone. I suppose I was gone, because I was at the airport here, walking up the jetway toward the terminal as if I’d just gotten off a plane. I had no luggage and I was wearing the same clothes I’m wearing right now. A white, short-sleeve dress shirt from JC Penney, a pair of dark brown slacks, dark brown dress socks, brown shoes and brown belt. I don’t know where the clothes came from and don’t know how I got from my bed to the jetway, but there you have it. Maybe it was magical or maybe I just don’t remember.

I followed the crowd down to a shuttle bus that took us just a few hundred yards to a train platform, where we boarded the train. I got on the train with everyone else. All the other passengers looked just as confused as I did, except for the Crazies. There were probably 25 of us on that train and five of those were Crazies. Of course, I didn’t think of them that way at the time. They looked as calm as they could be and stared out the window as if they were in the most wonderful place imaginable.

The train rode along for about 20 minutes and then stopped here in our little berg. I stepped off and followed the Crazies through town and down to the dock. I figured we went from the plane to the bus to the train, so why not to the boat? But when I saw the boat, I stopped.

It was the most rundown fishing boat you’ve ever seen. It sat low in the water and leaned so far to one side that sea water actually came over the starboard rail. Its nets were torn and patched and torn and patched again. The surfaces that weren’t covered in seaweed or barnacles or gear were all stained with blood. There was blood on the bow hatch and blood on the bridge and blood on the windshield and blood along the portside rail.

I read the name dug into the bow. It was called Violence. And there was no way in hell I was getting onboard.

I wandered in a bit of a daze into the Laughing Gull and Sung-Hee set me down and gave me a cup of her miserable coffee which was as bad then as it is now. Not bad enough to be interesting, but not good enough to be enjoyable. I drank a cup and asked her about the boat.

“No one knows nothing about the boat,” she said. “The lady captain can’t or won’t talk—not a word—and none of them passengers ever come back. I’ve been here for—oh, I don’t know how long, but I never met no one who knows nothing about the boat.”

“What about those people lined up to get on board?” I asked her, pointing to the five people who I’d come with on the train.

“Ya can’t trust what them people say,” Sung-Hee said. “They’re Crazies. That’s what we call ‘em. Look at the way they stare at the boat, as if was beautiful.”

Sung-Hee was right. I finished my coffee and wandered back out to the dock. The Crazies looked like they were waiting to get onboard a cruise ship. They cooed and pointed and stared, with their mouths hanging open and hungry.

“Look at the blood,” said the woman closest to me, with a voice full of wonder. “Look at all the beautiful blood.” She was an older black woman, dressed for church or for a fancy night out. She had on a bright red dress and red hat, finished with a pink veil that would have hung over her eyes, but she kept flipping the veil up so she could see unobstructed.

“Where’s the boat go?” I asked.

The woman looked at me with a startled smile, as if a toddler had asked her how breathing works. My question was too basic for her. She understood the boat at such an elementary level that she’d never had to articulate its purpose or its destination.

“Why child,” she said, in a very gentle voice. “It goes onward.”

“Onward where?” I asked. When she realized that I really didn’t know, her joy-filled face broke. A tear formed quickly and ran down her cheek.

“You poor, ignorant creature. I’m sorry,” she said. “I am so, so sorry.”

But as soon as she turned her head back toward the boat, her joy returned and she forgot about me. Tears of joy overwhelmed the other lone tear and washed it off her chin.

I haven’t thought about that day or that first meeting for a long time. Now the coming and going of the train and boat seem so much like the regular rhythm of this place that I don’t consider them much. They come out of the fog and return into it. The fog remains, like me.

Write again, please. I depend on your letters now.

Dad