Dear Casey the Teen Detective,

I know this will come as a shock to you now, but you will never solve the murder case of JonBenet Ramsey. The folders of research and the mapping out of the crime scene that you and Chelsea worked on were well-intentioned but wonderfully amateur. I remember being you, sitting in that purple room on school nights, circling the details of JonBenet’s last moments like a clumsy human-hawk with dental braces alternating black and orange for Halloween, rubber bands training the molars into place. I remember thinking that if we just cared enough, more than the police officers or lawyers or coroners, we could figure it out. We were still so scared to grow up at that point that we could imagine ourselves in her tiny body. We could be her. Certainly more than any detective could be. We were closer to her fear; we got lost in retrospectively wishing it away and wondering what place it had in the story. The story that we planned to end with a period and a back cover.

So, then, little one, for all the mysteries that you won’t solve (Did her family kill her? Was it a fan? Is it normal that you don’t really think she is in heaven because you don’t really believe that’s a place?), you will have uncovered one great truth, young skin-and-bones: empathy makes you smart. Perhaps not smart in a gavel to the sound block sense, a hard evidence-to-hard evidence-to-synthesis-to-correct answer sense, but in a more universal, gravy-textured sense. Empathy is gravy. And of the world’s meat and potatoes, which aren’t better realized, more complete, than when they’re covered in beautiful, brown slop? You will forget the names of the dead girl’s parents and the town in which she lived. You will remember this ever-growing way of solving problems. Don’t worry, you selected the better memory to keep.

One last thing: your braces look better in monochrome. But, not yellow. You'll get a lot of corn-in-your-teeth related shit for that.

Love,

Casey the Budding Insomniac