Letter Never Sent

   The last thing my brother wrote was a letter to my first girlfriend.

   He didn't finish it.

   Three pages from a note pad. Smallish. Green ruled lines on yellow paper. The kind engineers might use for the grocery list. 

    Phil wasn't an engineer but he had lovely handwriting. Legible, lithesome even, untortured like that of the rest of the men in the family - but he did leave some letters undone, some words half drawn. 

  Like a boxer who couldn't finish a punch. Or a swimmer exhausted who can't get those fingers to the wall. Ballet like. 

   His writing had an unfinished grace.
   He'd sketch most of a word. You could fill in the rest.
   You didn't have to wade into the bracken of a script like mine and bend it back into the language it once was, piece it together like a plane gone down in the Everglades blown into cursive mud and strings of steel.
  Anyhow.
  Allison wrote Phil to tell him he'd been a fine swim coach, a role model, and a friend to a teenage girl with mad smarts, mad talent, and more than a little madness that could have taken her either way - to the psyche ward or to Yale, which is where she went.
  (Not that going to Yale has anything to do with being sane or being a decent human....in fact, quite the contrary ....but I'll leave that to another day....)
  Phil had been dead a few days when I found the letters, his response and then hers. It was such an odd sensation: hearing a woman I hadn't seen in 30 years but whose voice still lived in my head. And hearing my brother, clear as day, who I'd never hear again.
   The two of them talking back and forth, the soft baritone he used when he felt safe with someone and her nasal coo - Alison always sounding like she was about to give you the punch line- but with Phil she leveled it, and leaning up against the side of the pool with her swimmer's shoulders on the concrete, Phil golden brown and blonde in his guard chair, the two of them would trade stories for hours.
  We dated, but I imagine she probably loved Phil.
  And he was a good brother.
  He was worth loving. Or as a director once said about me to an amorous leading lady "He's great, seriously, a great guy...long as you don't date him."
  Oh well. It's a fault.
  But I know a worser one.
  I wrote Allison and thanked her for writing to my brother. She'd actually sent him a letter. In an envelope. She'd spelled out at some length his contribution to her life. Simple, yet generous. A professional woman with kids, she'd made the time.
  Lots of folks posted stuff to Phil. They got on social media and "shared" their condolences to a man not yet dead or they engaged in the power of positive thinking in public, but very few people put themselves down on paper to someone they had once loved. Very few took the time, alone, to compose their thoughts, to fold the sheet, find the stamp, wait for the response. One woman actually called me and said she was nervous. How would Phil respond if she wrote, what should she do? I almost laughed.
   Allison wrote me back and in short order told me about her career, her kids, and her husband. She repeated that Phil was unique and that now she valued more those days spent by a pool in a dying steel town that we were all desperate to get out of.
  I was almost pleased to sense, feel, intuit no nostalgia on her part for me. No references to two awkward kids trying to kiss, trying to meet, trying however briefly - and what was it, a month, a summer?-  to figure out some way to be "two" together, when all we'd ever been was us. Kids.
  Not even a ripple really of being someone's first love.
  And it's still there....the memory, how can it not be, of realizing, "Jesus Christ this is what it is to miss someone." To yearn for them. To ache.
  Maple avenue runs East/North East through Edgewood, the smallest borough in Pittsburgh, and 150 yards up on the left as you ascend from Swissvale avenue, is the local school.
  Allison's parents were dropping me off in front of the old building, a dramatic arched entrance that even then was glassed in, and as I waved she tilted her head back by the window and laughed. I think we were 13, 12? She was a year younger. We'd been at a swim meet or maybe I'd gone to one of her Pitt practices and been totally outclassed, I don't remember, but I do remember when they drove away a buddy of mine walked up and said "That's Allison Kean right?" And the simple sound of her name bent my heart around my throat and I thought, " I love Allison Kean."
  Right there, on the sidewalk, 13 stupid years old, how could it be? I thought it then and I think it now - how could I feel this at such an age? I didn't say a romantic word to her for another 2 years, didn't kiss her for three, and then we fucked it all up over nothing for over a decade- twenty somethings still avoiding each other at reunions- but I knew it then.
  My nephew is 13 now, and if he told me he was in love with some girl I'd chalk it up there with his love for Star Wars figurines and Percy Jackson books. I'd think, "Shallow boy."
  And I'd be right.
  And oh, how I would be wrong.
  And there's a longer story to be told, or that could be told and shouldn't ever, about first loves and starkest memories and the deepest engraved images burned on all of our brains and how they echo, when it comes to them, those first kids we adored, without reason. Without compare, because there was no one to compare them to. The particular blue grey of Allison's house that to this day makes me love winter skies and pewter and Jasper Johns paintings and the letters Van Gogh sent to his brother saying, "If you cannot learn grey, learn it every day in all its different shades, you can never paint." What chlorine and soda ash do to a young girl's golden hair and how the plaited sheen of it plastered toward a shoulder gives me pause. The shape of her nose, too long, too big, planted in my face when we kissed, but which makes me speak up when a pack of guys start talking about perfection and beauty and how one ever needed the other.
  But that's not what I'm thinking here, or trying to say....I was pleased that Allison, greying, grown up, childborne Allison, didn't stoke any nostalgia because it made me realize what I should have admitted eventually even as a teenager, and that was she didn't have any.
  People cry at Romeo and Juliet not because they both die, not because they both love each other- and they do- people cry because they know this love cannot be. It ONLY exists on a stage or in our minds but both are so powerful, so insanely powerful, they make us believe it can happen again and again. And because it has to end.
  It's strange but it helps to realize you were not the first true love of your first true love. The same thing didn't happen as she drove away in her parent's car, "I love David Conrad." And it didn't happen no matter how many times that kid tried to convince her it should.
  But we believe our own heart, even when its not quite moored to another's.
  That might be the worser fault.