Dawn by Lau

I have another letter from Darren today.

They always come in the same white envelope in his loopy handwriting, which I always thought looked funny next to my own spidery slants. He dots his i's.

They're heavy.

I always know Darren's envelopes because of the way they feel.

I ignore the letter carefully, keeping it in just the corner of my sights as I diligently prepare my coffee. I have a ritual with these letters. They cannot be immediately opened. First, the coffee.

Every envelope has a different return address, one that I can't write back to, because by the time the letter reaches me in Australia, he's already gone. Already gone to another three cities and is well on his way to a fifth interview.

I have a collection of letters from Darren. This is the second part of my ritual. Each letter must be retrieved and reread, folded and unfolded along their breaking creases. Hidden inside each letter is a photograph. In the beginning, the pictures were of Darren. Now, the camera is his eye. He sends home to me a blink of his touring life.

We promised to write each other every week. No phone calls. Things get weird on the phone.

He writes. I don't.

Finally, I stare vacantly down at this letter, the sun warming the back of my hand. His solo album came out this week, and I wasn't expecting anything from him. We certainly never had time for writing or mailing or time to breathe when we did interviews for Savage Garden. But here it is, waiting for my letter opener. The envelope is a cream color this time, which bothers me more than
any idiosyncrasy should.

I stare at the return address. New York City, Darren's favorite. I smile, picturing him wandering up and down Fifth Avenue, salivating at the shop windows.

"We were going to write every week."

I look up, startled to hear the voice. Darren leans easily in the doorframe which connects my living room and my hallway. He is wearing modern, thickly framed glasses which he does not need to see. But no one is in the room, and I shake my head. I hear him more often now. He's getting harder to avoid.

"I write every week. Why don't you?"

"There's no return address," I reply, pushing the envelope away from me with the tips of my fingers. "Not one I can use."

"Have you ever tried?" Suddenly he is leaning against the glass door with his arms crossed. Sitting on my sofa. Lounging in the kitchen. Sprawled across my bed. I shake my head, pressing a palm to my closed eyes. This Darren I see does not exist.

"Go away." I command the confident Darren that waltzes over to my coffee table and sits down across from me. The glasses are gone and his hair has grown five inches and lightened.

I've always had these partners. Theres a team of five or six of them, and sometimes they come together, but usually it's only one at a time. I have a different one for each hard spot in my life, and it helps me to feel not so alone.

I'm not crazy. I know I'm not, because I get along just fine with these apparitions, and I know they're not there. I used them to keep me company when I was so lonely on tours. They're all images from my past, people I've wanted to be. I tried to tell Darren about them once, and the closest he could relate was that he used to imagine he was singing to Bono.

They've all left now that the tours are over. But Darren likes to float around whenever I get bored.

"Open it." Darren cajoles from across the table.

"I'll open it when I'm ready." I snap at him, and when I look again he has disappeared. I never told my psychologist about these people who I pretend talk to me. I never told my shrink about being visited by Neo from The Matrix, who makes me feel brave, or Edge from U2, who takes away my stage fright right before a show, or my brother Jon, who would appear in my hotel room late at night when I missed my family so much. And I never told about Darren coming to visit after all the others left.

I have imaginary friends.

The letter is staring up at me with all its wrong colors. I glance up for a second, and Darren is back, watching the letter as intently as I. He meets my eyes and prompts me with a look that says, "Well?" looking down at the table again.

The pictures he sends me are laid out in front of me chronologically. After the first five of him waving and smiling cheekily, they gradually turn into skyline shots. Sunrise. Sunrise. Sunrise. The most beautiful glowing orb of rising fire against the  buildings. He takes them from his hotel balcony, and each shot has the date and time meticulously recorded on the back.

I pick up the letter. It feels wrong. I slit it open immediately, and pull out its innards brusquely, setting the envelope in my lap.

"A postcard?" Darren and I say in unison, and I feel vaguely cheated out of the New York sunrise. It's a picture of the rising sun on the Manhattan skyline. "Welcome to New York City!" is printed across the bottom of the card. A postcard inside an envelope. I flip it over to the other side and find his loopy words written diagonally across the rectangular space:

"What does it say?" Phantom Darren perks up, and I read it outloud for the benefit of us both:

"It says
'You should have seen that sunrise
With your own eyes
It brought me back to life
You'll be with me next time I go outside
No more 3x5s'."

"What the hell does that mean?" I grumble, flipping the card over again to see if anything was printed on the front that I had missed. There was no other print or information from Darren that I could see. Flustered, I stood, and the envelope fell off my lap. I glared down at it and saw something had fallen out.

A plane ticket.

I stooped and lifted the ticket out of the envelope. One way to La Guardia, New York City airport. A smile broke out on my face, etching away months of anger.

Phantom Darren silently vanished.