The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed. For us it was the latter.

he was well liked because he only ever said the things people wanted to hear. He taught me that, too. To say what people want to hear, not necessarily the truth, because most people tell you they want to hear the truth, but they do not, and if you tell the truth it will come back to bite you like a snake finding its own tail to swallow.

there are complexities of human life that cannot be boiled down to black and white.

when you find a place for yourself in the world, it feels like music,

I know you think of me as your mother only, but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.

There is a quote from one of my friend Joan Didion’s essays. It’s from the last essay in The White Album. The quote is: “What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” and then it goes on, and then, “Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.” This feels like the truest thing I have ever read.

I guess there’s no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that, Theodore.

we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.