Sophie's Journal — Era 1: The Aftermath (1946–1948) — Entry 4

I tried to write a letter tonight and I could not do it.

I came to Tessa's after dinner and sat at her desk with a sheet of her good stationery in front of me, the cream paper with the deckled edge that she uses for important correspondence, and I wrote "Dear Adam" and then I crossed it out and wrote "Dear Adam" again and then I crossed that out too and sat there looking at the two ruined beginnings and wondered what exactly I thought I was going to say. That I miss you? He knows that, or he should, or maybe he doesn't, because maybe he has already moved on to the next thing the way men move on, which is to say completely and without looking back, and maybe this letter would arrive wherever he is and be an embarrassment, a relic from a summer he's already filed away under things that happened once, and I would rather chew glass than be that girl, the one who writes the letter that makes a man feel sorry for her.

But that is not why I stopped. I stopped because I sat there with the pen in my hand and I realized I did not know what I wanted from him. Did I want him to come back? Come back where? To La Conquistadora, where my parents would make his life impossible? To Albuquerque, where I am a student at the University of New Mexico and he is a cowboy with no job and no prospects, and we would have to figure out how to build a life from scratch, and maybe we could and maybe we couldn't, but the point is that I sat there at the desk and I tried to picture it and I could not see it, I could see him but I could not see us, not in any place that exists in the actual world, only in the country of that summer, which is a country that has closed its borders and will not let anyone back in.

What would I even say? Come get me? I'm at Tessa's house on Las Lomas, number 412, the one with the blue gate and the old cottonwood and the chile ristras hanging by the door, come get me and take me wherever you're going? Where is he going? I don't know. I don't even know where he is. He could be anywhere between here and California, following the rodeo circuit or working on some ranch in Arizona or sleeping in the cab of his truck somewhere in the cold. He could be ten miles from here. He could be a thousand. And I do not know, because when they made him leave they made sure there was no thread left to follow, no address, no forwarding, nothing.

I tore up the letter, both attempts, and put the pieces in the wastebasket, and then I took them out of the wastebasket because Tessa might see them, and I tore them into smaller pieces and put them in the pocket of my robe, and tomorrow I will burn them in the fireplace when Tessa is at the market.

What I wanted to write was this: I wanted to tell him that I am not all right but that I will be, eventually, because I am Degarrin's daughter and we are capable people and we endure things, and I wanted to tell him that the sky here is the same sky and that every time I look at it I think of standing on Indian Rock with the clouds casting shadows across the basin and his hand on my arm and the taste of apple, and I wanted to tell him that I am sorry, which is ridiculous because I did nothing wrong and neither did he, but I am sorry anyway, sorry that the world is arranged the way it is, with mothers who think they know best and fathers who love you too much to fight their wives and class rules that nobody wrote down but everyone enforces, and I am sorry that we were not born into a simpler story.

But I did not write any of that. I wrote "Dear Adam" twice and crossed it out twice and that was all I could manage.

There is a wind tonight. It has been blowing all day, that hard January wind that comes down off the Sandias and pushes the cold right through the walls. Tessa has built a fire and is reading in the front room and has not asked me why I've been sitting at the desk for an hour with nothing to show for it. Tessa is good that way.

I think I will ride tomorrow. The mare has been cooped up and she'll be fresh and ridiculous and I'll have to work just to keep her under me, and that sounds like exactly the right thing, to have to work at something, to have to pay attention to something that is not this, to be a body on a horse in the cold air with nothing in my head but the next stride and the next and the next.

That is all for tonight. I have nothing else to say and everything else to say and this book is too small for any of it.