Dear Madeleine

Dear Madeleine,
         For some reason, I rather doubt you will receive my letter. The odds are just too stacked out of your favor for the notion to be very plausible. But in all hope against hope, I write to you anyways. It's rather lonesome here, Madeleine. I write to you now because I have recently found myself in a situation rather similar to yours. My room is entirely white. Isolated. Door locked twenty-four hours a day. But there is some stationary and a mail slot in the door, and though they say the isolation is necessary for healing, it is not easy. So I am taking advantage of the tools at my disposal and creating a sort of pseudo-companionship in my written attempt to contact you. My room is moderately sized, rectangular, and narrow, a window wall overlooking some sort of forest to one side and a blank wall with a door on the other. My bed and a desk are against the wall and between the two is what I presume to be a second door. It's completely flush with the wall to the point that the only indication of its existence is a thin rectangular outline and an indent handle like one you might find on a glass door leading out to a patio. So, I believe it is a door. But it too is locked. Over the few weeks I've been in here there has been only silence. I heard only silence and the thoughts in my head. Both constantly remind me that I'm lonely. I miss them both. I miss you, Madeleine. I feel as though I have wasted so many chances, hurt so many people. I don't think the isolation is working. Perhaps these letters to you, and hopefully, your letters in exchange, will alleviate some of the ever-crushing singularity I feel. Despite the crated silence however, I've recently began hearing noises beyond that phantom door. The person on the other side must have noticed that door as well as I, as they began tapping on it just yesterday. There was a repeated rapping from the other side for a very long period of time. The knocker was rather relentless in their search for interaction, so I decided to reply. Much time later we were still knocking back and fourth, acknowledging each other by repeating one-another's patterns. And to my delight, the knocking continued again this morning. Between letters to you and my new through-the-wall companion, perhaps I will no longer have to stunt this loneliness on my own.

Dear Madeleine,
         It's been two weeks since I last wrote you. I apologize as I sincerely thought I would be writing more at the time. A turn of events has left me rather occupied however. On the third day of knocking upon the phantom door, in the middle of another exchange, the door slid away without warning, vanishing into the wall, and revealing a man sitting on the other side just as startled as I was by the abrupt change. He is tall and lean, deep tanned skin, thick dark curls matted with color, and irises so dark a brown they can only be properly described as ebony. We made contact instantly, not induced by our desire for human interaction, but rather due to the fact that the door vanished while I was mid knock, and my clenched fist swung it's way into his chest. We sat in long silence for perhaps two maybe three minutes before I attempted to introduce myself. He did not return the offer. The man simply stood up and strode into my room without a word. He walked directly to my wall on the far side, stood there, cocked his technicolor head and said, "It's blank." I promptly assured him that yes, it was in fact a white wall, and he returned, "I don't like it." He then turned on heel, strode back into the room from which he came, and re-emerged with a paint pallet that he began to dip his fingers into.
As he smeared colorful streaks onto the wall before him, I decided to return the favor and explore his room, which upon entering, I found to be an exact mirror image of my own but infinitely more colorful and lively. Paint strewn on the walls, wood and clay sculptures, nuts and bolts and self-made tinker-toys, pressed flowers in frames, patchwork blankets on his bed. I don't know that I ever truly knew refreshment until that moment. So many days in a bleak white room, I hadn't even realized that I missed colors. When I returned to my own room I found that he had left me a vividly colored floral landscape painted to my wall. Madeleine, it is the most beautiful piece of art I have ever beheld. But perhaps I am just biased. I turned to thank him for it, or perhaps to simply ask him his name, and I found him to be dead asleep on my bed. I was gone not five minutes.
He's such a strange man, Madeleine. He rarely talks. He's been a rather delightful companion these few weeks, although I didn't learn his name until he decided one of the paintings on my wall needed a signature and in neat calligraphic curves signed, "Diego." But, chatty as he is not, he's undoubtedly endearing. As sweet and loving as a child might be. The door now opens every day at sunrise, and he immediately steps in. If ever he finds me sad in my bed he paints another picture on my wall, which he usually follows up by laying on top of me and falling asleep. Though his gestures, of art and invasive slumber, can be hard to understand, I have decided they are loving and grateful ones. Sometimes he refuses to leave my room before sundown and once the door has shut for the night he crawls into my bed and hoists me over him like a heated blanket. I don't oppose; he is a very cozy pillow. Other nights he carries me into his room and holds onto me like a security blanket. There is much I do not yet know about him, Madeleine. But heaven knows I'm going to be with him long enough to find out.

Dear Madeleine,
Since I last wrote you, I spent my first day without Diego in a long time. Diego has an older sibling, Stefan, who comes to visit him periodically. Despite our privileged interaction, the isolation rule plan is still in place. Diego was locked in his room at sundown a few weeks ago, and the door refused to open the next morning when Stefan came to visit. I am still unable to see anyone beyond Diego. The day after the visit however, the door opened at dawn just as usual, and Diego ran in. I greeted him eagerly. He seemed perkier than I had before seen him, certainly chattier. I learned what Diego's voice truly sounds like that day. We spend a lot of time in his room now. I much prefer it there. His artwork is elating. I feel we are both happier in it's colorful environment.
Diego spends most of his time sleeping. And when he's not sleeping he's either making art or crying. He is a creature of much habit. Very odd habit. He's so strange Madeleine, with his impulsive creating and the same repeating pattern on every canvas he's provided. But I have come to love him dearly in this time I've spent with him. We talk, make art together, and sleep side by side. We tell each other about our families and friends. I've told him all about you, Madeleine. He has even requested to meet you someday. I anticipate the day we can finally meet again and Diego may come along. You of all people would find him enchanting.
We told each other about why each of us is here as well. I told him about- well you know... them. He told me a bit about his loss as well. Neither of us could say much, and the whole conversation just fizzled away into shaky gasps and tears until we simply held onto each other and cried. I hate to see him cry Madeleine. But Diego cries a lot. Much more often than I. Most of the time he begins to cry I simply crawl into his lap and he holds onto me until the tears subside.
When his emotions are highest is when Diego most likes to draw or paint or sculpt. He says it's relaxing, therapeutic, makes him feel as though he's purging the feelings from himself and into something more pure and raw. One day after he had been crying again, he produced a lump of clay from a stash under his bed and began working it on his desk. "My emotions are my thoughts," he said, "my thoughts are in my mind, my mind controls my arms which control my hands which work the clay into shapes. By making art I am making what hurts me into something that instead brings me happiness." Other times, he says, he just cries until the pain stops. That's why we're here, isn't it? To cry until the pain stops? Or to make the pain stop so we stop crying? It's all the same really. Either way, we come in bad health and, hopefully, leave the opposite.
I got curious, Madeleine, as I am sure you have by now as well, as to just what led Diego to this low point in his life. I asked him while he was slathering a muddy clay concoction onto his walls. He stopped with a sigh and wiped his hands off on his already mated hair then strode over near me and flopped down face first on his bed. He groaned aggressively into his pillow. "I shouldn't feel this way," he growled into the white fluff, "It's not right. It's not fair to them. I'm a jerk." I tried to reassure him that he's just sad, and that his feeling are his own, he deserves to feel however he feels, but he wouldn't have it. He lifted his head and snapped, "I'm selfish! They deserve better." He then shoved himself out of bed and knocked a vase off the desk to see it shatter. After a moment of silence his eyes went red and he let out a sob. He held on to me for a long time after that. I decided not to ask him about it again.
I've grown very attached to him Madeleine. I rather detest whoever broke his heart and I've hardly heard a word about them.

Dear Madeleine,
I am still unsure if you are receiving my letters. I now know you are not returning my letters however, as the staff began allowing Diego and I to receive mail addressed to our persons and there was not a letter from you to be had. I did get a letter from your address, but it was not from you. It was from your hospital staff... I received the letter a few days ago, addressed, "To the sender of the letters to Madeleine Maria." I doubt I'll open it. I already know what it says. But of course I don't really know what it says. And as long as it remains sealed, I may continue to write to you as an active being without any affirmation of the same or otherwise. Here or there, you keep me company simply with the existence of your name.
Diego received a letter a few days ago as well. He hasn't spoken since he got it. Balled up in a small mass on his bed, swaddled in his hand made blue-black quilt, crying silently but incessantly. Just a few days before hand we had been together happily, smiling, but the day we received our mail the door did not open, and the days since have been silent, and nights cold. Neither room is happy now. Mine is evermore lonesome than before and his had its cheer stripped away in the contents of an envelope and replaced by a wasteland of squandered art. The debris has been clearing away bit by bit each day, but there was too much to evaporate in a single night. The floor transformed into a prismatic sea, black ink sea creatures swimming through the rainbow waves of glass and pottery. Acrylic and canvas islands pepper the ocean of devastation and the once picture sky now rages with splattered storm clouds. And at the center of the wreckage sits the dark lump that now serves as Diego, an artwork so damaged that the sight of him made the rest invisible.
Madeleine, what is it like to hear news of your own death? To find out that your destruction is near on a piece of paper? Is there any way to console people out of their own death this way? I miss Diego dearly, Madeleine, and if there is not something to be done, I doubt if he will ever leave this place. The poor thing, already weak and self-destructive as he was, received in the mail that day a wedding invitation addressed to him. And the door did not open. They had read the letter. They knew.
All sense of self-reconstruction was lost in that moment he opened the envelope and immediately he reverted back to a state of despair, deeper and darker than even that of the very initiation of his pain. I could hear his cries even in my sealed room. A complete loss of hope reverberating through the soundproofed walls. I wondered if maybe they could control that, too. Diego feels such guilt now. When I try to sleep at night, I don't cry for myself anymore, Madeleine.
The wall shook as beautiful artworks perished against it. Shouts followed by a shatter, then more violent screams. His anger translated into my own panic. I shouted in response, clawed at the crevice of the door and called Diego's name. He never replied. He wasn't lucid enough to hear me. The door couldn't be forced open and the staff wouldn't grant me entry. The endeavor eventually became hopeless and I was left simply to sit and wait and worry until the door decided to let me pass. But it never did. I didn't see Diego that day, nor did I see the sun as the scape outside my window remained uncertain clouds and fog until the light in the grey faded away into the blackness of the night. That was the first night I had spent without him in nearly a month.
I need you to understand Madeleine that in these short few months I have spent with him I have grown closer and more attached to Diego than any other human on this earth. I care for him dearly- I might even dare to use the word love again- and thought of what was happening to him was nearly unbearable knowing I had no power to help. The thought of the person whose action put him here is a purely bitter one to me now.
Diego's rage eventually concluded, replaced by muffled sobs, continuing for nearly the entirety of the day, until his sounds stopped all together. When the door remained shut through the night I lay awake in my bed in fear. When it didn't open the next day, I panicked, fearing the worst.
The door finally opened in the midst of the second night. In my sleepless worry I was hyperaware of the opening and raced to be beside my friend again, relived to find him sleeping in his bed.
Madeleine, it has now been four days. Diego has refused to move from that spot on his bed. And now, upon the floor by the window, in the only remaining vase, sits a bright spring Daffodil. The entirety of Diego's room now holds a perpetual darkness, but the little flower seems to pierce it just a touch with its cheerful yellow petals.
I do not leave his room now, continually trying to urge him up as he cries, but he remains stubbornly cocooned in grief. I sit on his floor as I write you this, beside what was once a miniature bust of myself residing on his bedside, shattered in his blind rage, swept up and left forgotten the shade of this corner.

Dear Madeleine,
Diego's fit came to an abrupt end a couple weeks ago. After a week of inactivity- a visit from his distressed brother punctuating the infinite time- Diego was suddenly out of bed and back to full fervor. Too much in fact. He's obsessive now. No more leisurely chatting, no drifting from painting to drawing to tinkering, and no excess sleeping. Almost no sleeping at all, to be frank. He spends his waking hours pouring over a- a flower- a flower his brother gave him upon his visit at the end of Diego's violent episode.
He is always near it now, sitting by the window, moving it into sunbeams, giving it more water, often just staring at the bloom. The whole situation is unnerving. Something feels extremely unhealthy about it.
A book on plant care arrived in his room the other day. I suppose they believe Diego's new obsession will be good for him. I hope they're right. I hope that, for all the silence I once again endure, it pays off for my friend.
I am lonely again Madeleine. This time, pitted below a flower. Thrown out like last year's trend. Sometimes I worry I'll never be important to anyone.
I don't think it's the lonesome that ever truly hurts someone; it's knowing that you were deliberately left behind because someone decided you were less than something else. Because someone you love doesn't love you the same.

Dear Madeleine,
I found Diego in a puddle of tears beside a shriveled flower. He was just as shriveled. He simply wept on about the things he lost, people he lost, because of who he is. He couldn't handle it. He never wanted to leave this room.
He expressed to me, from his weeping fit on the floor by his bed, that he could find nothing he had done wrong, deliberately or mistakenly, other than simply exist as he is.
He felt he was wrong, broken. He couldn't be the person everyone said he was supposed to be so everything that came to him crumbled there after. His love included.
He felt he could not be loved as he was. There was something wrong with him. So the universe had decided to strip him of all he wanted but did not deserve for his impurity. Even the little daffodil.
Fresh wounds. Gashes that time wouldn't heal; infected by time instead. The hearts of the hospital couldn't all be sewn back together. He was sobbing not just for his own situation, Madeleine, but I felt he was sobbing for every heart in this ward that felt too ashamed, too guilty, too weak to do so. He tried so hard to be strong, be good to the wishes of others, but he couldn't. He wept over the shriveled flower, the dead remains of his last, desperate hope.
Love is an evasive thing, Madeleine. There's no way to catch it. And when it flies away all we remember are our own flaws. Diego felt guilt, like it was entirely his fault. He felt he wasn't allowed to be sad about it because his love deserved respect. But Madeleine, after watching Diego, weeping on the floor over his floral false idol, I realized that the tears after heartbreak are not for the love we lost, they are for our own sake. We deserve our aftermaths.
Watching him weep, I finally felt my own tears roll in harmony with his and I dropped to the floor to weep beside him. In a moment, I was suddenly in his arms, crying on his shoulder.
We had lost love, but I realized then, it had reincarnated its self in each other.
"God, I loved Cameron."
And Madeleine, I called his name, three syllables slipping sweet from my lips and in that breath I felt its power- the power of a name- brush the air about my head, Diego's desires came crashing down upon me.
Diego. Diego. A name can be merely a label or it can be the essence of an entire person. Diego lay prisoner to a person- a name. They try to free him with isolation and time but that only strengthens the name's mystique. Cameron. The name is a cell in which Diego is held prisoner, calling out constantly for release to a prison which doesn't respond, doesn't listen, doesn't care. He knows he is alone, he knows the cage is open for him to walk away yet every night.... Cameron...
Cameron...
         Cameron...
He wants to be free, tries to escape in fits of rage but no amount of slaughtered art will ever free him because he is a willing prisoner and to escape he need only turn the knob and step out...
But Diego in his gentleness, Diego in his loyalty, Diego with his heart soft to the touch of the lips, the hands, the heart, the soul...stays loyally within the cage- the name. He sees no door, He refuses to see the door; there is only the cage. Cameron is not a name; it is Diego's cage. C-A-M-E-R-O-N--CAGE. His heart is a bird that thinks its wings are still clipped because it is still inside the cage. Cameron. Cameron. Cage. Cameron. Cage. Cage. Cage. CAGE.

And this hospital... this place of supposed reconciliation for the heart broken... it cannot free him. Only he can do that, all in good time. And what wounds time won't heal, well, that's what I'm here for; that's what the hospital paired us together for, to heal what they cannot.
And as we sat together crying, everything changed.
That was nearly two weeks ago, Madeleine. Tomorrow, Diego and I are finally scheduled for discharge. And so an era of our lives comes to an end. The past doesn't matter the way it used to anymore. It's time we get on with our lives, and in our puddle of tears and mutual grief, the cage finally let him go, let us go. Or rather, we let go of our cage. Its incredible to think of all that we may finally do together. I plan to take him to see you Madeleine, and deliver this letter by hand to your new home in Graceland, Chicago.
And, Madeleine, Diego tells me, after so long surrounded by visual, he can't wait to listen to music again.