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Lisa
The letter quivers in my hand. The tight, slanted handwriting is unmistakably Griff’s. The letter has been smoothed flat,
but I can tell it was once scrunched up by the faint creases running through the page. Perhaps I shouldn’t be reading this,
but I can’t look away.
31 December 2024
Dear Beau,
I don’t even know what this is. I guess I’m writing it because I can’t say it aloud. And I need it out of me. I’ve now lived
twelve days without you.
Everything has become black. Heavy. Unmovable. I’m tired, Beau. Really bloody tired.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.
There’s no next. Just this room and the shape of your absence.
I still look over at your bed like you might be there. Sometimes I brace for the version of you from the end—thin, shaking,
barely there. Other times I expect to see you the way you used to be, sitting up, delighting in my lemon tart, dancing to
the credits of a movie.
Neither of you shows up. Just the quiet and the dent in the pillow.
You always said I wasn’t broken. That I was worth something.
I told you I believed you, that I knew I wasn’t responsible for my father’s death.
I lied, Beau. Deep down I’ve never stopped believing that I was wrong and bad and that everything that happened after he died was the punishment I deserved.
How I wish I could forget that voice that taught me to hate myself, but I can’t.
You always wanted me to let Lisa in, to open up to her. I’m sorry, Beau, I’ve failed you, and it’s my deepest regret. It wasn’t
about the kiss, not really. That was just something sharp I could hold on to. The reality is I didn’t know how. I think the
shame was too big by then. The secrets too old. There was one I never said aloud, not even to you. It felt like telling Lisa
the truth would betray the one thing I had left to offer Mum after all I’d taken from her—my loyalty. Please forgive me. I
can only hope I have protected Lisa from a distance.
So much of the life we had was stolen from us in these past few years. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, I only know that
wherever I go, I want to scan the room and find you in it. And when we meet again, I hope it all comes flooding back to you
like an ocean, not a single thing lost between us.
I didn’t get to go to your funeral. If I’d been there, I would have stood up and told everyone how much I adored you, in a
way I will never fully find words for. I would have thanked you for giving my life meaning and mercy, for seeing good in the
parts of me I’d written off as gone—the ones I never had the courage to look at until you held them in your hands and called
them worth loving. I’d have finished by quoting words that remind me of your good mate Winnie-the-Pooh: “How lucky I am to
have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
I’ll love you forever, Beau. We’ll both be in your beloved godforsaken Canberra soon.
x Griffy
I turn it over, and there, in my own childhood writing, is his name in purple crayon: Griff the Great. The label for his apron, kept all this time. Retrieved from the bin where I’d thrown it decades earlier.
I don’t move. I can’t. The letter remains in my lap, but the words are seared into my memory. The gasp that comes is raw,
deep, broken. He didn’t push me away because he didn’t think I was good enough; he pushed me away because he thought he wasn’t.