On choosing our words, how we are daunted, and writing from the future
February 2, 2024
Dear Eva,
It is exhilarating to be writing a letter to you in this form once again! Today is Groundhog Day, but the [temporary] restarting of this project after two years does not feel like a repeat of the familiar. In fact, it feels a little daunting! My letter-writing muscles have become a bit loose after all this time. This week I tried to draw on the patterns I developed throughout this project — little notes here or there throughout the week, a more dedicated time with a notebook and pen accumulating ideas on Thursday evening, and then this, sitting down at a keyboard to see where that lightweight planning will lead me. I remember often feeling surprised to see what would come out when the letter took shape, and pondering how different that shape might look had I sat down to write at a slightly different day/time in the week.
One of the things I did last night in preparation for this was reread our last correspondence from New Year’s Eve in 2021. I felt an outpouring of tenderness toward the 2021 versions of us; we had no idea what beginnings the ending would bring. Now, we know. It is a strange and wondrous experience to now be writing a letter from The Future — the closest we might come to being in conversation with our past selves. Doesn’t it feel a little bit mystical?
This week I have been walking through a post-vacation hangover that, at times, felt almost debilitating. There is something about the freshness of a new context, the wide open space in the days, that releases something within me that I find very hard to contain once I return to regular life. I can’t help but wonder which is more true: that little whisper that grows loud after some time away from my routine, or the more steady state of my status quo? The answer, of course, is that both are real and true. Part of me, most even, is perfectly content with my day-to-day. And another part, which mostly shows itself on or after a departure from the familiar, aches for some wholly different path. It can be hard to know which to honor with action.
This reminds me of something a colleague said while we were in Aruba at our meetup last week: that there is a razor thin line between feeling like you have it all together and feeling like a hot mess. Sometimes all we need to go from floundering to sturdy is a snack. And yet, when B said on our trip that he could sometimes imagine chucking it all and living in a Mexican fishing town, I can’t help but wonder if what that awakens in me is something worth listening to. Maybe the greatest challenge of all is listening to all of our parts, the ones that call for dramatic reimagining and the ones that yearn for a cozy night on the couch.
Recently I read a book that had the most inspiring advice — decide who you want to be, and then prove it to yourself with small wins. My Capricorn self may be ready to purge and burn in some impatient attempt to achieve a blank slate, but I want to get better at sitting in my messes and then gradually becoming, one tiny action at a time. So, I shan’t be joining you in Mexico anytime soon, but I’ll continue a slow-motion revolution here at home.
Yours,
Sarah
Friday February 2 2024
Dear Sarah!
Where and how to begin! We talked two weeks ago — we decided to exchange letters again — I felt a flood of thoughts and immediately put pencil to paper. The idea of writing a letter to you again was a sudden focusing of my thoughts — a bright pinpoint of light in the distance.
We’ve talked plenty in between our letters — in the intervening two-plus years since our last letter! — but suddenly I feel like I have a million things to say. There is something about the level of detail that the letters allow for — I always have more to tell you than what I might bring up in conversation. For example: I want to tell you about how I have to light the gas stovetop here in Mexico City with a match and it scares me a little bit every time, but I push through the fear in order to prepare hot food.
A letter to you — a letter exchange with you — is a combination of writing, and telling, and sharing, and listening. There is space in a letter to share details that may be harder for verbal conversations; or perhaps we choose details in verbal conversations that will play better, ring louder. We are, of course, always choosing our words in conversation — but there is something different about word choice in writing, and the experience of reading the written word — there is time built into the selection of each word, there is the opportunity for revision; and to read the written word is to have the opportunity to go back and re-read. We can replay verbal conversations in our head, but I think the mental tape begins to warp with each replay; I like the full capture of a conversation in writing.
As I scribbled notes for my letter, I found myself excitedly wondering what you would say, and wondering what I would say — a different kind of feeling than the one I have when we talk. I love to talk with you and I look forward to our conversations, and perhaps I do wonder what we'll say to each other when we talk. But there is something about the letter writing, putting it in writing — when you put together your words in writing for me, and I put mine together in writing for you — there is something different happening — my eyes sparkle, my brain tingles, at the idea of reading your words written for me. The act of letter writing and sending means that we exchange words simultaneously, we speak simultaneously in a way we never would if we were actually speaking — 1, 2, 3, go!
The idea of exchanging letters again is rekindling a certain kind of fire in me. You felt the call of the letters — you brought up the idea — and I didn’t even know I wanted them back, didn’t know I wanted this form of communication back! I am in Mexico City, have been here for two and a half weeks and will be here for just about two more, and I've just begun to feel more settled in an environment that was at first profoundly unsettling to me; because I do not speak Spanish beyond the most basic words and phrases, and cannot understand what is spoken around me, I found that I felt more alone than I anticipated. As you and I planned to pick up the letters, early in my time here, I was suddenly on fire again; some part of my brain that had stalled or frozen was flowing and awake again. I kept thinking — All I want to do is communicate all day long. Write, read, talk, tell, listen, hear how other minds work. I’ve been writing a lot in the time since our last letters at the close of 2021, and yet — the process of writing a letter to you is reactivating a part of my brain; it is a part that I thought had become something else, but maybe it had lain dormant instead, and is now awake again. My letter brain.
It is fascinating to me the way the letters are a lens, and a bucket for everything, a way to think about telling — telling you, and also simply telling. And yet I will not include in this letter every note I jotted down — just as in spoken conversation, in the end there are choices. I think about how it can be daunting to have to make choices every day — and at the same time I love to choose what to put into this letter to you. Perhaps in the past two years I have become more practiced in choosing, in making decisions.
I wonder what parts of your mind I will access anew as we reopen the portal of the letters. We talk — we talk every two or three weeks these days, for an hour or so — it’s not enough! When we started the letters in the fall of 2018 we didn't know how they would go, how they would function for us, and how long the pull of the exchange would last. Now, as we begin again — having ended to make space for new beginnings — one of which is the new beginning of a familiar project — we know the possibilities of what lies ahead for us, but not the details; we are both changed, and ever-changing.
In this new chapter of my life, I have been puzzling over what I want in relationships, all the types of relationships in my life, and the way I want solitude but also connection. Our letters are both. I am alone as I write this — but I am together with your mind — it is like a psychic connection, or a psychic channel — my body is alone in space, and writing, as I love — but I am connected to you at the same time. I am connected to the deep well of words we have exchanged, and what I know of how you think — I have missed this in my life without realizing it! I didn’t think to open the door again and I am so glad you did think of it. I don’t know everything you think but I know that to tap into your brain is a fascination.
As I’ve steeped on my letter over these past couple of weeks — a luxurious on-ramp back into the project — I found myself thinking of how we used to have our regular phone calls woven through the times when we were writing letters — and I recalled the way we might occasionally say in our spoken conversation, foreshadowing a letter to come, I don't want to give it all away, or You'll read more about it in my letter. There was somehow the sense that the story or an idea would be better in the letter, or more fully fleshed out, or described in just such a way — the idea that it would be better in writing than in spoken conversation — the idea that we each wanted to engage with our own thoughts in writing, and then to share them with the other to be engaged as a reader and thinker — and that we wanted to read the other's thoughts in writing. It means something to want to read someone's thoughts in writing.
It feels like I have more than one letter in me — as I should — and as I reflect on what I’ve written here, it’s a sort of love letter to our letters, a tale of how much I’ve missed them and why. It’s funny to restart the exchange in an open-ended way again — is this our only letter? It seems that it can’t be — we will at least read and respond; how many cycles of response will we move through? Is there a natural number of exchange cycles with an initial letter set that leads to an exhaustive set of responses to all ideas both initially suggested and subsequently provoked? How do we ever draw any conversation to an end? Only with the knowledge that another conversation is right around the corner. I am full of love for you and for our exchange, which helped me birth a new era in my life without me realizing that such a thing was possible, and happening. I am so looking forward to reading your words which await me now!
Until soon, your friend,
Eva