Dear Major Tom

Lily Pratt 

Dear Major Tom, 

I’m writing to you because my Mum used to say that you made everything better when she was younger. I’ve finished reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower and I thought I could use talking to a friend, as well. 

(I know that you’re not a real person but I can’t write without addressing somebody. Although I do know that is not the point). 

My Mum is a beautiful lady with grey eyes. She doesn’t think she’s very beautiful and doesn’t like having her picture taken. Which I think is a shame. My brother is the photogenic one and he knows it. But he doesn’t like being alone and sometimes Mum admits that she wouldn’t mind living by herself.

Tonight my Dad drove me to the fish and chip shop in our town because I was down about not being able to find a job. The loneliness is starting to creep back in. A loneliness that I keep trying to pretend is a comfortable solitude.

My grandma is very sick at the moment and I could tell that Dad was sad. It had been raining all afternoon and the streets were bright and green like lizard skin. On the way back I sat with the fish and chips on my lap and it began to rain lightly again. Out the window I noticed an older man in a similar suit to my Dad trying to unlock his front door. All of the lights in his house were turned off and I felt sad that he had to come back to a dark, quiet house. That there was no one to turn the lights on for him.

I sometimes have to remind myself that it won’t be one extraordinary act which changes my life but instead a series of small, gentle recognitions. My cold, quiet things. Right now it is winter and I am reminded constantly that everything is changing. 

It makes me frightened yet hopeful in a way I am still trying to understand. 

Right after my grandma got sick I went to Norway to stay with my best friend who lives in Oslo. We have been friends since university, and at one point we were something more. She has the bluest eyes I have ever seen and I like to take her picture.

As I walked towards security the officer smiled at me and asked the same question he always does.  

You look very happy. 

Yes. I love it here. 

Are you here to see your boyfriend?

Better. My best friend. 

I held up my prosecco wrapped in the duty free bag. 

He laughed. 

Don’t break too many hearts. 

There are lots of brilliant things which have happened to me this year. Such as Oslo, and skinny dipping in the harbour with a Norwegian man I hardly knew, Dubrovnik and swimming naked again, but this time with you, the tattoo bar, passing Patti Smith a poem I wrote for her in a bookshop in Tokyo, the Buddhist temple I was blessed at, and swimming behind the tiger shark in Thailand. And nearly dying in that storm, on the boat so close to the island, and feeling completely alive. 

And watching the two older women gossip in the sea whilst my brother showed me how far he could swim without taking a break. I will write to you about all of these things. 

I wish I had taken a million pictures because it’s so hard to write about love. 

My friend and I screamed love naked in the sea. We had been drinking for free in a bamboo hut by the water, and the moon hung over the sea like a match set to strike oil. I could make out the outlines of the men from the bar wading through the tide towards us. I love you, I choked on the seawater. Let’s leave before they find us, she smiled as we drunkenly lurched towards the sand. 

My solitude exists because I have friendships where I can scream the things I love in an ocean full of oil. And a beautiful Mum with grey in her hair.