The other day I found the meanest letter I’d ever received. It was dated February 1995. I dug it out of the basement by accident, where it had been lost in the wrong box; I’d given up on it years ago, and wasn’t looking for it this time. Reading it I was paralyzed by the same anger-hot embarrassment and shame I’d felt at the time, when I received it; even though I also quickly realized that I was reading a letter written by someone else, about someone else, from a fairytale memoryland long ago.
Letters, for those reading this on the internet, were longer than texts. This one was two and a half pages long, single-spaced, typed, with hand-written annotations and footnotes. Letters were also, it should be remembered, much more infrequent than texts. The author of this particular missive, I think, wrote to me twice that year. (This, for reasons that become clear, was the last time I ever heard from her.) Since letters home were the work of months not minutes, this letter is festooned with tangential information, like new phone numbers, and dates of next visit, and sub-messages to pass along to others in our mutual friend circle who weren’t going to be receiving a letter themselves, but probably needed some small piece of information and hey, while you’re here being harangued, let’s use you as a messenger as well.
The author of the letter absolutely took me apart in it. She had been in my circle of friends in high school but had accelerated to graduate a year earlier than the rest of us. She was the First Woman On The Moon* (*college). She had downshifted from tearful “I don’t know if I can do this without you guys” in August to “I never want to hear from any of you, ever again” by February. Displacement is weird. A new city (Halifax?). A new boyfriend (first?). New school, new friends, new academic rubrics that didn’t match whatever the fuck the rubrics were at N.T.C.I. Being the first flung out into the cosmos, play-acting the thing we knew anecdotally from 90210 (season 4 onward) but had not experienced the real-world version of, like, I can’t even imagine. I don’t like being the first to do anything. I manage expectations, loudly. I say “I don’t know how to do this.” All these years into my “adult” life and I’m still not over the marrow-deep fear of displaying my own ignorance, which goes all the way back to infancy.
Bringing that side of myself closer to the other — the side that is quite convinced (thank you) that I’ve got this all figured out to a degree that makes you ape-people look like ant-people — has been the work of lifetimes. It feels like lifetimes. At a rough guess I’d say there have been three of me, and I might be moulting v3 to make way for v4 right now, who knows. Do you ever think about the thing where all the cells on your body are replaced on a seven-year cycle? I do. I think about how my mind doesn’t feel like the person who went to high school; but I also think about how I have a replacement body, too. Enterprise-A. Enterprise-B. Enterprise-C. Enterprise-D. When I say that the meanest letter I ever received was written by someone else for someone else, I also mean that neither of those people are even alive on this earth. Those cells became stardust decades ago. I have the old software backups rattling around incompletely in my head, but they’re either all data, or all nuance. I don’t seem to remember how things were in half the cases, while remembering how they felt; and in the other half of the cases, it’s the other way around.
Pando Year Three might feel like a whole lot of the same, over again, but in this imposed containment this time around (Omicron), I’ve found something that wasn’t there in the panicky early days or the “oh shit how is this still going on” middle winter. The struggle seems to have abated. I’m just floating here, in equilibrium, untethered in the blind. When I was a kid I went with some other kids to a park that had a pond that had natural sinkholes eaten into its limestone bed. You would walk through the water which would be two feet deep until it was twenty feet deep, all of a sudden, the bottom of the world dropping out from under you and plunging you in, up to your neck. We’d take turns bobbing in this column of deeper water, and the water at your toes would be cold, where everything else (in the middle of the day in the middle of the summer) was bathtub-warm. In my isolation, Pando Year Three is the feeling of the cold water at the tips of my toes, and the shiver of not touching the bottom, and not knowing how far away the bottom is. Bobbing in sensation. The tingling thrill of perceiving another, hidden world.
I was a grandiose kid. (“Kid” in this instance extends into my twenties.) (What, like I’m not grandiose now?) When I was growing up I had a huge, achingly emotional sense of the universe and my place in it, and I catch evidence of enough of the specifics of my young behaviour now and again to know that I was an unfathomably unappealing brat, occasionally (purposefully) malevolent, likely quite honest and authentic in a way that would make anyone with half a gram of common sense or emotional perspective want to pull the hair and scalp and skull off the top of my head and punch the pink, throbbing brain. It is, tacitly, remarkable that any of my friendships from childhood remain (and no less a miracle that some of them are quite resiliently strong, unchanged even; emotional cores of the life I have now, which I don’t feel I’ve earned, but for which I am grateful).
All this to say, when I read the meanest letter I ever received, oh author, I feel you. I feel for you. You were being awful and so nakedly hypocritical and self-unaware that your words make my head spin; but I also don’t doubt for a second that your volley was served up by an equally, if not more so, loathsome volley of my own. Knowing me, being around me, must have hurt. I was careless, cruel, and spectacularly unwise. Boiling all of that down into writing and then actually writing the thing… well, I hope you’re still doing it, because you were a better, more detailed, and more honest writer than I am. I thought I knew what was going on; you actually did. The tips of your toes were in the cold water.
And on a structural level I love the idea of writing anyone anything that is equal parts “here are all the reasons you need to get over yourself” and “here are all the reasons I don’t care if you get over yourself.” We throw around the notion of teen angst (or we did, back in my day; who the fuck knows what Gen Z is doing) but let’s never lose sight of how big it all is, how every single piece of it is big, both because of the amplifying hormones cascading through those brains but also because an entire planet is new and you are on it for the first time, untethered, seeing it, smelling it, touching it, like, my god, it’s full of fucking stars isn’t it, and the simple act of clarifying no, here, this is how I really feel is, or feels, revolutionary — because it is, in its way. Having a self, owning a self, negotiating for a self, pushing back against the other selves, defining a place, defining a thought, defining a moment, all of these are the first steps in a lifetime of practice of fitting your particular piece into a landscape that seems like it was designed to hold you, but wasn’t, at all.
Some gossipy so-and-so will read this and want to know who wrote the letter, or where they can read the letter. We all love “the drama.” In less and less contact with the outside world, I’ve been weaning myself off. This wasn’t a goal or a Resolution for this particular moment in time; it’s just, the less you do, the less of it you do. The phone’s in a drawer. The blankets are on the couch, five books going at once. Pouring over journals, old notes, new writing, new letters. Getting used to my new body. The world, the way it used to be, was broad. I’m excavating the deep.