Letter From Tucson

She ended up in Tucson, married to a kind man with sad eyes who ran a spare parts yard. They had three children, and she grew old with him. She wrote me once, many years later, to explain how it had all worked out for her—how she had slowly become happy, or at least as close to it as an orphan's soul allows. She wrote that she thought I saved her, first in that alley and then with that bus ticket. The truth is,she saved me. But redemption is never a one-time thing. It demands a kind of repetition—like a prayer. And a soul must be washed free of the dust of living again and again. So we work the dirt of dreams into our hands and pray that something beneath the struggle—something true in it—will find its way down into us. Through our scars. She wrote that she still dreamed of the nights in that tiny place with a broken window, and a young man filled with stains and the murmur in his heart. She said she loved him in the way a woman does when she knows it’ll never be spoken of again… or breathed again… or felt again, except on a hot summer night when all you want is to feel its wind once more. And you remember what it was to be afraid of the lonely in your bones—feel it fill your voice and try to reach across—and then feel something brave rise and echo back and forth between. I traded the dirt and the migrants and the bar for the steel and the glass and the concrete. I bought, as we all do, a bus ticket on Old Hope Road. And I left that summer of the scars and the shovels behind, though I can still feel some part of me trying to be something more than the dirt of myself. Some small part saved by the bleach of her arms and the whisper of her at night in my ears still. But some stains you can’t ever quite bleach away. The past and its slave, memory, are one kind. Love and its echo, lonely, are another. They get way down deep in our bones. I carry them to this day. WLM --- Would you like me to make light stylistic improvements (e.g., rhythm and phrasing) while keeping your tone intact, or do you want it left as-is with only spelling and grammar corrections?