I have been sitting at this desk for three nights trying to write this letter. Every time I start, I cross it out because nothing sounds right. So tonight I am just going to write it the way I would say it to you, standing at the gate.

America is loud. Even the quiet here has something underneath it. Cars that never stop, the neighbor's television through the wall, air that smells like concrete and nothing familiar. My Aunt Laurel's house is nice. She put yellow curtains in my room and a real desk with a lamp. I think she is trying her best. I am trying to let her.

The houses here are so close together you could almost pass a plate through the window to the next one. But Auntie Laurel doesn't know a single neighbor. Not one. I said good morning to the woman next door and she just looked at me and kept walking. America is strange. I don't know if I should keep saying it or just stop.

I started school last week and Lenwell, I have to tell you something. They don't wear uniforms here. Not a single one. Some of these children come to school looking like they just rolled out of bed. I saw a girl in the hallway with her shirt so wrinkled I wanted to take an iron to it myself. You know how my mother was about our uniforms. Every pleat sharp. I thought about her standing at the ironing board and I had to go to the bathroom and collect myself before I could walk into class. Can you imagine going to school looking like that? I cannot.

I think about you every single day. I want you to know that. Not in the way people say it and forget it by the next week. I mean every morning when I wake up and the room smells wrong, I think about you. When I pass something that looks like a cane field, which isn't often but it happened once on a drive and my heart nearly stopped, I think about you. When it rains here, which it does a lot, I think about standing in that rain with you and not caring one bit about anything else in the world.

I think about the morning you came to say goodbye. Your uniform pressed so perfect. The sugar cane you put in my hand. I kept it until there was nothing left to keep and then I kept the memory of it instead. I don't think I will ever stop keeping it.

You were my first real thing, Lenwell. My first person who saw me and wanted to. Whatever happens from here, whatever life I end up living in this loud American place with its yellow curtains and its wrinkled children, what we had belongs to me and nobody can take it. Nobody can take you out of my chest because that is where you live now and that is where you will stay. I am going to think about you forever. I mean that the way the sea means it when it keeps coming back to shore.

Write me back. Tell me about the cane fields. Tell me if Mr. Pemberton is still excited about rivers. Tell me something ordinary, so I can close my eyes and be there for a minute.