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My Grandfather's Letters

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#1091366 added June 30, 2025 at 11:07pm
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1967 (Week One)

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August 29, 1967

Somewhere between the sand and my sanity

Dear V,

The photos arrived this morning creased at the corners, but perfect. I spread them out on my cot like they were some sacred maps: your hands on that ugly thrift store lamp I swore would never work, the crooked bookshelf, the curtains you made from your old dresses. That tiny apartment, barely big enough to stretch in and yet it holds more of you than the sky above me.

It’s surreal, looking at it.

Like someone built a dream out of paint cans and sunlight and called it home.

I could almost smell your shampoo through the paper. Almost hear the faucet that never stops dripping. And God, I miss that sound. I miss all the sounds your laugh when you’re tired, your humming when you stir tea, the way your breath would slow when you fell asleep on my chest like it was the safest place in the world.

Now it’s just desert wind and static radios and the metallic whisper of boots on gravel.

You used to say I mumbled in my sleep. Maybe I still do. Maybe I’m talking to you without realizing, telling jokes that don’t make sense and quoting lyrics no one around here gets. The other guys think I’m a little off. I am. I’m cracked at the edges without you.

Sometimes I write words down and forget what they meant the next day.

Sometimes I dream in colors that haven’t been named yet.

I promise I’ll send more money home soon. Things are tight here, tighter than I’d like to admit but I’ll find a way. I always do. You’re building a world without me in it for now, but I swear I’m coming back to live in it. Even if I come back with more shadows than I left with.

Keep sending photos. Keep sending that you ness in envelopes. It’s how I find my way.

You are my compass, even when north stops making sense.

Yours, even scattered,
Paul

P.S. Tell the walls I said hello. Tell the leaky faucet I’ll fix it myself one day.

September 6, 1967

Cambridge Street, Apartment 2B

My dearest Paul,

Your letter arrived yesterday in the late afternoon, tucked between a phone bill and a flyer for discount dentures. I laughed when I saw your handwriting it looked like it had been written in the back of a truck, which I suppose it probably was.

I read it once while boiling water for tea, again while folding the laundry, and once more before bed. By then, I had it nearly memorized.

The boys in your unit may not understand the way you talk, but I do. I always have. That strange and lovely Paul logic, where boots and dreams and laughter all somehow live in the same breath. You say you’re cracked at the edges maybe so but you’re the most whole soul I know.

The apartment looks different in those pictures, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s the lighting, or maybe it’s just that you’re not here. Everything is a little quieter without you. The faucet still drips, by the way. I tried to fix it with a wrench and some hopeful language it didn’t work. You’ll have to keep your promise.

I’ve started putting records on while I cook, just to fill the space. Sometimes I imagine you dancing behind me, off beat and grinning like a madman. (Yes, I still remember the time you tried to waltz in the cereal aisle.)

You asked me to keep sending “me” so here I am:

I’m still wearing your old flannel shirt when it gets cold at night.

I’m still scribbling little poems in the margins of cookbooks.

And I’m still waiting, not just like a girl waits for a letter, but like a life waits to be picked up again.

I miss your heartbeat under my cheek, the safe rhythm of it. But more than that, I miss being understood the way you do without even trying.

I believe in you, Paul. I believe in us. Even if some days are quiet and long, even if my hands shake when I miss you too much I believe in the day you walk through that door again.

Until then, I’ll leave the porch light on in my mind.

Come home to me when you can.

I’ll be here.

Love,
Vera

P.S. The lamp finally works. I think it just needed a little patience.

John slipped Vera’s letter carefully back into its envelope, noticing it felt thicker than the others. He ran his thumb along the inside, and there tucked at the bottom he found them.

Photos.

A handful, faded and curling at the edges, their glossy finish dulled with time. He held them delicately, like they might fall apart if he breathed too hard.

The apartment.

Small, sunlit. A little cramped, a little chaotic but somehow full of life. There was a plant in the window trying its best, a bookshelf clearly built by someone guessing as they went, and

“There it is,” John muttered with a crooked smile.

The lamp.

It was hideous. Squat, with a shade that looked like it had been stolen off a circus tent and a base shaped vaguely like a pineapple that had once aspired to be gold. Even in black and white, it radiated poor taste. And yet, there was something endearing about it like it had been chosen on a dare and kept around on a promise.

John looked up from the photo and scanned the attic.

And there, in the corner, half swallowed by a blanket and cloaked in years of dust and memory, it stood.

The same ugly lamp. Still here. Still standing.

He let out a soft laugh half disbelief, half affection and got up, crossing the attic to kneel beside it. He brushed the dust off the lampshade gently, like waking up an old friend.

“It really is awful,” he whispered, “but...I get it now.”

He didn’t know what he expected to find up here. A few family heirlooms, maybe a photo or two. But instead, he was unraveling a love story layered with war, poetry, longing, and lamps that refused to die.

John reached into the box again, fingers now careful in a way they hadn’t been when he first started. Every letter felt like a thread in some long forgotten melody and he didn’t want to skip a note.

But this next envelope wasn’t like the others.

It wasn’t bound in string, or scrawled with his grandfather’s looping handwriting.
It was stiff. Official. The paper yellowed, but the emblem in the corner was still unmistakable: United States Department of Defense.

His breath caught in his chest.

He turned it over and slowly unfolded the tri-folded letter inside, the seal long cracked with age. The typewritten words were cold. Measured. As if the pain they delivered had to be kept polite:

Department of the United States Marine Corps
Washington, D.C. 20350
December 3, 1967

Mrs. Vera Lennon,
Cambridge Street, Apt. 2B
Boston, Massachusetts

Dear Mrs. Lennon,

It is with deep regret that I must inform you that your husband, Corporal Paul S. Lennon, has been reported Missing in Action as of November 24, 1967, in connection with operations in the Quảng Trị province of the Republic of Vietnam.

At this time, efforts to locate Corporal Lennon are ongoing. No conclusive evidence has been found to determine his condition or whereabouts. You will be informed immediately should additional information become available.

We understand this news is profoundly distressing, and we extend to you the deepest sympathies and continued support of the United States Marine Corps.

Please do not hesitate to contact our office should you have any questions or require assistance.

With respect,
Lt. Col. James R. Whitaker

Personnel Affairs, USMC

John stared at the page for a long moment, the edges of it trembling slightly in his grip.

Missing in action

Three words that had the force of thunder, even after all these decades.

He could almost picture Vera standing in the kitchen, sunlight leaking in through the lace curtains, her hands shaking as she opened this letter. A life frozen in the space between knowing and not.

And Paul...her Paul. Dreamer, poet, goofball, marine.

Gone. Or lost. Or both.

John shifted another stack of envelopes aside and found it, not in a bundle like the others, not tucked with postage or string, but alone, folded in a worn envelope without a stamp. His grandmother’s neat handwriting was on the front, but there was no address. No date on the outside. Just one word:

Paul.

December 6, 1967

Paul,

They told me you were missing.

They used those words like they didn’t carry fire in them. Like “missing” was something that just...happens. Like you misplace a photograph or a sock, and not a whole person. Not you.

I read the letter three times. I didn’t cry until the stove timer went off. Isn’t that strange? I burned the bread, and that’s when I fell apart.

The house is too quiet, Paul. Not just silent empty. The kind of quiet that sinks into your bones and presses on your chest like a weight. I still play your records while I cook, but they sound different now. Hollow, like the music forgot you’re supposed to be here.

I keep thinking of the last thing you said to me in that postcard: “Tell the faucet I’ll fix it myself one day.”

And now...what? I’m supposed to believe you’re just gone? That you vanished into some jungle halfway around the world, and I’m expected to wait politely for a second letter that may never come?

I don’t know how to do this, Paul.

I don’t know how to sleep on a bed that only dips on one side. I don’t know how to listen to people complain about the weather when the man I love might be hurt, or worse. I don’t know how to be the strong woman everyone thinks I am when the only place I ever felt safe was lying on your chest, tracing that scar you hated and dreaming about names for children we haven’t met yet.

I wear your flannel shirt most nights now. It smells like cedar and faint memory. I keep it folded on your side of the bed during the day like I’m trying to fool the room into thinking you’re just out getting groceries.

I don’t know if you’ll ever read this. I don’t know if you’re alive.

But I do know this:

You are not gone.

You are not a line in a report.

You are not a silence I have to learn to live with.

You are the man who used to sing Beatles lyrics into my neck when we danced in the living room.

You are the hands that held me when my world was coming undone. You are the letters that built a home from words.

So I will keep writing, even if no one ever reads them.

I will keep the porch light on.

And I will believe, because if you’re still out there, I know you’re trying to get back to me.

Come home, Paul.

Please.

Always yours,
V

By the time he reached the line “I burned the bread, and that’s when I fell apart” his vision had blurred.

She had never sent this.

A letter not meant for the world, not even for Paul in the end. A release. A wound. A whispered promise she’d never stop waiting.

John wiped his glasses on his sleeve, trying not to smudge the corners of the letter as he re-read it. Slower this time. Feeling each word settle deeper into his chest.

It wasn’t just the pain that hit him, it was the love underneath it. The devotion. His grandmother’s voice, stripped of all pretense. A woman cracking in silence because no one had taught her how to grieve a question mark.

And for the first time, John realized something that both broke him and made him sit up straighter:

Vera; his funny, sharp, stubborn grandmother who always seemed a little distant when the news came on; had never truly closed the door on him.

John sat back on his heels and let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Gran...” he whispered.

Word Count: 2080

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