The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

It is the correspondence that is her manner of living.

It is as if I’ve swallowed a hot air balloon but try not to let on.

Now that that part of my life is over, I keep it in a box, forgetting that the contents of that box are vast, endless! It’s been nice taking the lid off and rummaging around a bit.

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?

When she came to the house in sweatpants about five sizes too large and her wet hair thrown up in a mess on top of her head I thought, well, she looks about as bright as a root cellar, but she asked me good questions, as a matter of fact.

I sat for the rest of the afternoon once she’d gone thumbing through some of the correspondence I’ve saved. There are hundreds of letters, into the thousands I expect, and to think, each one has a counterpart somewhere, even if it’s in a trash heap.

I’m all tucked in here with my tea and thinking about how strange it is, and wondering—have I been lonely? I wouldn’t have ever said that, but now that I sit here thinking, I wonder, was I always lonely? I’m not sure I’ve ever felt at home in the world, but I’m not sure that’s unique. I’m not sure. I’m really not sure what I sat down here to say, but it’s like the whole neat thing has had a good shake and, for the first time in a long time, I have no idea what’s around the corner.

(This is the trouble with being only five foot one inch, and it has always been the trouble, but you know I am tall on the inside.)

I was sitting there thinking here in my hands is a book about disappointment. Disappointment for every one of these people. Wretched, bitter disappointment. And I was angry, of course, but it was really that I was dismayed by your mercilessness, the way you dished out blow after blow, refusing to yield, even a little, and provide the reading population with a sense of relief in any measure. It was agonizing because it felt so true to the experiences of my own life, and I suppose, back then, I was reading fiction in search of assurances that there was still reason for hope.

my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane.

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.