Open Letter #6 - Your Voice
- Terry a O'Neal
- Mar 16
- 3 min read
Sunday, March 16, 2025, 11:04 AM EST
Dearest Albert,
I shudder at the thought. No woman of substance has ever wished to be a pawn in a man’s game. Women do not seek to be placeholders in someone else’s story; they long for their words to carry weight, to carve meaning beyond themselves. Perhaps that is all I ever was to you—a fleeting moment, a passing thought, something easily placed on a shelf and forgotten. Maybe that is why it comes so easily to you, this effortless erasure, as if I had never existed at all.
I hadn’t realized, until now, how hearing your voice again would make me tremble, how it would unearth memories so vivid I could reach back and touch them. I wonder why, after all these years, the sound of you still does this to me. I close my eyes, and suddenly, time rewinds. I feel your presence as if no time has passed at all. I have spent years deliberately avoiding old interviews, keeping my distance from the past—except in those moments when I find myself knee-deep in writing, crafting scenes that demand the sound of your voice to anchor them in truth.
How heavy it must have been for you to read aloud the fate of Billy, in the chapter where he was found guilty, tried as an adult, sentenced to death, and killed in the electric chair. How painstaking it must have been to read those words again, to let them leave your mouth and take form in the air. I can still hear the weight in your voice, the slow smack of saliva between syllables, the resolve in your tone as you discussed the inspiration behind the story. “Death is running loose on our streets…” you said, speaking of your young cousin murdered in his sleep. There was strength in your delivery, yet something in you faltered when you spoke of him, as if grief had never loosened its grip.
And when you spoke of December 10, 1965—the day you were shot in the neck in a rice paddy field in Vietnam—something in your voice wavered, or perhaps it was your thoughts that faltered. I heard it, that faint tremor beneath your words, the brief unraveling as you described the blood, the waiting, the way night crept in before the choppers arrived. You lay there, pressing your finger into the wound, holding your own life between your hands, suspended in the fragile space between survival and surrender.
You mentioned being born in Vietnam, as if war itself had reshaped you, stripped you down, rebuilt you into something new. And yet, for all that you gained, for all that you survived, you still harbor such bitterness, such meanness in your heart.
The echoes of a child’s scream from long ago still ring in your ears, a ghostly refrain you cannot silence. The suddenness of death, of war, of fate itself—it has followed you like a shadow. Billy’s execution, your own brush with death—they mirror each other, reflections cast in different waters. Or maybe this is all just a fantasy I have conjured, a writer’s indulgence, piecing together fragments of a man who no longer exists.
There is loneliness in being a writer—that, I, too, understand. It offers an excuse, an easy out, a door to close when the world becomes too much. And yet, what lingers is not just solitude, but something heavier. It still hurts. Even as a writer myself, I can rationalize it, justify it, but I cannot erase it.
But you are no longer writing. So why, then, do you still cling to the old habits of a man possessed by passion? You have admitted that Holy and Billy were born not out of enthusiasm, but out of desperation. And yet, that hunger, that restlessness, remains within you.
I wonder if you ever made peace with yourself. I wonder if you ever will.
And though you may never understand why, or even care, a quiet sorrow lingers within me for you, a weight that neither time nor distance can lift.
Sincere Regards,
Terry a. O’Neal
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