Dear John, Dear Taylor, Dear Hadley, Dear Harper

Wednesday night and I’ve just come back from a run. I am dripping so profusely with sweat it is hard to hold a glass of water. Hadley and Harper are in the living room listening to Taylor Swift and eating cornbread I made to go with the veggie chili I also made but they won’t eat that. They’ll slice a cucumber, call it good, and then go to Dairy Queen.

“Mama,” Hadley says and I love that she still calls me Mama. “Mama,” she says, “come listen to this song,” and so I pour chill into a bowl, slice some cornbread and I head to where they are.

This is my favorite room in the house. It is the first room I put together all by myself. Of course Jesse did the actual work, but the color scheme, the furniture, painting the piano, that was all my idea and I am proud of how it turned out.

“This couch smells like Corby,” Harper says. She is draped over the couch when she tells me this and I think to take a bite of chili but it is too hot so I pick up the cornbread. It is low-fat so instead of butter – or, all the butter – I used Greek yogurt. It’s not bad. I am trying hard to lose weight, and I won’t go into all the calorie counting details of my life, but I’ve lost 15 pounds and I’m feeling a lot sturdier and I think I’m doing better but Harper is rock solid as a vampire when she tells me the couch smells like dog. “And now it’s going to smell like chlorine, too,” I say and she sniffs out a laugh.

“So what’s this song?” I ask, turning to Hadley.

“Listen, listen,” she says eyeing Harper who looks back at Hadley, smiling in some kind of inside joke. I feel like I’m about to be pranked but also I love that they have each other. I love that these two people get to be sisters.

They will attend the same school next year. That hasn’t happened since Harper was 8 and Hadley was 10. For two years they will go to the same school and that will be it. Hadley will be in college and then Harper and what day was it that I changed their last diaper? What night was the last night I read them a story before bed? When was the last time I picked them up to carry them on my hip? What was the name of the street we last crossed holding hands?

“What do you hear?” Hadley asks, and I listen to a guitar solo that is twangy and slippery smooth.

“This is John Mayer,” I say.

“No!” Hadley says. “This is Taylor Swift!” She is delighted. “She’s playing in his style!”

“This song is about him,” Harper says. “It’s to him.”

“Long were the nights when/my days once revolved around you…./You paint me a blue sky/Then go back and turn it to rain/And I lived in your chess game/But you changed the rules every day,” Taylor sings.

“He was awful to her,” Hadley says.

“Yeah, John Mayer is a jerk,” Harper adds.

They are looking at me expectantly and I feel like I’m in the principal’s office.

The girls know how much I love John Mayer’s songs. I’m fascinated by his writing process, and I’ve listened to probably too many interviews he’s given. I have a CD of him singing live in a bar where you can barely hear him over the laughing and the talking and the clinking of pint glasses. He’s barely background noise but he starts his song with a guitar solo that isn’t smooth or twangy, it’s jagged like marbles falling on the floor – each drop makes a beautiful but incomplete sound and then he pulls them all together to make the melody, and it’s like they all needed to fall to find their way to each other.

He’s singing to a girl; asking him to pencil him in when she can. He tells her that the worst part of all of this is he’ll always be available. He’ll always be around. “I would be free when you wanted me. If you wanted me,” he tells the girl. He knows about heartbreak, too, I think to tell the girls. He knows about writing a song from the hurt, too.

I don’t say anything, though. This is not about what John knows. This is not about what I know.

I watch them listen to Taylor sing, neither of them afraid of the heartbreak, both of them confident that they too will be fireworks that sparkle over some boy’s sad town. Because Taylor has given them language for heartbreak. Taylor has given them a story.

“He was horrible to her,” Hadley says. “Listen to that guitar.”

And I do, and I am proud of it, too. Taylor is playing the sound of John. She’s made something new from the pain that he marked her with.