Letters Never Sent
June 14th, 1987 Dear Thomas, I am writing this letter knowing I will not send it. This is my third attempt at a first sentence, which you would find amusing if you knew, which you do not, which is the point. I am told by people who write about the heart that unsent letters are useful — that they let you say things the way you would say them if the saying had no consequences. I find I am not sure this is true. Every word I write to you has the weight of consequence, sent or not. What I want to tell you is that I saw a heron today on the river path by the college and I thought of you immediately because you once told me herons were the most serious birds, and I agreed with you, and we spent twenty minutes being serious about herons in a way that made two passing professors look at us with profound uncertainty. I think about that afternoon more than I think about most things. This probably tells you something about me. I will not send this. But I wanted to say it to something that was not just the inside of my own head. The heron stood in the reeds for a long time. Then it left. I watched it go and felt, for a moment, the specific sadness of things that don't know they're being watched.
October 3rd, 1991 Dear Thomas, I saw you on the underground. You were reading and you didn't look up. You were reading something with a blue cover and your hair was shorter than I remembered and you were wearing a coat I didn't recognize, which sounds like a small thing but when you know someone their coat is also them, and this coat was a stranger's, which meant time had passed in a way I could see. I almost said your name. I had it in my mouth. What stopped me was not cowardice, I think, but something more pragmatic: I did not know what would come after the name. Hello, I saw a heron in 1987 and I still think about it. Hello, I have been constructing you in my head from the components I remember and I do not know how accurate the reconstruction is anymore. The train stopped at Embankment. You got off. I watched the doors close. I have thought about what I would have said if I had said your name, and the honest answer is that I would have said something ordinary — the weather, how long it has been, the standard architecture of an encounter you were not prepared for. I have also thought about whether ordinary would have been enough. I think it might have been. This is the thing I am least sure about. November 30th, 1991 Dear Thomas, I am not going to write you another letter for a while. I think I have been using these to avoid deciding something, and avoiding a decision is its own kind of deciding. I will write again when I have something to say that is not just the same thing with different weather.
March 2nd, 1994 Dear Thomas, I saw you at the Hartley wedding. You were with someone — I could not see her face clearly and I did not try harder to see it. You looked well. You always look well; this is one of the things about you that I have, over the years, considered forgiving you for. My mother sat next to me and held my hand during the reception, which she has never done before, which means she saw you too and understood something she has never once mentioned. We drove home in comfortable silence. I have been lucky in the women who have loved me. The woman with you laughed at something you said. I was across the room and I could not hear what it was, but I could see the laugh — the particular quality of it, the way it involved her whole face. I have a taxonomy of laughs at this point, from years of paying attention to people at celebrations. Hers was the laugh of someone who is surprised by the pleasure of the person they are with, which is rarer than it sounds and which tells you something true about both of them. I drank two glasses of wine and danced with the bride's uncle and left at nine, which was early but not so early that it announced itself. In the taxi home I thought: this is what it looks like, from the outside, being fine. I was fine. I was also performing being fine, and the performance was so practiced by then that I could not entirely locate the seam between the two.
September 7th, 2004 Dear Thomas, My mother died in July. I am writing to you because there are things you cannot say to the people who are also grieving, things that are too particular to your own experience of the person — the specific texture of a loss that belongs only to you. She was seventy-one and not entirely well and it was, as people keep telling me, not unexpected. I have found, so far, that not unexpected is not the same as prepared for. What I keep coming back to is the cedar box in her bedroom. She kept things in it — the photograph kind, the letter kind, the small objects that represent larger things. I have not opened it yet. I know what is probably in it and I am waiting for the day when I am ready to have those things confirmed, which I think is the honest description of what I am doing, though it does not feel particularly honest to sit in my childhood bedroom and not open a box. I am telling you this because you met her once, at the college, and she liked you in the way she liked people who seemed to mean something to me but was too sensible to ask about. She told me afterward that you had very good posture, which was her standard first-tier compliment, reserved for people she intended to pay more attention to. I thought you should know she noticed you. The people who notice you, even briefly, deserve to be remembered as having noticed. December 1st, 2004 Dear Thomas, I opened the box. There was a photograph of the two of us in it, taken at the college, the year you would remember. I don't know when she took it or how she came to have it. She never asked me about you. She just kept it, in the cedar box, with the other things that mattered.
June 22nd, 2013 Dear Thomas, I got married last week. His name is Will. He is a secondary school history teacher and he makes excellent pasta and he has been patient with me in the specific ways that require patience, which is a thing I have only recently learned to recognize as a quality rather than a deficit. We were married in a garden in Suffolk in the rain, which we had not planned for but which turned out to be, in the way these things sometimes do, exactly right. I am writing to tell you because writing to tell you is the thing I do with the events of my life that feel significant, and this is significant, and I wanted the record to include it. I want the record to include that I am happy. Not in the comparative way — not happy despite, not happy in contrast to. Just happy, in the simple and slightly bewildering way of someone who kept moving forward through years of uncertainty and arrived somewhere that turned out to be good. I don't know where you are or what your life looks like. I hope it is good in the same uncomplicated way. I hope you have someone who makes you laugh the way that woman did at the Hartley wedding — fully, with surprise. You deserve that.
November 29th, 2019 Dear Thomas, I found all of these today, in the cedar box in the attic — my mother's cedar box, which I kept after she died. Forty-one letters over thirty-two years. I read them in order and then I sat with my coffee and I thought about you, the real you, not the one I've been writing to all this time. You are sixty-three years old now, somewhere. You are someone's husband or someone's loss. You have a face that has thirty-two more years on it than the one I carry. I hope it is a kind face. I think I am finally ready to stop writing to find out. February 14th, 2020 Dear Thomas, I found you. Not in a dramatic way — a name in an alumni database, a photograph on a university department page. You are a professor now. You have the white hair I would have predicted. You look, from the photograph, like a person who has lived in a way they are not ashamed of, which is all I ever wanted for you and for myself, and which is more than many people manage. I am not going to contact you. Not because I am afraid of what it would be, but because I think I understand now what these letters were: they were how I stayed honest with myself, through all the years when it would have been easier not to be. You were the person I wrote the truth to, in the knowledge that it would never be read. There is something important in that — in having a witness who cannot respond. It kept me from revising things. This is the last one. Not because I have run out of things to say to you. Because I have finally, after thirty-two years, said the most important thing: I was here. I noticed everything. I am glad I did.
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