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Dear Claire,

I told my therapist that we used to write letters. She said I should keep doing it, because supposedly it’ll help me process my feelings. She said I needed to write everything down.

My assignment today is to recall a happy memory. (In case you wondered, it’s the only kind of assignment I’m doing. My teachers said I could take incompletes this semester and finish up during the summer. Believe it or not, it was Hastings’s idea.) So anyway, here’s a memory from a long time ago.

It was my fifth birthday, and Mom and Dad had rented a big white tent for the backyard.

It was like they were hosting a wedding!

There were bouquets of balloons, towers of cupcakes, and multicolored streamers hanging from the trees.

There was a clown on a unicycle and a little pony we could ride, and every kid in the neighborhood was there, and they were all screaming their heads off in delight.

At first I felt like a princess. Everything was so big and bright and wonderful, and it was all for me.

But it didn’t take very long before I started to feel really small and really lost. Everything was such an expensive spectacle.

I was five—did my party really need waiters?

Hand-calligraphed place cards? A Pocket Lady, handing out presents from her giant skirt?

There were so many people at my party, and half of them I’d never even seen before. I’d lost our parents in the crowd.

And then you came out of nowhere and found me, hiding behind a rosebush, and you picked me up and you carried me to the far corner of the garden.

“Here,” you said, “I made this for you, Emmie. Happy birthday.” And you set me down next to a tiny, beautiful house constructed out of sticks and leaves, glass beads and glitter glue.

“This is a fairy house, and soon there will be fairies living in it,” you said to me.

“You might not ever see them, but they’ll be watching over you, granting you little wishes, and keeping you safe. ”

It was the best present I ever got.

It’s too late for these wishes, but I’m making them anyway:

I wish I could’ve made you a fairy house, Claire.

I wish I could’ve kept you safe.

And I wish you could call me and tell me how to go on. Instead I’ve got to fumble through life without you.

I will never understand why you did what you did, and it will never be okay.

But I’m going to have to try to be okay.

I realize that if I’m going to write everything down, like I’m supposed to, it’d never fit in a letter. It’d have to be more like a whole book. A book about a girl who wanted to save the world but only ended up saving herself.

It doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment, does it? But maybe that’s all anyone’s really able to do anyway. Oh, Claire, I wish you could’ve saved yourself. I wish you had chosen to live.

The world is smaller without you in it. It’s also worse.

But I’m going to try to make it better, for others, and for myself.

I miss you. I love you.

Forever and always ,

your little sister