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stefanie_beanTitle: Surfing the Bardo
Chapter Title: Chapter 8: Letters to Jack
Genre: Angst with a happy ending; Friendship/Romance
Characters: Hugo Reyes, Claire Littleton, Kate Austen, Aaron Littleton, James "Sawyer" Ford
Relationships: Slow burn Hurley/Claire, past Jack/Kate, Sawyer/Kate (later)
Rating: T
Length: 3038 words
Status: WIP
Notes: TW for canon trauma, mental health issues, suicidal thoughts.
Summary: After Kate and Claire return from the Island, Claire starts to rebuild her relationship with Aaron, while she and Hugo explore their growing feelings for each other. Meanwhile, Kate has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. And while things start out rough, they eventually do get better.
Chapter 8: Letters to Jack
Jack,
Right before the move to Malibu Springs, I looked over what I'd written and almost tore it to pieces. Even though I hated the house on the hill and couldn't wait to leave it, packing was hopeless. All I could do was re-read harsh words which leaped out at me, as if someone was hitting me over and over and I couldn't get away. Claire must have heard me sobbing, because she walked right in and sat down like she was the big sister and I the little one who needed a firm talking-to.
She showed me her old diary from over three years ago, before the crash. She'd hung on to it through everything, and even managed to find it again after being taken by the smoke thing to live in that filthy hovel.
The little blue journal helped her to remember who she was, she explained. Inside, words were written in such anger that she'd practically punched holes into the paper. A taped-in picture of her old boyfriend had the face scratched out. Little sketches of knives dripped blood onto his name, or onto the curses she used to describe him.
“It's the most precious thing I have,” Claire said to me. “Don't tear out those pages, Kate.”
So I haven't. Instead, I'm doing something completely crazy. I'm writing to you as if you had just gone on a long journey to somewhere on the other side of the planet, somewhere so far out of reach that you might as well be dead.
You'd like where we're living. Richard Alpert came down from Portland to help us settle into this old summer camp run by his company, Mittelos Laboratories. It doesn't faze me at all to think of Richard as some big-shot executive, because we saw him in action during the weeks we were waiting to get back into the United States. So I didn't even blink when he showed up with a crew of movers, looking elegant in a sharkskin suit and an $800 silk tie.
Mittelos Summer Camp was here even before the Dharma Initiative ever came to the island, because the Others were always looking for new recruits. As Richard described it, the camp was like a six-week-long audition for a play. The real performance started when, rarely, a few campers got invited on a one-way trip to the island.
Richard was so friendly and helpful that I didn't have the heart to ask what Mittelos told the parents when their kids didn't return.
It took some time and a lot of lawyers, but now Hurley owns all of Mittelos: the sprawling Portland headquarters where Richard works, the factories in north Africa, and the aviation company that keeps Frank busy flying scientists and finance people to and fro. Or not really Hurley, exactly: more like this giant not-for-profit foundation which he and his mother set up. As Richard droned on about the details, my head started to whirl. It's almost all too much to take in.
Claire didn't even listen, just tended to Aaron while the movers unloaded boxes, while Carole, Carmen and Margo fussed over where everything was to supposed to go. I don't think Hurley's money interests her, even though it provides for this place where she seems to feel safe for the first time in a long while.
A woman named Jill has moved up here to work the kitchen for all of us. While we have kitchenettes in the cabins, they're more for making coffee or frying up an egg. Dinners are served just like at summer camp, and we all help. Most of the day, though, Jill goes to work at her butcher shop down in the valley. She has offered to take Claire with her sometime, show her how to butcher, but I suspect Claire already knows how.
Sitting in my cabin, I can pretend I'm inside a living tree, surrounded by golden wood on walls and floor. Above, thick cross-beams hold up the paneled roof over a room with a bed in one corner and tiny kitchenette in the other. The entry door is so short that your head would almost scrape the top. Tiny windows keep out the summer heat, and in the dim light the cabin is like something out of a fairy tale.
Claire's cabin is right next to mine, and we both have set up an extra bed for Aaron. He bounces back and forth, as much at home in either place.
At night I step outside into almost-dark, where Los Angeles hides on the other side of the mountains, invisible except for where it edges the ridge tops with light. Along the foothills, everything is black in the nearby state forest, which gives the place an eerily quiet and remote feeling.
I want you here with me so badly. We never took a real vacation, not after Laguna Beach, and this place would be perfect. If I could only show you this golden room, or the desk where I write this, the furniture all hand-made of the same warm-colored oak as the rest of the cabin. Or lie with you on the full-size bed and...
Never mind. That hurts too much, because it reminds me of one night. One last, perfect night that arrived only once and will never appear again. It's cruel that I am here without you. Maybe, just maybe, if we had visited here before “we had to go back,” I might have been way more likely to listen to you. That's ridiculous, isn't it?
Kate
*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Jack the silent,
Don't laugh, but I have a therapist now. Three times a week I drive down to Thousand Oaks and meet with her in a shabby little strip-mall office. Her name is Susan, Susan Lazenby, and she used to work at the hospital where we went to visit Hurley. Until we stopped, that is, and I'm still bitter about that. Her patients are mostly the ones from Santa Rosa who were able to leave the hospital. Needless to say, Hurley helped her set up her own office.
She remembers you from those Santa Rosa visits, how stiff and uncomfortable you looked. How Hurley's symptoms seemed to you like a personal slap in the face, how his inability to get better was an insult directed against you.
It's not clear how much she knows about the island, and I haven't asked. But her wise expression speaks volumes.
The island isn't the point, though, is it? She explained how losing you was a terrible shock, and that such shocks are like broken limbs. If you don't set them so they heal straight, they'll become crooked and painful, and may never work properly again. She says that I have gone through something as serious as multiple broken limbs, and I wouldn't let those heal on their own.
When I snapped that if a horse breaks a leg like that, we just put it down, she became very serious and gave me that don't-do-anything-rash look.
I told her not to be ridiculous. That I had a son.
Instead of arguing that Aaron wasn't really mine, she just leaned back in her office chair and nodded. She knows about the lie etched into Aaron's birth certificate. She knows that I would never make him lose me just as he lost you.
Susan and I talk a lot about loss, and grief, and hope, although that comes more from her than from me.
If you could only see Aaron. Carole gave him a little wire box with a hinged lid, and in it he traps crickets or little toads, just to look at them. Unlike the safe house, which was covered by desert and rock and loneliness, this mountainside teems with life. Its thick carpet of yellow or purple flowers draws swarms of bees. After Aaron watches his bugs for ten minutes or so, I convince him to let them go by telling him they need to head home for their naps.
He is so gentle with them, Jack. Once he broke a cricket's wing by accident and cried for a quarter hour. When I told Susan, I couldn't hold back my own tears, especially the part about lying to him about the bug's fate. “Let's let the cricket go,” I told him. It will get better on its own,” when I knew full well that it would die.
We haven't yet told him that you died, either.
It's just after sundown. I wish you could see the fireflies as they dot the hillside. I miss you so much.
Kate
*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Non-existent Jack,
I don't believe you're here, or even can be. I don't believe you're anywhere, because like animals we go to ground and turn to fertilizer when we die. Fertilizer exactly like the steaming piles I muck out of the stables every day, while two horses watch me with curious interest.
One is a twelve-year old Haflinger named Cobbie, one of the sweetest and gentlest horses I've ever met. I've already taken Aaron around the ring on him several times. Old Joe is a warmblood with some Percheron or Belgian in there, but nobody seems to know for sure. At 15 he's slow, deliberate and very calm. When Claire first saw him she called him a “Hurley horse,” because of his curly chestnut mane and thick body.
Sometimes when I'm grooming Cobbie, I just lay my cheek up against his flank. He stands very still, as if he knows that I need him to not do anything except breathe. He seems to understand.
It still irks me that I gave Hurley such a hard time about helping run the stables. Hurley knew that as soon as I saw these two beautiful creatures and this lovely place set up for them, that I would fall in love.
He must have gotten the satellite phone system up and running, because he called last night. He sounded garbled, as if underwater, and there was a brief uncomfortable silence in between each sentence as the signal bounced from one satellite to the next till it reached us.
Businesslike and almost brusque, he wanted to know how everything was going, was there anything I needed and if so, not to pay for it out of my own pocket, but make sure it got charged to the foundation. As he went from one point to the next, I felt like he was treating me as the honorary “man of the house.”
A long time ago Sun told me something from her art history courses. In the Middle Ages in Europe, if a guild artisan died, his widow sometimes took over for him. In a way she was treated as if she was him. I think Hurley talks to me as if I were you, because you are gone.
When I handed the phone to Claire, she sat very still and cradled it, bent over as if wanting to dive into the device itself. Trying hard not to listen in, I went out to the front porch, but through the open door her voice drifted out anyway. She told him how she's finally run a clothesline, started a sourdough for baking bread, and today had planted some hot peppers in the garden. It sounded soothing and ordinary and to be honest, boring.
Sometimes she fell into a listening silence broken only by murmurs of “Great,” or “Good idea.” When Claire came out to the porch and handed my phone back to me, she was smiling.
I don't feel as if I'll ever smile again.
Kate
*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Dear Jack,
Carole has moved into one of the lakeside cabins, where she casts her fishing line from the dock. The summer-camp kids must have once jumped into this chilly lake, fed by a large bubbling spring halfway up the hillside.
Claire and her mother take it all in stride, but I chafe at all this generosity. Since it comes from Hurley there's no catch, but I'm still braced for one. Susan says that I can't force trust; it just has to grow naturally out of one good experience after another.
She said that I don't think I deserve good things. That came up in two whole sessions devoted all to you, about how I didn't feel that I deserved you, how sometimes you made that worse even though you might not have meant to.
We've all felt so worthless, all of us: Hurley in the hospital when he wouldn't let his parents visit him because he didn't want to show himself crying and hallucinating round the clock. Claire when she didn't want to inflict herself on Aaron, still believing what that creature had told that she'd been left behind because no one cared enough to try and find her.
Me, when I felt so filthy after Mom blamed me for Wayne's disgusting remarks and side-looks, her crude remark about “leading him on.” Not even an acid bath could wash that shame off.
As I told Susan that, her calm and professional facade cracked and her face grew dark red with anger. “You were a girl,” she said through gritted teeth. “Just a girl.”
She says that I am under no obligation to see Mom or communicate with her in any way, even if she did drop the charges. Even if she is in hospice care now, and that means she probably has only a few months.
Then there's you, Jack. Deep down you probably felt that you were the most worthless of us all. Because Claire, and Hurley, and me – we all continued to cling to life.
You, though, let yours go.
I can't bear to leave this letter on that note, though. So here is something for you, courtesy of Claire. You and I used to read to Aaron every night or before his naps, and we even had those waterproof books to take into the bath. Between the two of us, Aaron was immersed in a world of brightly-colored and happy stories, and I was so proud of that, even if I could never make up stories for him on my own.
Claire, though, in ten minutes she can weave a tale seemingly out of nothing. Recently she's been telling him this one, and finally I asked her to write it down. I'm taping it into this letter so you can see how much of your father's storytelling has passed on to her.
Every night Aaron listens to it, never bored.
The first time Aaron heard this story, he fretted over any baby birds that might have been in the nest. Claire told him no, they had all long since grown up and flown away.
After he and Claire went to bed and I knew they couldn't hear me, I cried for Claire and all the years with him that she had lost. For myself, too, because I traded your sister's life for yours. Now the little Aaron-bird has flown away from the nest I made for him, the beautiful one that was purely an illusion.
And nothing new: I cried for you. It always comes back to you, doesn't it? I'm convinced that you're gone forever, while at the same time I do stupid things like taping Claire's story into this journal, as if somehow you'll magically be able to read it. I suppose it's not any crazier than anything else we've been through.
Love, love, oh my love,
Kate
(continued)
Chapter Title: Chapter 8: Letters to Jack
Genre: Angst with a happy ending; Friendship/Romance
Characters: Hugo Reyes, Claire Littleton, Kate Austen, Aaron Littleton, James "Sawyer" Ford
Relationships: Slow burn Hurley/Claire, past Jack/Kate, Sawyer/Kate (later)
Rating: T
Length: 3038 words
Status: WIP
Notes: TW for canon trauma, mental health issues, suicidal thoughts.
Summary: After Kate and Claire return from the Island, Claire starts to rebuild her relationship with Aaron, while she and Hugo explore their growing feelings for each other. Meanwhile, Kate has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. And while things start out rough, they eventually do get better.
Chapter 8: Letters to Jack
Jack,
Right before the move to Malibu Springs, I looked over what I'd written and almost tore it to pieces. Even though I hated the house on the hill and couldn't wait to leave it, packing was hopeless. All I could do was re-read harsh words which leaped out at me, as if someone was hitting me over and over and I couldn't get away. Claire must have heard me sobbing, because she walked right in and sat down like she was the big sister and I the little one who needed a firm talking-to.
She showed me her old diary from over three years ago, before the crash. She'd hung on to it through everything, and even managed to find it again after being taken by the smoke thing to live in that filthy hovel.
The little blue journal helped her to remember who she was, she explained. Inside, words were written in such anger that she'd practically punched holes into the paper. A taped-in picture of her old boyfriend had the face scratched out. Little sketches of knives dripped blood onto his name, or onto the curses she used to describe him.
“It's the most precious thing I have,” Claire said to me. “Don't tear out those pages, Kate.”
So I haven't. Instead, I'm doing something completely crazy. I'm writing to you as if you had just gone on a long journey to somewhere on the other side of the planet, somewhere so far out of reach that you might as well be dead.
You'd like where we're living. Richard Alpert came down from Portland to help us settle into this old summer camp run by his company, Mittelos Laboratories. It doesn't faze me at all to think of Richard as some big-shot executive, because we saw him in action during the weeks we were waiting to get back into the United States. So I didn't even blink when he showed up with a crew of movers, looking elegant in a sharkskin suit and an $800 silk tie.
Mittelos Summer Camp was here even before the Dharma Initiative ever came to the island, because the Others were always looking for new recruits. As Richard described it, the camp was like a six-week-long audition for a play. The real performance started when, rarely, a few campers got invited on a one-way trip to the island.
Richard was so friendly and helpful that I didn't have the heart to ask what Mittelos told the parents when their kids didn't return.
It took some time and a lot of lawyers, but now Hurley owns all of Mittelos: the sprawling Portland headquarters where Richard works, the factories in north Africa, and the aviation company that keeps Frank busy flying scientists and finance people to and fro. Or not really Hurley, exactly: more like this giant not-for-profit foundation which he and his mother set up. As Richard droned on about the details, my head started to whirl. It's almost all too much to take in.
Claire didn't even listen, just tended to Aaron while the movers unloaded boxes, while Carole, Carmen and Margo fussed over where everything was to supposed to go. I don't think Hurley's money interests her, even though it provides for this place where she seems to feel safe for the first time in a long while.
A woman named Jill has moved up here to work the kitchen for all of us. While we have kitchenettes in the cabins, they're more for making coffee or frying up an egg. Dinners are served just like at summer camp, and we all help. Most of the day, though, Jill goes to work at her butcher shop down in the valley. She has offered to take Claire with her sometime, show her how to butcher, but I suspect Claire already knows how.
Sitting in my cabin, I can pretend I'm inside a living tree, surrounded by golden wood on walls and floor. Above, thick cross-beams hold up the paneled roof over a room with a bed in one corner and tiny kitchenette in the other. The entry door is so short that your head would almost scrape the top. Tiny windows keep out the summer heat, and in the dim light the cabin is like something out of a fairy tale.
Claire's cabin is right next to mine, and we both have set up an extra bed for Aaron. He bounces back and forth, as much at home in either place.
At night I step outside into almost-dark, where Los Angeles hides on the other side of the mountains, invisible except for where it edges the ridge tops with light. Along the foothills, everything is black in the nearby state forest, which gives the place an eerily quiet and remote feeling.
I want you here with me so badly. We never took a real vacation, not after Laguna Beach, and this place would be perfect. If I could only show you this golden room, or the desk where I write this, the furniture all hand-made of the same warm-colored oak as the rest of the cabin. Or lie with you on the full-size bed and...
Never mind. That hurts too much, because it reminds me of one night. One last, perfect night that arrived only once and will never appear again. It's cruel that I am here without you. Maybe, just maybe, if we had visited here before “we had to go back,” I might have been way more likely to listen to you. That's ridiculous, isn't it?
Kate
Jack the silent,
Don't laugh, but I have a therapist now. Three times a week I drive down to Thousand Oaks and meet with her in a shabby little strip-mall office. Her name is Susan, Susan Lazenby, and she used to work at the hospital where we went to visit Hurley. Until we stopped, that is, and I'm still bitter about that. Her patients are mostly the ones from Santa Rosa who were able to leave the hospital. Needless to say, Hurley helped her set up her own office.
She remembers you from those Santa Rosa visits, how stiff and uncomfortable you looked. How Hurley's symptoms seemed to you like a personal slap in the face, how his inability to get better was an insult directed against you.
It's not clear how much she knows about the island, and I haven't asked. But her wise expression speaks volumes.
The island isn't the point, though, is it? She explained how losing you was a terrible shock, and that such shocks are like broken limbs. If you don't set them so they heal straight, they'll become crooked and painful, and may never work properly again. She says that I have gone through something as serious as multiple broken limbs, and I wouldn't let those heal on their own.
When I snapped that if a horse breaks a leg like that, we just put it down, she became very serious and gave me that don't-do-anything-rash look.
I told her not to be ridiculous. That I had a son.
Instead of arguing that Aaron wasn't really mine, she just leaned back in her office chair and nodded. She knows about the lie etched into Aaron's birth certificate. She knows that I would never make him lose me just as he lost you.
Susan and I talk a lot about loss, and grief, and hope, although that comes more from her than from me.
If you could only see Aaron. Carole gave him a little wire box with a hinged lid, and in it he traps crickets or little toads, just to look at them. Unlike the safe house, which was covered by desert and rock and loneliness, this mountainside teems with life. Its thick carpet of yellow or purple flowers draws swarms of bees. After Aaron watches his bugs for ten minutes or so, I convince him to let them go by telling him they need to head home for their naps.
He is so gentle with them, Jack. Once he broke a cricket's wing by accident and cried for a quarter hour. When I told Susan, I couldn't hold back my own tears, especially the part about lying to him about the bug's fate. “Let's let the cricket go,” I told him. It will get better on its own,” when I knew full well that it would die.
We haven't yet told him that you died, either.
It's just after sundown. I wish you could see the fireflies as they dot the hillside. I miss you so much.
Kate
Non-existent Jack,
I don't believe you're here, or even can be. I don't believe you're anywhere, because like animals we go to ground and turn to fertilizer when we die. Fertilizer exactly like the steaming piles I muck out of the stables every day, while two horses watch me with curious interest.
One is a twelve-year old Haflinger named Cobbie, one of the sweetest and gentlest horses I've ever met. I've already taken Aaron around the ring on him several times. Old Joe is a warmblood with some Percheron or Belgian in there, but nobody seems to know for sure. At 15 he's slow, deliberate and very calm. When Claire first saw him she called him a “Hurley horse,” because of his curly chestnut mane and thick body.
Sometimes when I'm grooming Cobbie, I just lay my cheek up against his flank. He stands very still, as if he knows that I need him to not do anything except breathe. He seems to understand.
It still irks me that I gave Hurley such a hard time about helping run the stables. Hurley knew that as soon as I saw these two beautiful creatures and this lovely place set up for them, that I would fall in love.
He must have gotten the satellite phone system up and running, because he called last night. He sounded garbled, as if underwater, and there was a brief uncomfortable silence in between each sentence as the signal bounced from one satellite to the next till it reached us.
Businesslike and almost brusque, he wanted to know how everything was going, was there anything I needed and if so, not to pay for it out of my own pocket, but make sure it got charged to the foundation. As he went from one point to the next, I felt like he was treating me as the honorary “man of the house.”
A long time ago Sun told me something from her art history courses. In the Middle Ages in Europe, if a guild artisan died, his widow sometimes took over for him. In a way she was treated as if she was him. I think Hurley talks to me as if I were you, because you are gone.
When I handed the phone to Claire, she sat very still and cradled it, bent over as if wanting to dive into the device itself. Trying hard not to listen in, I went out to the front porch, but through the open door her voice drifted out anyway. She told him how she's finally run a clothesline, started a sourdough for baking bread, and today had planted some hot peppers in the garden. It sounded soothing and ordinary and to be honest, boring.
Sometimes she fell into a listening silence broken only by murmurs of “Great,” or “Good idea.” When Claire came out to the porch and handed my phone back to me, she was smiling.
I don't feel as if I'll ever smile again.
Kate
Dear Jack,
Carole has moved into one of the lakeside cabins, where she casts her fishing line from the dock. The summer-camp kids must have once jumped into this chilly lake, fed by a large bubbling spring halfway up the hillside.
Claire and her mother take it all in stride, but I chafe at all this generosity. Since it comes from Hurley there's no catch, but I'm still braced for one. Susan says that I can't force trust; it just has to grow naturally out of one good experience after another.
She said that I don't think I deserve good things. That came up in two whole sessions devoted all to you, about how I didn't feel that I deserved you, how sometimes you made that worse even though you might not have meant to.
We've all felt so worthless, all of us: Hurley in the hospital when he wouldn't let his parents visit him because he didn't want to show himself crying and hallucinating round the clock. Claire when she didn't want to inflict herself on Aaron, still believing what that creature had told that she'd been left behind because no one cared enough to try and find her.
Me, when I felt so filthy after Mom blamed me for Wayne's disgusting remarks and side-looks, her crude remark about “leading him on.” Not even an acid bath could wash that shame off.
As I told Susan that, her calm and professional facade cracked and her face grew dark red with anger. “You were a girl,” she said through gritted teeth. “Just a girl.”
She says that I am under no obligation to see Mom or communicate with her in any way, even if she did drop the charges. Even if she is in hospice care now, and that means she probably has only a few months.
Then there's you, Jack. Deep down you probably felt that you were the most worthless of us all. Because Claire, and Hurley, and me – we all continued to cling to life.
You, though, let yours go.
I can't bear to leave this letter on that note, though. So here is something for you, courtesy of Claire. You and I used to read to Aaron every night or before his naps, and we even had those waterproof books to take into the bath. Between the two of us, Aaron was immersed in a world of brightly-colored and happy stories, and I was so proud of that, even if I could never make up stories for him on my own.
Claire, though, in ten minutes she can weave a tale seemingly out of nothing. Recently she's been telling him this one, and finally I asked her to write it down. I'm taping it into this letter so you can see how much of your father's storytelling has passed on to her.
Every night Aaron listens to it, never bored.
Once upon a time there was a little boy named Aaron, who every day went to pasture the sheep on the side of a mountain. Every day he had to stay awake and watch, so that the sheep would be safe.
But one day the sun was so high in the sky, the breezes were so warm, and the bees buzzed so loudly in the clover, that little Aaron fell asleep.
And while he was asleep, the side of the mountain opened up, and out came the little men who live under there. They picked Aaron up and took him into the mountain with them.
Down they went, past the mines where they dug for jewels as big as eggs, down through twisty passages, over black underground rivers, until they came to the Hall of the Mountain King.
When Aaron woke up, at first he was frightened to see all the dwarfs together in the big feasting hall. Especially startling was the great King himself, a huge dwarf the size of a man, who sat on a golden throne covered with sparkling jewels.
But the dwarfs made so merry with the pipe and the lute, and there were so many cakes and pies to eat, so many morsels of chicken and roasted meat, that Aaron soon forgot his fear.
The mountain men put a chain of gold around Aaron's neck. They gave him a sceptre with a green jewel on one end, and a magic purse for wishes. Whatever you wanted, you could reach in and there it was.
All the music and cakes, the singing and dancing made Aaron's eyes droop and then close. When he awoke, he found himself once again on the hillside. The sun was low in the sky, so Aaron ran to and fro, gathering the sheep until every one was gathered into the little flock and tucked into the fold before nightfall. The bolt on the gate went 'click' just as the sun went down.
As Aaron's mother gave him his supper of cheese, brown bread, and warm milk, she said, 'Where have you been?'
Aaron told her all about the Hall of the Mountain King, and his presents.
'Oh, you mean this vine around your neck? And the stick you use to drive the sheep?'
'But there was something else,' Aaron said. 'A bag full of wishes!' And from his pocket he drew out a little bird's nest.
Then his mother kissed him, and he said his prayers, and went straight to bed.
The first time Aaron heard this story, he fretted over any baby birds that might have been in the nest. Claire told him no, they had all long since grown up and flown away.
After he and Claire went to bed and I knew they couldn't hear me, I cried for Claire and all the years with him that she had lost. For myself, too, because I traded your sister's life for yours. Now the little Aaron-bird has flown away from the nest I made for him, the beautiful one that was purely an illusion.
And nothing new: I cried for you. It always comes back to you, doesn't it? I'm convinced that you're gone forever, while at the same time I do stupid things like taping Claire's story into this journal, as if somehow you'll magically be able to read it. I suppose it's not any crazier than anything else we've been through.
Love, love, oh my love,
Kate
(continued)