My wife, Alyssa, keeps a picture of me on her desk. A picture of a picture actually. She took the picture of the picture on her phone in 2019 when she saw it hanging in the hallway of my family’s home in Lousiana. I don’t know how old I am in the picture. Maybe one? I’ve got a curly blonde fro and I’m wearing some androgynous plaid overall thing. It’s the closest thing I have to a baby picture. When the sun feels farthest away from the earth, I stare too long at the picture. I reach back in time and snatch him from out front of the camera. I show him the world I’ve built because of him and for him and for the him that comes after he’s long gone. I look in his eyes and go, “This side of forty years will feel like forever. And I fucking hate that so much for you. I hate that you won’t smile like this for a long time. But you will again. I promise.”
My dad gives me a picture of me that he had taken after he’d been given full custody of me and my brother during the most recent bout of custody battles. I was fifteen or sixteen. There are a few pubes sprouting up on my chin and a little spit-catcher right below my bottom lip. I’d just touched my first pair of boobs. The smile from the first picture slunk back to a reluctant smirk. My eyes are less wide, less full. I put my hand on his shoulder and tell him, “None of this has anything to do with you. And you never should have been put in the middle. You never should have been made responsible. All that weight was never yours to carry.”
My cousin and I took a picture at my grandmother’s funeral in Mississippi. I’m wearing all black: black suit, black shirt, black tie, black circles under my eyes. After this picture was taken, I went to a bar with my cousin and drank too much bourbon. I told him about the impending divorce from my first wife. He called it the Robbins Curse—all of our first marriages are destined to fail. I peek my head in the picture and say, “Nothing and no one you’re about to lose was worth keeping in the first place.”
It’s December 21, 2023. I wake up today the way I always do. The alarm goes off. Birds sing outside. A breeze slips in through the window and knocks the blinds around. My two older kids walk through the halls of our home, getting dressed for school. My youngest, almost two now, is still asleep in her crib. On the kitchen counter are a couple of presents and cards. Alyssa hands me a cup of coffee, kisses me. She tells me Happy Birthday, I love you. Today, I’m forty. The kids come downstairs and hug me hard and tell me to open their gift/card first. Before I leave to drop them off at school, Alyssa takes a picture of me. I’m thirty pounds heavier than I was at my grandmother’s funeral. Flecks of gray are scattered throughout my beard. I have lost friends. I have lost family. I quit believing the shitty things people wanted me to believe about myself because it was easier than becoming a healthy adult and managing their own insecurities. I’ve stopped picking fights with God. I fell in love and found that same love returned to me a hundred fold in Alyssa. I’ve stopped picking fights with myself. I found that something good can come from me in the shape of my three children. I learned what Kahlil Gibran meant when he said joy and sorrow are inseperable. And I understand what Townes Van Zandt was talking about when he said: To live’s to fly // low and high // so shake the dust off of your wings and the sleep out of your eyes.
One day no one will recognize me. The wrinkles will have cut canyons so deep into my face that you could bathe in my tears. My eyelids will droop low, hiding all this blue behind them. Every time I speak, it’ll register lower and lower, sinking deeper back into the earth. My mind will simply be whatever is left of it: memories cemented in time and in flesh, perpetuating my blood and my love until the earth dries up.
***
D.T. Robbins is the author of Birds Aren’t Real. He lives in Southern California.
Rejection Letters 