January 13, 2013
Dear Ray Bradbury,

I’m sorry, Mr. Bradbury. I was just a few months too late in reading your book Fahrenheit 451. Were I still fifteen and your death not yet come, I would be sending this letter to you directly. I have pondered to myself many times that at every moment, nearly anything I can think might be happening; someone, right as I write this, may be blowing a balloon, tying their shoe, or falling mortal to some terrible accident. Is it strange that I don't cry for the deaths happening as I type, but tears wet my cheeks as I realize the person lost to the world just a few months prior? Oh, Mr. Bradbury! Is it odd, my last name being Granger, that I weep for the loss of the things your hands might have still done? More so, with you being close to the age of a grandfather to me? I have been touched by your words, your views, your ideals, and they have touched me. Etched deep into the glowing twists and turns of my soul, you would find the marks of your finger, toe, thumb prints! Reverberations of your voice would still move my heart, and its beating would match to its rhythm. Oh, science can deny that this is the case: my heart has not changed its motion, my soul has not made contact with any dead man's hands, but you are inside me now, and science has never found a way to prove or disprove the essence of a human's emotion—and you are such an elemental existence inside of me.
I will hold you close to me, Mr. Bradbury, forever. If we as humans ever deteriorate so far as you feel, I will become the old woman wandering the woods, and I will become you that you might live on. You will continue to reach out and touch others, Mr. Bradbury! Your book will be made immortal in me, me and my children, if no one else.
Right now, it's cold outside: too cold for me to experiment with nature. The leaves are all dead and taken away by those men in their green trucks, who move them “out of the way.” When I was little, I used to steal away fall's prettiest leaves, and hold them together by the stems. Those bundles, with their burning and beautiful colors, would be my flowers. They carried a scent as well, just like their petaled counter parts, but for the life of me, I’ve never identified it. Is it nutmeg? Is that what they smell like? Why, I’ve never smelled nutmeg either! I suspect, if I were to come across any of this spice, I might lean down, inhale deeply, and exclaim, “Why, it smells just like fall leaves, doesn't it?” Oh how funny the world might look to me then!
So, Mr. Bradbury, you must think the world funny, too (for I’m sure you still ponder it, your mind still heated and turning, unfazed by the cold earth around it), for right now, a young lady has been inspired so deeply by a dead man's words, that she feels the need to reply. Oh, literature! You tempt me, having me meet with such a remarkable person through his words, yet mine can never reach him! Oh, Mr. Bradbury, let us meet someday, through another book, letter, poem, play! You will offer and I will return; our words will dance and twist around each other. They will float until they lie restful on the earth, never to be violate by those men and their trucks. Then someday, another reader! The plains will stir with the winds of their revelations, toss up our words, and watch them spin once again! We won't die, Mr. Bradbury. You will live in me as I will live in you and both of us in our successors. Worry not for the future, for our words can change it, shape it, meld it into something beautiful. As long as there is “racism” people are racist! “Sexism” and people are sexist! Let's move away, think not of behemoths with flamethrowers guarding their “ideals.” We are imagination, hope, love, and knowledge. Nothing intangible was ever singed by flames, and we shall never be destroyed. Forever we will exist in our purity, and let all those who wish to join us be able, for there is no lock for a mind, no boundary for an imagination, as long as we wish there not to be. I stand with you, Mr. Bradbury. And my heart which strides so closely to yours need never fear any flames, for if my body is gone, my soul will remain, and in it, the true heart we talk about, which, disagreeing with science, feeds us our emotions and changes rhythms as we live on.

Thank you for having lived, and having made yourself immortal in letters, Rachael.