Dear K,

Pack it in. You've gone over the edge and you're not coming back unless I haul your canoe up with a rope.

It's been a month since you've seen your love?

Where's the brawler I used to know? The one with fists as hard as alley walls and broken glass for teeth and chewing tobacco for blood? You used to be as tall as an oak tree and twice as hard to pull up by the roots.

Look. If you're not going to try for something... then I don't know. I don't really have a threat. I just want so badly for you to understand that yes you can be happy and all it takes is for you to stop treating this life like every decision has been made for you.

You spun my last letter completely on its head, when you said that fiction lets people have nice tidy little resolutions.

I was trying to say that you are free, and that every character ever written will never ever know what it means to be able to turn left when the universe and everyone in society says you can only go straight, or maybe you go straight to fake them out and because they think maybe you're the kind of person who randomly turns left, but then pow as soon as they believe that you're only going to move forward, bam, left turn and you're running through the fields in the hidden woods with the prairie weeds up to your hips and the rattlesnakes hissing in the grass.

Look, every morning the sun comes up. And every day away from spring is filled with memories of spring, and every moment of spring is filled with childhood scents, and every thing is all how you remember to look at it at the end of your life when the curtains close in and finally this beautiful thing, a shining bauble for the rest of the darkness to envy, comes to a very satisfying end, like warm oatmeal cookies being swallowed with a glass of milk, that is what life is.

So buck up kiddo,

Your Elderly K