“Write A Letter To Your Mother About Your Longest Winter”

If writing had any real power, I could write my mother a letter that said, no second heart surgery because the first was enough. The taste of wax on my tongue as I sent it would keep her out of the hospital room. I could tell her please go outside, it is not enough to simply sit by the window and look at the people below. The world is for you to enjoy too. I could ask her what the estate sales were like in New York, and it would spur her to go to one, just like when I was little. She would return to her apartment with cracking leather shoes, and chipped plates that said Handpainted in Spain on the back, and my letter would start a snowball that pushed her across the ocean and into the June warmth of Barcelona.

I would add extra stamps to send my letters to her summer apartment, and we would no longer feel the biting cold on our cheeks from taking too-long walks at night to avoid another one of my father and sister’s fights, ones that probably made her heart start hurting in the first place. We could write haha’s with ink that wouldn’t run, and say it was never quite as bad as we made it out to be, how funny that we can laugh about it now. She would end her letter to me with remember to eat, I love you! and I would put the envelope down and walk to the store for the first time in months because her writing would have power too. I would make chili with four different types of beans, and cornbread from the box like she would before her doctors told her it wasn’t good for her health to eat like that. We could make each other happier with our matching handwriting, and we could draw a line through loneliness and be together in the same stroke.

This piece of flash fiction uses the first line of Chen Chen’s “Write A Letter To Your Mother About Your Longest Winter”