Letter to My Daughter Read Online Free PDF

lives.
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    My only consolation that first week at Sacred Heart came in the form of a letter, delivered to me by Sister Agatha late one afternoon at the dormitory. Even now, thirty-four years later, I remember the shape and feel of that envelope, with the Zachary return address in the upper left corner, the six-cent Dwight D. Eisenhower stamp in the right, and my name square in the middle. And inside, the folded sheet of notebook paper covered with his handwriting; handwriting that was so like his character, teetering between an adolescent awkwardness and a touchingly earnest effort to appear upright and manly.
    “Dear Laura,” Tim began. He went on to say how he wasn’t much of a writer, but he wanted me to know that he missed me more than I could imagine. If anyone was to blame for my being sent away, he wrote, it was him. He was the man, after all, and he should’ve been more responsible for our safety that evening. Not that he regretted it, though. That night, no matter what came after, would always stand for him as the best night of his life. Because it was that night, he wrote, that he found out what true love is.
    Thus began our correspondence, one that would continue for as long as I was a student at Sacred Heart, and that, in the early days at least, was like a lifeline, tethering me to a tree of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.
    I wrote back right away to tell Tim how much I loved and missed him, too. I wrote about my first miserable night in the dormitory, and my roommate, Melissa, and the charity cases at the lunch table. I wrote him letters in the back of my notebook from the last row of Freshman Science while Sister Helen—Yellin’ Helen—lectured on the periodic table. And in the afternoons, while other girls were out flirting with boys from Cathedral High School, or going to piano lessons, or attending basketball practice, I would write to Tim from the library, long shadows slanting across the dusty tabletops as I emptied out my loneliness onto page after page of white paper.
    I came to rely desperately on his responses. My heart jumped up whenever Sister Hagatha-Agatha delivered another letter to me in the afternoon at the dormitory, frowning in poorly disguised disapproval behind her old-lady eyeglasses. Who ever knew so much happiness could be contained in one small envelope? If Tim missed more than a few days, I would become anxious and dash off two letters at once, wondering what was wrong. He would write back apologizing, saying how he’d been out hunting with his buddies over the weekend and so wasn’t able to answer my last letter as soon as he would’ve liked, but not to worry, I was always on his mind. I’d write again: How could he even think about going out hunting with his friends and having fun when I was locked up here in this prison for girls? Didn’t he have any feelings at all? And why had he signed “Love” instead of his usual “Love always” in the closing of his last letter? Maybe he didn’t miss me as much as I missed him. Maybe what he called “the best night of my life” wasn’t so great after all. Maybe we’d be better off just forgetting that anything ever happened between us…. And so on, until he would send me a reassuring letter by Express Mail, filled to the margins with the most tender sentiments a girl could ever want to read. On paper, I learned, even arguments can be beautiful.
    I suppose even at the time a part of me relished the melodrama of it. We were every pair of young and divided lovers there had ever been. We were Romeo and Juliet. We were Abelard and Héloïse, we were Antony and Cleopatra. But we were greater than all of them, because we were real and alive and this was ours. And the secret knowledge of the profound and historic suffering we were forced to endure on account of our love made our separation bearable; it made our separation, I daresay, almost pleasurable. Our sweet, secret pain.
    Go ahead, roll your eyes if