Dear Will
Dear Healthy Will,
I think if I make it through this sane, I’ll remember this as a dumbass idea. I don’t even really know where to start. I feel like shit, I guess. Woke up this morning and there was blood everywhere, and my face felt like it was melting off like wax. I don’t even know why I’m writing this down. Something like this—you’d better remember what it was like. Don’t make me live through it more than once.
I don’t really know what else to say, so I guess I’ll end here today.
Stay healthy.
Will
He put the pen down. It was a little composition notebook, black and white, unused, one his mom had dug out of some forgotten pile in the basement. Yesterday, Robbie had told him it might be a good idea to write everything down. Make sense of his own thoughts, not let himself dwell on things, whatever. Will didn’t think it would do anything, but there wasn’t exactly much he could do for entertainment.
His face itched. He’d cut his nails short, significantly shorter than was comfortable, so he wouldn’t bleed. He bled anyway. He was inflamed, and he was in pain, and there was nothing he could do but wait. So he ate, cursed, cried, slept, itched, bled. The first day.
Dear Normal Will,
I’m afraid of mirrors now. Do you remember that? Do you remember going into the bathroom and turning the light on to the dimmest setting, so that if you do accidentally look in the mirror, it’s harder to see the monstrosity that you’ve become? Do you remember looking at old pictures and crying, not knowing if things will ever be the same, and then feeling worse, somehow, because the tears sting your face?
I don’t know if I’d rather you remember this or not. I don’t want you to have to relive this. But I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be angry at you—at myself, I guess—for forgetting the way I suffered.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. Day three, and it’s hard for me to even remember a time when things weren’t like this. But I don’t think I’m writing these letters properly. I feel like this is supposed to help me find ways to feel better, and all it’s doing is making me spend time thinking about all the shit that’s been going on. I just don’t really see a solution in sight. When I wake up tomorrow I’ll find dried blood under my nails, and I’ll look like a burn victim. Rinse and repeat.
Stay healthy, I guess.
Will
He took a shower, and it burned. There wasn’t much else for him to do except lay down and try to go to sleep. He tried to turn off his brain in the moments when he wasn’t writing. His parents told him it was unhealthy, that he had to at least try and live normally. Or something along those lines. The crickets were out that night. They chirped. He wondered if crickets had eczema, and if they had doctors who could overprescribe them topical steroids until they had withdrawal.
Julia called him sometime the next morning—Will hadn’t responded to anyone’s texts in two days. He let it ring five, six, seven times before finally picking up.
“Hey,” she said quietly.
“Hey,” he said, but it sounded bleaker than he intended. “Sorry I never responded.” “Don’t apologize,” she said. “I’m just worried about you.”
“Don’t be,” Will said, but what he wanted to say was, so am I.
“I was thinking about stopping by,” she said. “I don’t know if you saw my text, but I bought banana bread at the bakery yesterday for you.”
“No,” he said reflexively. “No, I mean—thank you, Julia, but I think you should keep the bread for now. I love you. You can’t see me like this.”
“Bullshit. I’m getting in the car right now.” “I’m putting on a ski mask.”
“No, you’re not. I’ll be there in twenty.”
Will was wearing the mask when she pulled into his driveway, and they sat in the living room for about an hour and a half until she had to go pick up her sister. He never let her take the mask off. After she left, he went up to the bathroom upstairs, took off the mask, and turned the light on to the brightest setting for the first time in days. He wondered if Julia would even recognize him as the boy she loved.
Dear Normal Will,
Go fuck yourself. Either you’ve forgotten what this is like or you don’t exist. I had to go see Julia in a ski mask today. Couldn’t bear to let her see me like this. I know it’s wrong of me—I know it’s a weak move. It’s just that somewhere in the back of my mind I’m wondering how she could still love me in this state if I don’t even know whether I love myself. I don’t know if this is ever going to end. Maybe this is the new normal. She doesn’t deserve this, but I did it to her anyway. She brought you banana bread, Will, from that bakery in Santa Barbara when we
went there for the first time two years ago. Drove the hour to get there and drove back. If we make it out of here, you’d better marry her someday.
I keep seeing that I need to write about things I’m grateful for or things that make me happy here. Three things a day, they said. Well, I’m grateful for Julia. I’m grateful that this is happening to me during the summer, at least, so I don’t need to be dealing with this while in school. And I’m grateful for my parents, that they can love and support me, even while I’m in this state.
But I’m still in pain. It hasn’t gotten worse, but it hasn’t gotten better. Every second I’m alive feels like I’m manually trying to keep myself from going insane. It’s hard to find ways to distract myself. I’m spending every day wondering how to make it go by faster, so that I can just go to sleep again and forget. For what it’s worth, at least it’s getting a little easier to write more in these letters. Not like there’s much I want to say to Robbie or Michael or Parker about this. Stay healthy, Will.
Will
Dear Normal Will,
Day six today. I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think things are getting a bit better.
Maybe the end of this is coming a lot sooner than I expected it to.
Do you remember the birds in our backyard? They come out before noon, mostly, but I heard them in the afternoon today. It occurred to me that I’d been hearing these birds for years but never bothered to figure out what they were called. I had to search it up today—went on YouTube and watched recordings of the most common birds in Southern California. I don’t know
why they’re called mourning doves. Their song doesn’t sound particularly sad to me, maybe just more nostalgic. I don’t know why I never questioned what they were called.
Dad came home from his business trip today. He cried when he saw me. I think it was one thing to hear about everything that was going on, and another to see your own son so broken. I think that was the first time I’ve seen him cry. Didn’t say much. We just hugged, for a lot longer than we usually do. Stay healthy.
Will
Will,
Day nine today. We’re almost good. I can start to feel my real skin coming back, and this morning I woke up with almost no blood under my nails.
I’m reading through everything from the past few days right now—I don’t know how I survived that. I don’t know how much of this you’ll remember, Will, but you better remember all of it. Remember how lucky you were that this was a mild case. Remember how fortunate you were that you’d be mostly fine in less than two weeks. Remember how much you suffered, and all the things that you couldn’t even bring yourself to write in here. I think when all this is done I’m gonna start responding to texts again—maybe go play some football. Stay healthy. You better not forget.
Will
On the twelfth day, he felt like he was free enough to leave the house. Will called up his boys, and they walked to the park with a football in the afternoon sun.
“You’re sure you’re good, now?” Robbie said.
Will nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
“We were scared, man. You can’t be ghosting us like that.”
“It wasn’t great,” Will admitted. “But it’s over, now. Let’s not talk about it.” “Did you ever end up writing everything down?”
“Yeah. Thanks for the suggestion—it’s there if I ever need to see it again.”
They spoke no more of it. In the waning days of the summer, the journal found its way into some unknown shelf in the depths of the house and was lost when his parents moved out a few years later. Will never felt it missing.
It was a beautiful spring morning the day they left, trees shimmering in the gentle breeze, pavement warm under the cloudless sky. So the doves cooed, their songs bittersweet, and no one was there to hear them.