The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

But the worst dream, this is the one I have over and over, is I’m sitting down at the desk to write and there is the stack of letter writing paper, there are my pens, there are the envelopes, and I’m pawing at them like a cat, but I cannot pick them up. Or I pick up the pen and it lists like a noodle in my hands. I press the thing to the page and it softens or disintegrates. Or there is one version where I get as far as the ink on the page, but I can’t make sense—I can’t write a thing, it’s all scribbling. It’s the way my fear imagines blindness. You’d think the dreams would just be a black void, which is what I suppose it will actually be, though if I were dreaming of a black void I suppose…I wouldn’t be dreaming at all. I would be simply asleep, but I don’t think I sleep, at this point in my life, without dreams, the mind being far too saturated for that. Far too many haunts for that.

We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die. One turn of the seasons per person, unless it’s cut short, like it was for Gill, and like it was for Quintana Roo.

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.

The stretches on the high, windblown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, and aren’t we always trying to get back to the happier times? I think that is what it feels like, with Gill. I’ve spent my life trying to get back to having him even though I know I cannot.

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?

reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see.

I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal. Sometimes, Caroline, the easiest inroad is to begin with a thank you, for a gift or a kindness or a letter, you know, and then take it from there. Answer every question they’ve asked, and ask your own, and you will have created a never-ending circuit of curiosity and learning.

I’m not sure if I can stomach that image I have of him leaving that last day in all of his professorial stature being replaced by the shriveled, disease-ravaged corpse of an old man. I think that’s the roundabout train of my thoughts. I’m terrified.