Letters to the Moon

October — Letter One

Dear Moon,

Maya died three weeks ago. In case you didn't see it — you see everything, I think, but maybe not the specific things, maybe it all looks the same from up there.

She was twelve. She had been ill for a year and a half but it still felt sudden, which I know doesn't make sense but is true anyway.

I'm writing to you because I don't know who else to write to. My mum keeps asking how I am and I can't answer correctly, and the school counsellor uses words like "processing" which I find annoying, and everyone else just goes quiet in a specific way when they see me that makes me want to walk in the opposite direction.

You don't do that. You just stay where you are.

I don't have anything else to say right now. But I wanted to start.

Celia

November — Letter Two

Dear Moon,

I went to her house.

Her mum let me in. We sat in Maya's room for a while. It smelled like her still — that specific smell of her shampoo and the vanilla candle she always had burning. I didn't say anything. Her mum didn't either. We just sat in the room like the room needed witnesses.

On the way home I was so angry I could barely breathe. Not at anyone. Just — angry at the whole situation. That it happened. That it keeps having already happened. Every morning I wake up and have to go through the few seconds of not-yet-knowing and then the moment of remembering, and the remembering feels just as bad as the first time.

I'm angry at the remembering.

C.

December — Letter Three

Dear Moon,

Christmas is impossible.

I don't have more than that. It's just impossible.

Also I got a 94 on my French essay and my first instinct was to text her and I got as far as opening the message before I remembered. That keeps happening. I keep living in the two-second window before I remember.

I've started to think of it as a kindness. Two seconds of ordinary.

C.

January — Letter Four

Dear Moon,

I've been thinking about who Maya was.

Not missing her — I do that constantly, that's not thinking, that's just breathing — but specifically who she was. As a project. Trying to hold all of it at once.

She was the only person I knew who genuinely thought silence was comfortable. Not awkward-silence, comfortable-silence. We could sit for an hour and it wasn't strange.

She was decisive. When she made up her mind about something it stayed made up.

She was bad at geography — hilariously, specifically bad, in a way that was a running joke — she once got France and Spain confused on a map.

She could impersonate exactly four people: her maths teacher, a newsreader, her cousin, and me. The me one was frightening in its accuracy.

I could keep going. I think I'll keep going in every letter, actually. Just adding things. So the list exists somewhere.

C.

February — Letter Five

Dear Moon,

It's been five months.

I don't know what I expected five months to feel like. Less, I think. I expected it to feel like less.

It doesn't. It feels different, but not less. Like the grief has changed shape rather than shrunk. In October it was enormous and shapeless. Now it's more specific — it has edges, and the edges are where the memories live.

A girl called Priya at school asked if I wanted to study together. I said yes.

We studied for two hours. She's funny. She's not Maya. I didn't expect her to be. That felt like progress.

C.

April — Letter Six

Dear Moon,

Something happened. I wanted to write it down before it got complicated.

I was in the garden on a Thursday evening and it was that specific quality of spring air — you know the one, probably, where it smells cold and warm at the same time and the light goes long and golden in the evening — and I felt something.

Not sad. Not happy. Something in between that didn't have a name.

Present, maybe. Just present.

I thought: Maya would have called this a perfect evening. She was good at naming perfect things.

And then I thought: I can name them too. I learned that from her.

I want to tell you that that moment felt like something important. I can't fully explain why.

C.

June — Letter Seven

Dear Moon,

Eight months.

I got the lead in the school play. I almost didn't audition. I told Priya I didn't audition because I didn't have time. She looked at me with that specific expression she has when she knows I'm lying but has decided not to push it.

The truth is: Maya always said I should audition. I never did. I was scared of the specific exposure of it — of wanting something visibly, in front of people, and then not getting it.

I auditioned. I got it.

I don't know if that's Maya or me. I think it might be the part of Maya that I carry now.

Is that a strange thing to say?

Priya says it's not strange. She says "you carry the parts of the people you love" and I asked where she'd read that and she said she'd thought of it herself. I believe her.

C.

August — Letter Eight

Dear Moon,

I went back to Maya's house.

Her mum asked if I'd like to take something — something small, something of Maya's. To have.

I took the vanilla candle. Unburnt. She'd had it on her bedside table since last summer.

I haven't lit it.

I might not light it. I might just keep it as a thing that still smells the same.

C.

September — Letter Nine

Dear Moon,

Year 8 started. Same year she was in when she got sick.

It's strange to be in the year that was hers for such a short time. Like I'm going through a room she passed through.

Someone new joined our form group. She sat on her own at lunch. I know how that looks from the outside.

I went over.

C.

October — Letter Ten

Dear Moon,

One year.

I lit the candle tonight.

I sat with it for a while.

It smelled exactly right.

C.

December — Letter Eleven

Dear Moon,

I've been trying to figure out what I'd say to her.

Not about what's happened to me since — though I'd tell her that too, obviously. But the actual thing. The thing I'd most want her to know.

I think it would be: you taught me how to sit in silence without being afraid of it. You taught me that a lot of the things I was afraid of were things I'd made larger than they actually were. You taught me, without ever trying to, that friendship can be comfortable the way a room can be comfortable.

I miss you all the time.

Also: you were right about France and Spain. I checked.

C.

January — Letter Twelve

Dear Moon,

Fifteen months now.

This is the last letter. Not because I'm done — I don't think done is a destination — but because I think I've been writing toward something, and I think I've arrived, and the something is this:

I am not who I was before.

That is not a bad thing. It is a true thing. I have been shaped by something very heavy, and I am a different shape now, and some of the new shapes are ones I like.

I am braver. More interested in people. More willing to go over and sit down. Less worried about the specific exposure of wanting something visibly.

I am worse at other things. I am less patient with small problems. I am sometimes too serious. I have two-second windows of ordinary before I remember, every day.

But I am, on the whole, still here. And here is more than I thought I'd manage, in October fourteen months ago.

Thank you for receiving these.

You don't have to write back.

Celia

P.S. She was decisive. Bad at geography. Could do four impressions. Loved vanilla. Made silence comfortable. Called perfect evenings by their right name.

And is remembered.

The End.