Wyethtown

Dear Miles in Charge,

I am full of nothing today but still feel like writing to you. There’s something about having a close but distant interlocutor that is incredibly reassuring. Do you find that? I wonder sometimes how these letters feel to you.

If you were here, which I wish you were, I would just have to turn my head and out the insides would come—almost the same as thinking—that seemless and unselfconscious. Or I’d stand in our metallic doorway and holler at you out in the field like some kind of futuristic housewife landed on the moon.

Speaking of, I was thinking of rigging up a tin can telephone between the tree house and the trailer. We could chatter to each other while still maintaining the illusion of distance. I installed a telescope up there and would have in the balloon. All of this so that we can wave at each other in various forms. Sometimes that’s all this all feels like, waving. Me to you, you to me, me to myself, me to the world. Sometimes I use both arms and that’s when you know I really want attention. The tin can telephone though, what do you think? Too much?

I feel things edging towards overblown. Our lives fairly glow with sepia tones and seventies color saturation. The rainbow pattern of the balloon against the sticky blue sky against the blonde fields abutting the green and purple hills and then the spark of the Airstream glinting like some kind of distress signal. Sometimes I can feel the creep of affected vignetting closing in around camp. Who’s escapist fantasy are we living in? It used to be yours and mine but now I’m not even sure the tin can telephone idea was mine.

Everything’s so good, I wonder when the bitch slap will come. There was menace in things, in small ways and maybe we cultivated it to make life interesting but now that the menace is gone and the colors just shine instead of hiding out under dullness, I feel more afraid that something is going to give or worse, that it won’t and I will have become something pretty yet quirky but all around benign.

Anyway, I don’t know what brought on the melancholy but I’m sure it will brushed aside by something totally ridiculous tomorrow.

Tell me about Virginia. I have no sense of it whatsoever. And after that, call me on the real telephone, none of this tin can bullshit. I want to chatter at you.

Love,

Sandy

***

Dear Miles,

Please don’t worry. I’m sorry. I’m fine. Everything’s okay.

The balloon’s completely cached. Donezo. Darger is probably dead somewhere. He flew off, dragging his leash after the chamber exploded and he didn’t look good.

Danzig may never get over seeing his mother nearly catch fire and fall through the air. I had to bail out just before the crash.

You know how I am when I listen to metal when I’m driving. I put the pedal to it. I was dropping sand bags like cartoon sacks of cash over the hillside. I must’ve looked like a banshee up there.

First off, I shouldn’t’ve installed that radio in the basket. I was rocking out to White Zombie, getting way too excited. I wasn’t paying attention. Big surprise. Details.

I wasn’t watching the flame.

Then I go and do this. You know how I’ve always wanted these things, how I had to work hard to bring them out of my head and into the world: starting with the airstream, then the land, and Darger, the little D’s and lately the balloon. I learned how to be a grownup so I could have what I want.

Today I realized how much I still live in my head and how actually dangerous that can be. My daydreams affect more than just me now. They cause accidents. My bird is gone. My kid can’t sleep.

It was a beautiful day. The wind picked up from the west and I figured it would be a good day to take her up.


Love,

Sandy