Thirteen. I hope you got my letters

DEAR ARI,

I hope you got my letters. Okay, that’s a disingenuous start. Of course you got my letters. I’m not going to analyze why you haven’t written back. Okay, that’s not totally true. I have analyzed why there’s no letter waiting for me when I get back from swimming. I won’t waste good paper on theories that I come up with when I can’t sleep at night. This is the deal, Ari, I’m not going to get on your case about writing back. I promise. If I want to write you, then I’ll write to you. And if you don’t want to write to me, you don’t have to. You have to be who you are. And I have to be who I am. That’s the way it is. And anyway, I usually did most of the talking.

I have another favorite thing to do besides riding the El: going to the Art Institute of Chicago. Wow, Ari. You should see the art in that place. It’s amazing. I wish you were here and we could see all this art together. You’d go nuts. I swear you would. All kinds of art, contemporary and not-so-contemporary and, well, I could go and on, but I won’t. Do you like Andy Warhol?

There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart.

But Nighthawks isn’t my favorite painting. Not by a long shot. Did I ever tell you what my favorite painting is? It’s The Raft of the Medusa by Gé ricault. There’s a whole story behind that painting. It’s based on a true story about a shipwreck and it made Gé ricault famous. See the thing about artists is that they tell stories. I mean, some paintings are like novels.

Someday, I’m going to travel to Paris and go to the Louvre and stare at that painting all day long.

I’ve done the math and I know that by now your casts are off. I know you said that the rule was that we couldn’t talk about the accident. I’m going to say this, Ari. That’s an incredibly inane rule. No reasonable person could be expected to keep that rule—not that I qualify as a reasonable person. So, I hope that your therapy is going well and that you’re normal again. Not that you’re normal. You are definitely not normal.

I miss you. Can I say that? Or is there a rule? You know, it’s interesting that you have so many rules for things. Why is that, Ari? I suppose everyone has rules for things. Maybe we get that from our parents. Parents are rule givers. Maybe they gave us too many rules, Ari. Did you ever think about that?

I think we need to do something about rules.

I’m not going to tell you that I miss you anymore.

Your friend,

Dante