Eden’s Email
Dear Elliot sisters,
Ok, it’s been a few months.
Thank you for the cards you sent me. You sound perfectly lovely and normal. That scares the crap out of me, if I’m being honest. I have met Mr. Elliot (sorry, I still can’t call him ‘Dad’), but the psychiatrists said I wasn’t ready to meet you two yet. But soon .
So, until then, I will write to you, emails I will never send. (I didn’t know emails existed before now—bear with me.)
Here we go:
I met Mr. Elliot.
I don’t call him ‘Dad’. I don’t know if I ever will; I mean, he is little more than a stranger at this point. A kind stranger, one who is committed to protecting me and who is insanely angry on my behalf, but a stranger. He doesn’t pressure me into calling him that, and I’m not ready, so Mr. Elliot he is (Dad).
Side note: I have never used the word (Dad). Father He The man I lived with I’ll just call him by his name, Solomon. Solomon wanted to be called ‘Father’. After I met Isaiah, I got jealous of how he kept talking about his dad all the time, so I tried it too. I said it in front of the mirror a couple hundred times, to get used to it. Dad. Dad. Dad. Then I tried it on Solomon. He didn’t like it. After a few hours of him screaming at me, I had to do penance by fasting—starving—for five days. After that, I don’t remember much, because I kept fainting a lot and the rest of the days passed in a daze. He never took me to the hospital, but somehow, I survived. Obviously. The effort to call anyone ‘Dad’ didn’t.
So no calling Mr. Elliot ‘Dad’. I can’t even call him by his first name. But I think there is something there, something between us.
Our connection was instant. As if something inside me recognized him—we were in sync instantly. Attuned. It was like I had known him for years, and he me. He just looked at me and cried and cried. I didn’t cry, but inside I was melting. I think for the first time I understood that Father’s (wait, no, not Father’s) Solomon’s face hadn’t been kind. Not really. Because here was a kind face. A face that held nothing but love. I had not been living with such a father all these years.
The specialists, (police, psychiatrists, social workers, etc., etc.) who are working on my case, all agreed that I should be taken to a ‘neutral place’ to be rehabilitated. Mr. Elliot (Dad) agrees with everything they ask of him without question. The neutral place was decided: New York. To a girl who had not been anywhere apart from her room and the woods of Massachusetts, New York kind of resembles a zoo. Or a circus. Did no one think it would be kind of overwhelming for me? We’ll never know.
Side note: These specialists don’t know nearly as much as they pretend to. Just saying. Mr. Elliot (Dad) knows how to handle me so much better, just because he is a Decent Human Being TM —something I haven’t previously experienced in my entire life, with one notable experience.
I stayed for a while in New York with Mr. Elliot (Dad), monitored by doctors. We tried to get to know each other. And to ‘heal’, as they call it. I told him I would never be normal. He said a bad word in response. I laughed. (There was a time when I would have thought that hearing a bad word and then laughing about it would send me straight to hell. I know now this was one of the many lies Father Solomon tried to control me with. They are still stuck in my head, these lies. But I’m fighting them.) (Too many parentheses). (Sorry).
We watched some of the newsreels about my life, Mr. Elliot (Dad) and I. The doctors said it would be a bonding experience, if I was up to it. Mr. Elliot (Dad) was just struggling not to cry the whole time. We only got as far as the headlines: ‘The Lost Girl’, ‘the princess in the tower’, ‘Edie’, etc… Then we turned it off.
We tried talking to each other—we couldn’t. We didn’t know what to do.
Then I decided, what the heck. I’d show him my writing. So Mr. Elliot (Dad) read some of my poetry and his eyes popped out. He said ‘this is good stuff’ and then he cried some more.
We went together to a slam poetry club. It was beyond amazing. (I might have cried a bit too, but I will never admit it. But it was so beautiful there, being among all those true words.) I told him I wanted to try slam poetry, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak in public. So we went there every single night for two weeks straight, until I could muster up the courage to do it. Now I have recited three of my poems in public. He cried every time and I told him he was embarrassing me. He beamed at that. Real dads are weird.
You know this, right? I mean, he is your dad. He is your dad, too , I should say, but it sounds so strange. So so strange.
I went to a concert. I did not go inside. (Yes, another weird thing I did—this is going to be a pattern, buckle up.) I did not even buy a ticket. I knew I couldn’t handle the crowds. But this person who was singing… His name is Issy Woo and he’s gone viral several times in the past few months—you’ll know him, I bet. Well, here is something you might not know: he wrote his first songs with me.
For me.
But that’s a story for another day. (For never).
I stood outside his very first public concert, at a basketball stadium. I don’t think I drew a single breath during the whole thing. I sobbed out loud—and it was not a pretty sound, either, just ripped involuntarily from me—but no one heard me anyway. His voice. My God, his voice. It has become a force to be reckoned with. I just stood there, listening to it, feeling the world tilt on its axis. He never saw me, he never even knew. But I was there. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
No way am I going to let him see me now, after everything that’s happened. I am too embarrassed—I feel too disgusting. If I am disgusted by what’s happened to me, imagine how he must feel. Besides, my story has been all over the news for months now, my face plastered across every TV and online news agency in the country. He knows why I disappeared. He knows, and he wants nothing to do with me. I don’t blame him.
But I have been to every single one of his concerts so far. I can’t stay away. His pull is too strong. I only hope his fame doesn’t get any bigger—if it does, I know it will swallow me whole. There will be no chance for me to ‘heal’ as the stupid doctors say, with his eyes following me from every single screen in the country.
Yours in complicated trauma,
En.
P.S. When your our dad decides to let you meet the psycho me—or rather, when he can’t contain himself any longer—I think I would love it if you called me ‘En’. You know, abbreviate my name like sisters do. Isn’t that what sisters do? Make names smaller, because they use them all the time? Even if you have never used mine, I think that would be cool.