Dear Lyra
I wrote this letter as part of the Dear Sister project. Thanks to Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, my fellow writers, Off the Shelf and English P.E.N. It was a beautiful and healing group to be part of.
DEAR LYRA,
It’s happiness, that’s the worst.
This is new. It is when I am the happiest, that I ache for you the most.
I long to hear your laugh, to gossip with you over a hot chocolate in the Clements, in Belfast City Centre. “Your Auntie Lyra looks after you.” I long to meet you again, in London, both stressed and happy. Finally, your career is coming together. You have signed books to Faber & Faber. Neither of us liked studying English at Queen’s, much. We found the lecturers largely snobby, and dull. We were impatient, always. Impatient to get to the heart, to the truth of a story. Our minds, not suited to long drawn out, academic, study. I endured, and you quit. You always seemed braver.
You helped me become braver. I wouldn’t still be writing if it weren’t for you. I almost failed my postgraduate degree in journalism. I was incredibly homesick. After the high of getting a fancy scholarship, and of moving to England. Life became such a struggle. I was getting poor marks, I lived in a house that didn’t feel safe, I felt my Irishness in full, for the first time. I felt my difference. My first boyfriend – that lasted 3 months. I do not belong. I cannot be right, in the ways that matter.
I don’t remember how exactly we connected. It must have been via Twitter. But I remember vividly, the first day we met. I was working part-time in a call-centre, and part-time in a 0-hour gig at Windsor Stadium. I was living off about £800 a month. I was trying to keep writing, to freelance. But I wanted to quit. My confidence had been shattered by my year in England. You were adamant, that I would do no such thing. “Kylie, you have something special. The Guardian seen it – they gave you a scholarship. You don’t get that for, nothing. You just need to find your own path.” I had done some shifts at The Belfast Telegraph but suddenly was dropped. I had an interview to be a reporter for a newspaper in a tiny, unionist town. I didn’t get the job; writing about abortion and gay rights, probably didn’t help.
I listened to you and started to aim higher. The Guardian opinion column I got published whilst still working at the call centre and moving to London to work in marketing for a charity a month after. Lyra, you did not let me settle, did not let me waste my talent. You showed me that I could be brilliant, even if I didn’t fit the typical mould of a journalist.
I still have the scarf you described as “Harry Potter.” I bought it on Black Friday 2017, in H & M. I thought, the yellow and red; beautiful, autumnal colours. I was horrified, when in excitement, you exclaimed, “Oh you like Harry Potter too!” The colours of Gryffindor. I had liked Harry Potter as a child. And I was secretly proud that the Sorting Hat had placed me in Gryffindor; brave and foolish. That captures my life. Perhaps, if you were still alive, I would have given the scarf to a charity shop. I might have given it to my niece, to wrap a doll or teddy in. I might have given it to my dad, to wrap a little lamb in.
As things are – and it has taken me some time to accept this – you are not alive. So, I still wear my Harry Potter scarf, now bobbled and worn. I smile every winter, when I drape its familiar warmth around my neck. It is my best link to my memories of you. In a few weeks, I will go on a date with a woman. You were one of the first few people I came out to.* What would you make of this? I know we would have had a lot to laugh about. I have been messaging this woman for several months, and I really like her. I will wear my Harry Potter scarf and remember my Aries, queer**, brave journalist friend… these are all true for me, too. And although I cannot understand it, wish it weren’t so, I will live my life, as fully and bravely, as you did, as you taught me to.
LOVE, KYLIE
* Original version - included the sentence “Then I thought I was bi. Now I know I’m gay.”
** Original version - “lesbian” instead of queer
I came out as bisexual age 24, as a lesbian age 27, and as bisexual again age 28.
More information on the Dear Sister project.
I read this letter, in its original form, as part of the online event, In Memory of Lyra McKee: Lost, Found, Remembered, hosted by her publisher Faber and Faber. Other writers who read as part of the event include Anna Burns (a friend of Lyra’s), Paul Muldoon and Lucy Caldwell.