The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round. 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.

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,

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 want to repeat that when someone(s) treats you poorly, it is a reflection of him or herself and the misery within the heart of them.

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.

I still loved him, I suppose. I just couldn’t bear him. You get the one life. It’s awfully unfair, isn’t it?

It takes patience to say exactly what one means, to think of the right word.

I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal.

I sat out by the river for some time just thinking, really. You know, just pondering. My age. The survey

of my life thus far. My career, things I’d have done differently (which for years I could not admit, and thinking about why that is. Fear, I guess).

Each time the calendar rolls over to a new year, I become introspective. It’s as if I am going into the pantry and surveying what is there, taking inventory—what I have, what’s needed, the state of things.

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.

Terrible things happen. We make choices. Time cannot

be rewound. The good that comes out of the bad can be unbearable.

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

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.

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.