The Girl Who Loved Boyan Slat

We’re driving the largest cleanup in history. . . . We let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.
—Boyan Slat

Dear Boyan Slat,

Honestly, I thought it was beautiful how after the rain drenched everything, the creeks rummaged through the holler, coaxing out all the plastic milk jugs and Clorox bottles and grocery bags. Afterward, that stuff hung in the trees at the waterline, like memories of days in people’s lives—days that would otherwise have been lost in the murky depths of time.

Listen to me. The murky depths of time.

Maybe this has something to do with my being born in a town that was flooded over when they built the dam. We don’t live there anymore, obviously. We moved to Rowan County when I was seven. But being born in a submerged town is something like being born with a caul, as far as I can tell. You see things through a glass, darkly. Though a caul is supposed to be lucky, and Mr. Slat, I’m about as unlucky as a cake in the rain. Referring to a song my father loved in the version by the awful and ancient Ray Conniff Singers. And that brings me to the Tupperware cake-storage container my mother purchased when their love failed. My first experience of plastic as grace. Salvation. I shouldn’t be leading with this. It certainly isn’t my best foot forward in a letter to a guy who famously wants to clean up the world’s overabundance of ocean-bound plastic. It’s an honest foot though.

Also, there was the plastic glow-in-the-dark cross I kept in a shoebox in the closet after a week at Vacation Bible School. All of this in a family that started out believing in wooden toys and strictly cotton underpants.

Are you surprised that I’m writing all the way from America? I’m sending it in an actual letter in hopes you won’t ignore it as shitposting. And that’s a maybe. Maybe I’m sending it.

I’ve gotten past the religious stuff—nothing a summer of preachy work in the Appalachian hollers wouldn’t cure me of. It was supposed to be a soul-winning thing—sharing the gospel with the underprivileged back in Perry County—but instead it was a graphic illustration that what seemed true for one little body just really had nothing to do with lots of other people, a Cinderella shoebox cross that didn’t fit. People there had nothing and saw lots of bad shit happen, shit I really hadn’t taken into account, and even had their own ideas about happiness and beauty. But the plastic endured, as well you know it does! And still with a surreptitious glow that tells me I haven’t seen the end of it.

Dear Boyan Slat,

Today’s letter is mostly a confession. Back from my morning run, I’m sitting out under the sweet-gum tree in the yard of our house, and it’s been two days since Aldo Leopold died. We buried him in a box and—don’t ask me why—put him in a plastic bag inside. More hygienic, I guess. Also, there’s a sweat bee on my arm. (Aldo was a cat, by the way.) I’m eating yogurt to make myself feel better, the blended kind that comes in plastic mini-cups. I’ve eaten four of the six in the pack—and with a plastic spoon. I’d ask if you thought less of me, but I know you don’t think of me at all, or didn’t, at least, until you maybe got my last letter and maybe read it. I know you’re a busy person.

Sitting here, I’m surrounded by creeping Charlie and weedy violets that have taken over the lawn. In the house, there’s a three-layer Lady Baltimore cake in my mother’s Tupperware container. She made it as consolation for Aldo’s passing. In conclusion, death is the mother of plastic. But so is infidelity, I guess.

It was after my father left that my mother and I converted: a plastic slide in the yard, plastic straws in plastic orange-juice bottles, and, for my birthday, balloons made of Mylar (isn’t that plastic too?) spelling out the happiness she wished for me—the very happiness they had destroyed. I suppose you could say I am, somehow, though not profoundly, unhappy.

I’m not asking for absolution. I now believe that we live with the consequences of our actions. The same way my mother had to live with the red hair she got out of a bottle, even though it made her look like a failed teenager or the last stand of a dying coral reef. I think she hated it too, but she wore it first as an act of defiance, since my father had loved her natural dirty-blond, and later as proof that she knew what she was doing. Why are psychologists always the last to see what’s going on in their own heads? I should talk though.

I’m nineteen and working part-time at the Piggly Wiggly, still living at home with my mother. In my own defense, I’m thinking about community college next year. Or something. Somebody at the high school saw me out running the other day and now they’ve asked me to coach the girls’ track team. LOL. My only excuse not to is that I’m completely unqualified.

All of this to say, I imagine you somewhere out in the middle of the ocean with your team, waiting for the rain to wash these little blueberry Dannons down the gully and into the river and across half a continent to your magnificent filtration net. Maybe you would know me then—a loser with modest aspirations to change.

Dear Boyan (okay if I call you Boyan?),

I guess my mother and I were only looking for eternal life. Or, short of that, extended expiration dates. I sucked air through a plastic snorkel the first time I went underwater at the dam at Buckhorn Lake and I wore plastic goggles when I swam with my cousins at Beaufort, South Carolina. I can’t deny that plastic is the comfort of my generation—its puffy constellations of play equipment, the promise of health in bottled water, the handy food-storage bags full of Goldfish or Cheerios we grew up on, the makeup compacts that were the foundation of our first loves. Even the Lycra in my leggings. Plastic is newness and fun. It’s freshness and flexibility. Radical persistence. Dashboards and bird feeders and cafeteria trays and sleds. Sunglasses and floaties. Now I feel a little like an addict, looking to be free of the necessary substance.

Mr. Slat:

I don’t get far without it. I’m frantic in the kitchen, waving a lettuce leaf. Or at Piggly Wiggly, I get dirty looks from my fellow cashiers when my radishes dribble down the belt, making mud with the soil from loose mushrooms. And that’s just me trying to put together a simple salad for my mom and me without causing the demise of the planet.

But this isn’t about me at all. Admittedly, I am a person who used to love dumps and junkyards. To see so much that was cast-off and broken—the torn vinyl upholstery of the seats of old station wagons. All that evidence of human hopes gone bust. It gave me the feeling of nothing left to lose.

No, this is about how I imagine you, drifting over the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, at just twenty or twenty-two, having thrown over your education to try to fix the thing you hated about the world. And beneath you, that mass of plastic belches and churns, eighty-seven tons of it like a melting pot of the world’s efficiency and immediate gratification. It’s this vision of you that is making me love the possibilities of my new life as a born-again former plastics queen.

So how did you come to believe you could do shit on such an enormous scale while I’m here laying plastic geraniums on the grave of my ideals? I don’t want this to come out wrong, but it seems so big, what you’re up to, it’s almost spiritual. The only other things I can think of that big are nuclear disaster, Islam, and Christianity.

And, to continue in the vein of honesty, I’m eaten up with disgust at my failures. Also, I’m seeing someone. He’s working toward management at a company in Louisville that makes hangers for lingerie, etc. Do those things get recycled at all? If I leave them at the store, does that make me an activist?

I mean, we’re not serious, him and me. Or not committed in the ultimate sense. He’s a good person, really. And look who’s talking! I use those little eye-drop vials about ten times a day—more on a bad day—and dental picks once in the morning and once before bed. It all seemed fine until I read about you in National Geographic and also started thinking about sea turtles. I didn’t feel lost until then. Do you think I’m still looking for a savior? Please don’t answer.

Dear Boyan,

I’m leaving him, though no, we weren’t living together. I put my belonings in a cloth bag meant for laundry. I’ve been brushing my teeth with coconut oil and charcoal on a bamboo stick, and I’m coming your way. I’ve stopped wearing lingerie on account of how it’s displayed. So my boobs are chafing against my shirt, and my tush is on the loose. I’m only two miles from home at present. Don’t look for me anytime soon. I’m at the first station of that plastic cross, which in this case is the Piggly Wiggly on State Route 189—the one where I work.

As you probably know, the impeachment hearings are on the horizon here in America—one more reminder we shouldn’t put our faith in men. And still, based off the seductive dream of you on the floating island of refuse, looking like Lord of the Rings with your Bilbo Baggins face and your honest eyes, I wonder if maybe I still haven’t learned.

I haven’t exactly planned things out for the Piggly Wiggly “action,” so I just kind of approach people at the entrance, saying things like, “Hey, forget your reusable bag?” or “Did you see they found a whale with two hundred pounds of plastic in its stomach?” Most people say they didn’t. “Reusable bags save the planet. Where are yours?” When I get tired of the dirty looks and the apologetic looks and tired of feeling like the book of Jonah there in the parking lot, I go inside and ask to talk to my manager. I ask him to donate reusable bags, which I will be happy to hand out. Get this, Boyan: He says, “Milly, the plastic ones are reusable. People use them for cat litter and dog poop.” (I don’t help him by adding “or even burying pets.”) He says people won’t use special bags just because you give them away. The worst part was I couldn’t argue with him. So I just left. Tail between my proverbial legs. I’m sure you would have known what to say to that, but I sure as hell did not.

Boyan, the distance between you and me is the distance between the fire alarm (which merely goes off ) and the guy with the hose. The distance between the tail of the dog and genius. It’s like I’m still hungover—ready to move on but with a monster headache and a thirst only a Coke would quench. I’m dying for a Coke, but I can’t buy one because they only come in plastic bottles here. Where I live—and maybe you too—the world is still bingeing, but I’m the morning after.

My father, before he left, said he hoped my stubbornness would be useful one day. He was an interesting person, though not to my mother of Tupperware fame. He was the one who named our cat Aldo Leopold and in addition to liking the ancient, sappy Ray Conniff Singers and “MacArthur Park,” he thought a lot about trees and lakes. He never liked the lakes of the South—lakes formed by dams. Lakes where people drank a lot on pontoon boats and went frogging at night with searchlights. He preferred ones cut by glaciers and surrounded by birch trees and smelling of pine. Those were the lakes he’d known in his childhood up north. For you I pine. For you I balsam. I think he wrote that to my mother once when they were young. That was his thing. He was all about wood. Whereas I—well, no need to recap.

Because I’m not ready to go home yet, after my lame action at Piggly Wiggly, I get on the Trailways bus that happens to be parked out near the highway and cop a ticket to Louisville. It’s no secret that it’s hard to be an activist in your hometown. Not that I am one.

So I’m sitting in the front seat, where I’ll have the biggest chance of flying through the windshield if we’re in a head-on with a tractor trailer, and I lean back and close my eyes and I picture your face. I picture your hands on the day’s haul of plastics that look like a ghastly creature up from the deep. And I’m starting to see it’s your optimism I’m a little in love with. Your lack of respect for the magnitude of the disaster. I mean, who, in God’s holy name, believes he can clean up the planet—at least the oceans? Personally, I don’t know the difference between eighty-seven tons of plastic and eighty-seven thousand tons. What I do know is that your face looks innocent, and your journey is epic.

Oh no. So it turns out there’s a little engine fire toward the back of the bus, and we all pile out onto the shoulder of the highway and have to hike to the next town, a mile down the road. They can’t tell us when they’ll have a replacement bus, but it will be at least two hours, because that’s how far we are from Louisville. I’m also remembering that I’m supposed to work in the morning.

At the mini-mart/diner/gas station, I’m handling the pro-life books and the antlered refrigerator magnets nearest the side window when this guy who’s been sitting in a booth with his buddies gets up and walks over and asks do I need help. I’m not sure how he means, but then again, it doesn’t matter. The answer is no.

“Good deal,” he says. “Righty-O.” He, too, begins to seem very interested in the magnets. “How about a ride?” he says. “It’s a lot faster in my rig than on the bus. Especially the one that’s broken down. Where you headed?”

“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” I tell him. I may as well be headed there as to Louisville, which was just a whim anyhow.

“Is that over near Paducah?”

I laugh. I’m thinking For all you know.

And then, for reasons I still fail to understand, I look at the clock, which gives us an hour and a half to wait, probably longer, and before I really know how, I’m climbing into the cab of his truck. You can’t complain there are no knights in shining armor if you don’t even give them a chance, right?

Dear Boyan,

It seemed to me as I stood alone at the roadside, seventeen miles from the nearest town, that I should have known I was not going to reach you. The guy’s hand on my leg while he jerked off at the wheel had left me feeling scathed. If that’s a word. His truck was carrying a load of molded plastic swimming pools. That was the only funny part. And this thing I have for heroes . . . Maybe I have a man problem as much or even worse than I have a plastics addiction. After I bit him and he finally stopped to let me out, I crossed the highway and walked back along the weedy median in the direction of town as it started to rain.

The first guy I ever slept with, it was almost platonic. Well, I should say something old-fashioned like “chaste.” His name was Jimmy Ray, and he talked me into taking my shirt off and letting him stay with me in my single bed in the staff quarters at the Methodist Children’s Home over in Perry County where I was trying to win souls. We kissed a lot and held each other and I fell asleep on his big padded chest—the two of us shirtless in the sweltering Kentucky heat. I was still living a life of holiness then, and he always stopped when I said we needed to. All the nights after that, I’d climb the outdoor stairs of the house where he lived with his granny—she fast asleep down below—and I’d stay with him in that wide bed in the big upstairs room. I’d sleep beside him. It was a lot for me and enough, it seemed, for him, just lying there. Especially since he already had a girlfriend in Berea. I always left before daylight.

But here’s the thing, Boyan. Jimmy Ray was the pride of the town. A good boy who’d gone off to college at Berea, then come back home to live with his granny. He spent his days taking the juvenile delinquents at the Methodist Children’s Home, where I worked, down to swim in the lake. Not many kids from Perry County ever went away, and when they did, they rarely came back.

He worked in the mines too, and I watched him down at the lake some evenings, lathering up and plunging into the blackened suds with the other men of the town after his shift. I don’t know what made him such a local hero. Maybe just that he knew something of the developed world and still chose that poor, beautiful shithole to live in.

Dear B. S.,

It’s Tuesday. Somewhat miraculously, I’m home again. Am I lying to myself? My mother (a psychologist, you may remember) is sure that I am. “What’s with the long face?” she says. She is hosing off Aldo’s plastic geraniums. This would make me laugh if I didn’t believe she posed a serious planetary threat.

“Where to begin?” I say.

It’s raining, Boyan, and all the vast space between me and where you are is opening up again. The hollers and the mountains are burping their plastic trash from Paducah to Pikeville and all the way to New Orleans. The billboards are hollering salvation, but at this point I long only for the oblivious passive-aggressions of the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. I have to admit, I’m losing faith. I want to not need a hero. Even a boy-hero. You are still a boy, really. But this is my hymn to sloppy ideals and ill-conceived plans.

“You heard about the pandemic?” my mother asks.

“Uh—no?”

“Then what?” She offers me an Adirondack chair—resin, not wood—and settles into one herself. She drops the hose at our feet. “They’re calling for flash floods tonight,” she says, looking at the dark sky to the south. “Leftovers from the hurricane coming up the coast.”

She probably thought I would let loose too, but I withheld. She couldn’t fix this. Suddenly, I got what I wouldn’t even call an idea. It was more like an urge that I interpreted as an inspiration.

After my mom went to bed, the rain kept up, battering the grass and forming a gully wash that turned her chair on its side and moved it along the yard until a leg caught on something. I watched it from the dining-room window. The rain felt like a big sigh. Or a shower at the end of a long day.

I started with the smaller items—the plastic pots she’d left on the stoop after planting the real geraniums, the key chains and refrigerator magnets with messages of hope or someone else’s vacation highlights. I wanted the flood to come. I wanted the action to be big. I threw it all out into the gully wash and watched it trip and stutter down the lawn toward the McNaughtons’ place. As the gully widened and got deeper, I threw in the melamine dinner plates—the sunflower ones I’d gathered from the kitchen—along with the trash bags and sandwich bags. It felt good to purge that house of its plastic legacy and of all the false satisfactions it had brought my mother and me.

I love my mother, I do. But I carried out the Tupperware cake-storage container too. I opened the lid and offered what was left of the Lady Baltimore cake to the rain. It was only half-gone, since I’d been away for most of a day. The cover floated off on a rivulet while I watched the cake shed its frosting and turn into a sponge, then splooge on its Tupperware base.

Was this the way to a better world? In retrospect, I have to say no. But it seemed so as I hauled up the Legos and the baby dolls from the basement. Then I put out the shower curtain and the desk lamp and the electric column fan and a bunch of other stuff, as if setting up a yard sale. A few inches of rain takes the whole lot! And because a deluge is no time for delusions, I took the unsent letters to you, rolled them up, and released them in plastic water bottles. Signed, Milly.

In the wee hours of my purge, my mother came out.

“What in the name of God?” she cried, her bottle-dyed hair glowing an alarmist red under the backyard spotlight she’d turned on before dashing through the screen door in her nightie. I couldn’t see her face, but I didn’t need to. The yard was already flooding, and the cake holder swirled around the flagpole like an insurrection. I saw a computer keyboard and a mega-size liquid-Tide jug batter my mother’s shins when she turned toward me. We don’t use Tide, so I knew some stuff was coming down from the Brausers’ place. There was something very beautiful about it, more direct than a letter, these artifacts en route to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And just as I thought that, I realized a terrible thing: It was all headed to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of the watershed. Stuff washed from here to the Ohio River and then out to the Gulf. Not to your giant filters. Not to you at all, Boyan. “Come back!” I shouted to my mother.

“What have you done?” she screamed.

“I’m facing up to the truth!” I cried. Because it was a lie, indeed, all of that plastic. “Maybe it’s time for you to do the same! It feels almost Biblical, doesn’t it?” Angry and a little crazed, I added, “This is my letter to the world!” Emily Dickinson, who I hadn’t thought of since the sixth grade, sounded good just then. But almost as soon as I said it, I was sorry. Because it was then that my mother lost her footing.

In trying to fetch the Tupperware, which was caught in the forsythia at the bottom of the yard, she had headed downstream. And as I plowed toward her through water up past my knees and all that floating debris, she fell.

This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me. In the beginning there were no words. There were no letters. Just things happening. Acts of God, or whatever. In the beginning, Boyan Slat, you were just a boy diving in the crystal blue-green Aegean in Greece and bummed to find so much plastic. Trash at the bottom of everything. It all came down to you. You were only seventeen when you dropped out of the university to build your magnificent filtration system, predicting that within five years you could clean up 50 percent of the plastic trash in the ocean. Peace out, Boyan!

I admit I always thought the world at the bottom of the lake was paradise. Our drowned town. Maybe it was dirty and full of failures, its own dead end. Maybe what I did was about wanting to go back. And since I’m all about the truth right now, here’s a tidbit: Boyan Slat, you never wrote to me either. Maybe you couldn’t. I don’t know.

I don’t want to make a big deal of it, how I had to rescue my mother. Because she got kind of banged up last night, and it was after two in the morning when I helped her limp upstairs, her arm around my neck.

The water had gone down by the time I got up this morning, and all our stuff was gone. Our forsythias and our whole lawn are now decorated generously with the neighbors’ plastic.

My mother calls out to me in the yard, where I am checking things for the recycling symbol. “Where is the coffee maker?”

For a long, uncomfortable moment, I find I can’t speak. She throws up her hands.

“I’ll take you out for coffee,” I say. “We’ll get chocolate croissants at Butterfingers.”

My mother and I both went under for a few seconds last night. That’s right. I fell too, trying to rescue her, and I felt the water swirl around me like Dooms-day around the knees of the poor, sad, deluded ones.

“What you did was pretty stupid,” my mother says. “And a little deranged. What was your point? Are you angry with me and your father for splitting up?”

Jesus, Boyan. She still doesn’t get it. “Maybe,” I say.

Dear Boyan,

What I loved most about religion—and yes, faith—was 1) the singing, and 2) the unguarded optimism, which came through in the singing. Maybe also having a man in charge. 3) My Jesus, I love thee; I know thou art mine. For thee, all the glories of sin I resign. I love thee for wearing the thorn on thy brow. If ever I loved thee . . . By this point, Boyan, I might just as well be singing about you—sole hope for the planet’s redemption. If ever I loved thee, tis now. Tis now.

I’m supposedly working on registration for summer courses at Morehead State. But instead, I’m sitting in the living room surfing the five channels you get on TV with no cable. On one is local news about a mother who murdered her two toddlers. I flip to the national news, where refugees are washing ashore on a Greek island, and piles of rubber dinghies and life vests are destroying the landscape. Rubber isn’t plastic, is it? I mean, I think it’s better. Natural. But still, disposal is a problem. Then back to local coverage on the planned ethane-cracker plant along the Ohio River. The reporter says it’s part of the growing vision for an Appalachian Plastics Hub. The region will lead the country in the manufacture of plastic pellets, to be used in the manufacture of what I can’t bear to hear, so I turn the TV off.

To tell you the truth, I thought it would always be like it was with Jimmy Ray. But I found out later you couldn’t just trust people and expect . . . I don’t know. That you could control what happened. Bad things happened, they did.

To me. And whose fault was that? I think probably mine. The fault of the girl who still believed, only not enough.

After the summer I worked at the Children’s Home on my mission stint, things went not just a little bit haywire. The director made advances toward a seventeen-year-old girl to whom he’d been like a father. The son of the preacher over in Chavies shocked everyone by wanting a sex-change operation. Also, Twyla Combs’s father, Jimmy Ray’s next-door neighbor, shot himself in the head out on the front stoop because the miners were out of work. I heard that Jimmy Ray went to work for management at one of the mines. Management wasn’t too popular.

Boyan, I am, apparently, nothing like you. Everything I try to do confirms that I’m an impulsive idealist who will not change the world.

Maybe I should stop trying before somebody really gets hurt.

Dear Boyan,

I’ve been in my room for a couple of days now and I find no reason to leave. Can’t help it, after my epic fail. Did you ever read the Odyssey? I have it here on my bookshelf from sophomore year. In a way, it’s just about a series of bad calculations—a world stacking up to a homecoming and a violent conclusion. Also about lopsided relationships and, of course, heroism. The parts I like best are when Odysseus tells his tales to Alcinous, the Phaeacian king, probably exaggerating but moving everybody to tears anyhow. The seeds of what happens next are always there in the story, in what happened before. Nausicaa has found the hero on the beach and secreted him away. She can’t keep him there, and she can’t really ride on his shirttails, but she is part of the story. She finds him broken and shows him a little love. Myth is only mythic when it travels from mouth to ear, connecting people across a treacherous geography. It’s fed by the telling.

I never had a sword, or diving gear, or even a hearth. And for sure nobody like you sitting around listening to me ramble.

I’m not done with this letter, but I have to get my lazy ass over to the high school, where I’m coaching the girls’ track team. Did I mention that I’ve never competed in a track event? It’s a good thing I don’t get paid. I’ve watched a few YouTube videos to see how it’s done—hurdles, sprints, the mile. Dear God, I’m ridiculous. And the team. They are dreadfully bad. I pray for rain—heavy rain—when we have the meet over in Hazard. My prayers will probably go unanswered, and the girls will lose every event, but at least I’m not abusing them as I suspect their former coach was.

Boyan,

Yesterday, when I get home, my mother stops me in the kitchen and says, “Who’s Boyan Slat and do I get to meet him?”

I say, “So you’ve been in my room?”

She says she was putting away the clothes she washed for me, thank you very much, and she couldn’t help seeing what was on my laptop, which I had left open. She sits down at the table, looking exhausted.

“I don’t even send them anymore,” I say. “I don’t know why I keep writing them.”

“You know, your father wanted to write. To be a writer. But instead, he was an engineer. You know he worked on the dam that flooded our town?”

“He wouldn’t do that,” I say.

“He did. It was his job. Army Corps of Engineers. He’d do that during the day and then come home and read Aldo Leopold and John Muir and Rachel Carson at night.”

“Isn’t that what you call cognitive impairment?”

“Dissonance. Cognitive dissonance.”

“So he had, like, zero impact on the environment, except for that?”

“You’re just like him. Only the opposite. You go around trying to engineer solutions—but what’s really happening are the words. You actually write. Your father never did. And I’m glad you weren’t involved in building the dam, after your little demonstration last week,” she says, smiling and wiping a pile of coffee-cake crumbs into her hand, then getting up to dump them.

I give her a look.

“I’m just saying,” she says.

Now I’m thinking about yesterday. Because it was our last track meet and there were no awards to be given out for a series of losses and failures, the girls sent their beloved coach home with a small gift. I’m glad I didn’t open it in front of them. It was a silver pendant, about the size of a quarter, and in engraved script it said Couch.

Maybe my mother was right. I wasn’t so much cut out for action. Though we all need heroes. In some weird way, maybe I was theirs.

The next day, also weirdly, one of my letters to you turned up in the Eastern Kentucky Herald. Apparently, the bottle I’d put it in floated down and landed in a flowerpot at Gill Nasaka’s house, and he works in the print room, but he took it to the editor, who printed it with the columns. Then two other people found messages in bottles downstream from here and took them to the paper.

They’re looking for this “Milly,” the writer. Should I turn myself in? I mean, I guess I don’t know why I wouldn’t. Or what they would want from me. If you put a message in a bottle and someone gets it, then do you owe them the courtesy of not giving up on saving the planet?

I found some marigold seeds in the basement, and I’m going to plant them on Aldo Leopold’s grave, since his plastic geraniums washed away. I’ll just see if the seeds are still good. And it’s been a long time since I wrote my father. This is probably my last letter to you, Boyan—if it even is a letter.

I don’t believe, anymore, in being born again. I think that’s what people do when they’re afraid or they desperately need another chance. Still, it’s not naive to think I am capable of good. Or that there is good in the world. You have given me permission to think so. And it seems that even my sorry, misdirected, impulsive action might one day lead to good. I’m not sure what I was looking for this whole time, Boyan. I’m not stalking you, or worshipping you, or wooing you. Though I admit the letters were kind of personal, there’s something epic in my heart, and I’m just trying to let it play.

Read more from Issue 21.2.