The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years.

A good punch line is a good punch line regardless if delivered by a man or a woman. You sound like an old fool with comments like that one.

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.

You get the one life. It’s awfully unfair, isn’t it?

We were needing the same thing, you and I, a temple in which to tuck away and disappear from the earth, to mourn at the altar of our desolation,

The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it?

How cruel life is only this long.

You are very stubborn, and that is a wonderful quality except when it’s not.

I have missed you all this time, of course, but the fact is that I got every moment of you there was. Enough of this now.

You are right about what you said—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.