ON CAPTAIN OBVIOUS REPORTING FOR DUTY, PLAYDATE GRIEF, AND AN EXTRA ETHEREAL KIND OF VIBE
Friday February 16 2024
Dear Sarah,
It’s Friday afternoon — I’ve written a bundle of words that I think are my letter to you — but I’ve also done myself a disservice by eating a pack of fruity Mentos while writing and now my mind is drifting! Also note that I am back on Pacific Time but I forgot that detail, and now it is 330pm my time which means it is 530pm your time — getting a wee bit later — and you are going to post — but just how late are you planning to post! We’ll see if I can get this letter over to you before you find yourself ready to send yours over to me!
I am re-reading your letter and I will find ways to share more with you about my Mexico City time soon. I did find my way during my time there, moving from loneliness into an actual state of finding my way, navigating public transportation, another triumvirate — this time the triumvirate of the subway system, the Metrobus, and the regular city bus. I moved through a kind of pure loneliness into a less-lonely solo time shaped by my daily patterns, as you mentioned, and by my increasing comfort with my very light handle on the Spanish language as well as my own sense of how I wanted to see and get to know the city. Then I moved into a delightful time of sharing the city with my friend B — I forget sometimes how nice it is to share new experiences with another person. This may be a bit of a Captain Obvious thing to say, but still it is true. The Captain reports for duty! I have spent a lot of time on my own in the past year, but often in cities that are more familiar to me, or doing activities that are inherently more solo-friendly. Traveling to a new international city — seeing the sights and tasting the flavors — is a particular treat with another person who is also experiencing it for the first time. The place itself is a site of conversation, of comparisons and contrasts with what we each have known. It is a site of new noticings, and reflections to be shared with each other, sparked by those new noticings.
I have been stewing on your letter of last week, thinking of the power of the letters, thinking about for how long we might choose to write to each other in this era. I also found my mind circling back over topics from my own letters these past two weeks, on the topics of relationships and on impermanent states, both of which are topics also inherently woven through the letter project itself. Allow me for a moment to think a bit about romantic relationships as I also think about the letter project — perhaps I am bouncing what I know about the letters up against the reflecting wall of other kinds of relationships and how they work, or might work. Or vice versa — bouncing relationships against the sturdy wall of the letters.
In the face of some connections that are beginning to take shape in new ways, I found myself thinking about how I am seeking a kind of guarantee of continuity, reliability, predictability. I think that in a relationship of any kind, I do not need to see or hear from someone every single day, but I do need some kind of commitment and regularity. Yet I am not sure I know how to establish commitment without also indicating a kind of permanence. Do I want to know that someone will be there forever; do I want to know for how long they will be there; perhaps I at least want to know that they will be there longer than one week, longer than two, longer than three — how much time is enough? What is a cycle of time that feels like enough, that feels meaningful as a period of commitment? What is a way of communicating with someone or being communicated with that makes me feel secure in the connection between us?
As I thought about my letter to you last week and how I was mulling on impermanent states, I was also thinking about how sometimes my brain moves so deliciously slowly. Making connections but taking its time to show me what the connections are, and how they are made. Because thinking about impermanent states is also a way of thinking about what I hope to get out of relationships, or what relationships are even about — what is commitment, what is time, what is it to love and care about someone.
An idea flashed into my mind, thinking about new species of animals, how it is decided that some animal or insect is a new species — perhaps it's got these familiar qualities but it's also different. How do we know if the letters are letters? How do we know if these letters are part of the Letter Project? We do not have to fill the container, we do not have to keep the container in the same way we did last time around. Imagine: a letter is a letter (is it?) if it is not delivered and posted on a Friday — a letter is a letter (is it?) if it does not come weekly and precisely in its timing. It is for us to decide how frequent an exchange makes the letter project function as we want it to. The letters are always there for us — and yet, as we have observed, they are different when we write them at different times of the day, week, month, season — so a letter not written weekly is a letter that could have existed and did not come into being — and yet the letters that come into being are meaningful in their own right no matter how many letters precede or follow them.
Are we considering the nuance of what makes the letters a Project? Are we doing a Project — the Letter Project — right now in the same way we were doing a Project before? Perhaps we are not doing a Project this time around, but are each calling up the magic of the letters — the magic of our friendship — to work in some particular way in our lives. I am borrowing this language you used in your letter last week: “... it is almost as if you were calling upon the letters to unleash their full powers once again.” We know the letters are powerful — we know we are powerful, our minds individually and put together in conversation on the page — we are calling up the magic of that power because we each needed it.
I have a tarot deck that I have been getting to know in a slow but deliberate fashion. I picked it up at an estate sale, I think in Minneapolis, though it may have been San Francisco, predating my move back to the midwest — this is doubtful, somehow, the idea of casually browsing an estate sale in San Francisco — estate sales and garage sales feel more midwestern. Anyway, I acquired a Marseilles deck; it was perhaps five dollars and its cardboard box was well worn; the top came off when its paper hinge became too soft to hold any longer, and I wrapped the remains of the box and the deck inside it in a piece of kitchen parchment paper, folded it up like a packet or a present, which I secured with a rubber band. The crinkle of the parchment gives it an extra ethereal kind of vibe in my life. I sleep with the wrapped deck near me on the bed; this is something I read as a suggestion to bond with your deck, bringing it close to your mind and your dreams. I do not necessarily interact with my tarot deck every day. I ask it questions when the questions are real and pressing for me, and I am looking for some kind of gently abstracted insight into what is going on in my life, or whether there is a new way to think about something that is puzzling me, some new set of words and phrases that might cast a light on what was previously a darkened corner of my thinking, a blind spot — casting a light that might make me say Oh! This is a new way to think about that. Sometimes I don't have a big question for my deck but I am feeling a bit chatty, and then I will ask it what it's thinking about or what it perceives in the mood of the moment. In all my interactions with my tarot deck I have gotten very insightful responses. It is a process of tapping into something; perhaps it is oracular, in that I am not constantly talking to it but it is prepared to offer thoughts or wisdom should I ask; and perhaps it is not quite oracular, in that I am not looking for it to make decisions for me or to tell me something that is external to me, something coming from outside me; it is not godlike, it is a wise collection of ways of thinking, and each card itself is subject to different nuanced interpretations by different sources. My tarot deck has been on this journey with me since January of last year, tucked into my shoulder bag or backpack; at one move through airport security in the last year my bag was flagged for extra screening, and a TSA employee sifted through my belongings, drawing out the deck, turning it over in their hands, swabbing it as they do for any signs of explosive material. Sometimes my peanut Larabars set off the need for an extra security review; nut bars are dense, and a series of them in a row perhaps appears in an x-ray like sticks of dynamite; I presume my tarot deck conveyed a certain similar density in its x-ray screening. It is not technically dynamite but it is ready to gently explode a firmly set way of thinking, poking open a new hole to let the light or air in or out.
All this is to say that the letters are their own form of magic; we are calling upon them; we do not have to be as rigid with our magic as we were when it was a Project; perhaps we do not even have to post every Friday, as long as we are not actively putting the letters off for some reason, because if we were doing that, then why are we writing them? But I see their general structure as more flexible this time around — perhaps the week is still the unit; if they come together later than anticipated one week, perhaps they get posted the following week, with room for expansion or addenda in the intervening time. I would say some form of: We continue with the letters until our questions are answered, or until we have gleaned the knowledge we sought in calling upon them. But perhaps we simply missed each other — we are two friends calling up each other's wisdom in this particular way, and we can keep calling it up for as long as we want and are able, until the end of time, or until one of us changes in some way — whichever comes first — and we decide again to pause the letters until it is time to call them up again.
It is fascinating to know now that the end of the letters in December of 2021 was a pause, and that we would continue or restart at some point in the future — we thought it was an ending, and even as it was, in a way it was not. This is a lesson I will carry with me: some endings do not have to be endings forever; life is unexpected in its twists and turns, and while you can't count on the specifics of how those twists and turns will manifest, you can count on the unexpected, and leave room for it to enter your life; leave a door or window cracked so that it may seep in and tickle your nose or the edges of your dreams. Do not send it away, do not block it out, invite it in when you have the capacity for it.
I wrote a fair portion of this letter as it started to come to me while I was eating a can of sardines, and so it smells a bit sardine-y in my space right now, an open can of sardines awaiting my return. Back to it!
I look forward to reading your words later this evening! Much love to you!
Until soon, your friend,
Eva
February 14, 2024
Dear Eva,
Sometimes I find it hard to begin. And just by writing those words, I have now officially begun! It is Wednesday evening (Valentine’s Day, I hear), and I am in an unusually serene mood. In a sharp contrast to last week, I currently feel quite content with our open-ended letter commitment. My meditation app tonight finished with a quote inspired by tonight’s meditation: Energy flows from commitment. I think that is maybe what I was getting at last week when I said knowing whether we were committed to this could help me stay motivated to push through when it became inconvenient. But tonight at least, I feel a little less literal. Maybe it is enough to just be committed to each letter, being here while I am here, fully open to whatever comes. I think this is generally how I want to try to live, a kind of freefall into all of my important relationships, come what may. That kind of openness feels accessible to me in a way it didn’t used to, at least tonight. So scratch what I said before. Forget arbitrary commitments, let’s just dive in and see where it takes us!
I think this relates to what you wrote about in last week’s letter. For one thing, you said we could always revisit and revamp and revise. I agree; here I am changing my tune in just seven days. But it is also about impermanence. Everything is temporary, and I think we spend our lives learning to cope with this truth.
In early December we had two of our friends’ kids over for an afternoon. The four kids had a magical afternoon of tag, video games, and the horror dentist game they have invented in our family dinners over the years. After the kids left our house, I suddenly realized I heard crying. I discovered S in our family room crying. When I hugged him, the cries turned to guttural sobs. He could not catch his breath. Later, when he calmed down — a solid 15 minutes later — he explained it like this: I was so happy they were coming over; I was so happy while they were here. Now that it is over, it feels like the worst day of my life.
Grieving the end of a playdate may seem silly, but there is also a way in which it is a microcosm of the kind of grief that is always in the air for all of us. We love and we lose, over and over again. It delights me the way S lets himself feel it all. So many of us put on armor. I suspect he will over time, too. But right now he is here for all of it, the highs and the lows. He is even starting to experience the more complicated experience of having two contradictory feelings at once. He recently told me that he wants to move into his own bedroom so he can make his space fully his own. But in that conversation his eyes welled up as he talked through the prospect of missing the post-lights out talks that he and J have in the summers when their bedtimes align. A chapter on the cusp of ending.
Telling you this anecdote has me thinking again about what stories are mine to share, what stories of mine I want to share in this somewhat permanent and discoverable form. Last week J mentioned that he had searched my name online at school and stumbled upon a bunch of my old writing. It led me to do the same, and I felt a sudden urgent need to excavate. I cut and pasted several old Medium posts into a personal document and erased the public posts permanently. This was entirely self-motivated; J even asked why I was taking down the stories about him, as if he was sad about it. Maybe I felt a bit of the vibe that prompted Kiese Laymon to buy back the rights to his book and change it. I just feel different, it is a new chapter after all, and I’m not sure I feel comfortable with the vestiges of prior chapters sitting around for those without context for me to discover. Does this make any sense at all as I embark upon this very personal and public writing project with you? Probably not. But the purge felt like the right move in that moment, and (so far) I have no regrets.
–
It is now Friday evening, and I am finally wrapping up this letter I started two days ago. I feel only slightly less serene than I did at prior writing. (Luckily you missed me on Thursday, when I was wild and wooly!) I am thinking tonight about your quest to find ways to make things better, to live and be a human in the best way you can. I am always drawn like a magnet to anyone emitting that kind of what-should-I-with-my-life energy. When it comes from me, I sometimes see it as contemptible dissatisfaction. But I think that’s unfair. I think the hunt for meaning is beautiful.
Right now, my own hunt has taken me to start a 10-week poetry class. It is a daunting endeavor! It has been such a busy week that I haven’t really yet jumped in. That will be a weekend project, along with coaching this season’s last sixth grade basketball game and then taking the team out for pizza. Poetry! Pizzas! Throw in some errands and lots of sleep, and I have myself a lovely little weekend.
Your letter is waiting for me in my inbox, and I can’t stand the suspense any longer. Happy Friday to you, and to you a goodnight!
Yours,
Sarah