Dear Lura,

I think of calling you. Now that I see this picture, I see your face, only you are the one in the smart vintage hat, red on your short hair, you are sitting in the chair in a old time room with old time clothes and it is you that has reached for the phone, to call your sister, to tell me you are all right, that you love me, that it's not my fault. I wrote those words and paused because I thought I'd erase them but now I don't know. Maybe those words came out because I wanted them to. I'll have to think on this.

In my mind you are in your 20's, like you were of course the last time I saw you. It is hard to force my mind to even imagine you as a woman in your 30's, because my mind is as selfish and self centered and anyone's, and acts as if things went on without my witness, they surely did not go on at all. When I know you did. Amalia told me you are all right, at least you were, the last time she talked to you. Living, is the point.

I watched Into the Wild with my family and it hurt hard, it hurt in the pulp red center of my chest, in my veins, in the closing up of my throat. Do your folks know where you are? the kind hippie asked the young man. A call inside of me was twisted- ask him if his sister knows? What about the sister? In the movie it is the sister's voice telling her family's story, just like it is my own that will tell ours, one day. The sister tells the story of the parents and the brother who ran away and they found his car and that is all for two years until they found his body in a van and he had died without ever touching them again. The sister tells the story in a calm and intelligent voice, a voice that sounds as deeply resigned as anything I can think of. I understand this because I can't feel you like I should because it hurts too much. I can't feel you like I should because it hurts to endlessly and engulfingly. My baby sister. Half the time when I write to you I end up drowning in sorries. I just want to say I'm sorry over and over and over until somehow that incantation brings you back. When I'm not sure what I even mean. I'm sorry he hurt you that badly, that long. I'm sorry sometimes I didn't let you sleep in my bed. Jesus I'm sorry I ran away high and fucked up and left you in that house. I AM SORRY

I am sorry I was angry and scream freckled and loud spoken and got left alone more. I wish it had been me.

I'm sorry that you are a grown woman with grown woman desires and thoughts and loves and cares and confusions and fears and discoveries and I don't know a single one. A single one.

Every time I think of you you get younger and then I am with you until finally we are always this way: I am four and my hair is white and you are two and your hair is white and we are tan and white haired and blue eyed and beautiful and fat bellied and we love our fire haired mother very much and we love each other and we love our father. This is the only time we will. But we love each other in that completely oblivious way of love since birth, a thing you take no notice of, like an arm, until it is cut off.

I miss you.

I miss you.

I miss you.