Dear Hannah,

How long has it been? Six, seven years? Time just seems to slip away from you, doesn’t it? Today, as I was riding the bus north, I had an inexplicable, overpowering urge to get off and walk through our old neighborhood. So I went by my old house on Chickamauga, with its large porch and the window I kicked in after the landlord locked my things inside when he was trying to evict me for painting life-size murals of women on the walls.

Large oak trees and enormous maples, green and sultry while we were there, stood now in skeletal form, their branches raised high towards the heavens as if beseeching the gods for mercy against a harsh world. They shimmied a bit in the January wind and it seemed to me that they were shivering with cold—perhaps a bit lonely, too, for the house appears to have been abandoned for some time. A vine trailed through and around the window with an elegiac beauty, as if to deny the property’s starkness.

In that strange apartment I had the cats in one room, and my dog, Abraham, in the other, for he was a wild thing and would have mauled the cats to death. The apartment was built in such a way that one had to go outside to reach the back room where my cats, Mittens and Reagen, lived. The room itself was bare save for a mat on the floor, a handmade quilt of reds, yellows, purples, and black fashioned for me by my mother when I was a child.

The room seemed magical to me, for the walls were made of many tiny windows and the summer was so lush with greenery that it was like living in a tree house. I spent many happy hours in that room, reading Waugh, Proust, and Pushkin—books I can barely muster through these days. The room had a tin roof, so when it rained there was a gentle tap tap tap like the fingers of fairies in and around my senses. If I raised the window just enough to keep the cats from getting out and let the outside world of trees in, I could smell the rich, brown earth with its world of tiny insects living lives of their own outside while we lived ours, safe and dry, inside our magical room. 

I then walked rapidly to Hiawassee to see the house where you had lived with David and your little boy, Mark. When first you moved away with your new family, I thought, they’ll be back soon. But after a time, when season followed season, still there was no Hannah wheeling round the corner in her silver Volkswagen convertible, with her long mane of curly hair, honest eyes, and forthright speech. I began to realize that a remarkable person, an extraordinary friendship, had served its time and was now a memory, ever fading. Sometimes it seems like you left only yesterday; other times it feels as though it has been years since I knew you. But more and more frequently, it’s like our friendship never occurred at all, but was only a figment of my imagination.

It’s strange how well we conversed and understood one another; I was already in my mid-50s and you were a blossoming 22. But matters of the heart are ageless, and we connected on a deep level beyond time and its limitations. Your breakup with that brilliant, manic poet whom you imagined could fill in all the vacant spaces inside of you—such as the father who abandoned you when you were 3—left you a crumpled ruin for awhile, but you rose up and soared again. You went on a journey to find your lost father, only to learn that some things are better left undiscovered. I remember how you threw your head back and laughed when you told me about it.

“He’s totally clueless,” you said, and never mentioned your father again to me.

I must apologize for not liking your new husband at first. He’s too good to be true, I had thought. But he was every bit as good as he seemed. The love he has for you is real and true and will last for a lifetime. 

I do not know if we shall ever meet again, but know that you were a remarkable event for me in my life. The light that seemed to follow you wherever you were landed on me. It has never left me, though I am not always able to see it.

I give you thanks, and a wish that you can transcend all the daily miseries and commonplace annoyances with laughter that echoes throughout the planet. I will hear it, dear Hannah. I hear it now.

Donna Johnson

Donna Johnson describes herself as a person who thrives on breaking the rules other people have made while also creating rules for herself that do make sense. “My rules do not necessarily follow the law set out by the government and law-abiding citizens,” she says. “They follow an inner law, one unto myself, and when I attempt to go outside this, to conform, disaster follows.” Her stories are often about people who are not recognized by others, who may even seem invisible, but “they often have a great truth to share if one but listens.”