Dear Marietta,
I haven’t thought about you in years but you are so much on my mind tonight that I have decided to write you a letter. It must be strange for you, receiving something from me after all this time. And believe me: if I had been told a few months ago that I would end up writing a letter in the middle of the night to a high school ex-girlfriend, I wouldn’t have believed you. But since I am writing this, I think it’s only fair to warn you that I intend to be uncomfortably honest about everything. That’s the only way to write a letter to someone you haven’t seen in years. You have to keep things simple and honest. Honesty has become real important to me recently.
And by the way, doesn’t it seem a little ridiculous to receive an actual letter rather than an email or a phone call? While I’m writing this, I can’t help but feel like I’m playing a part in an old movie. I’ve spent a lifetime absorbing cinematic stereotypes, and now it’s impossible for me to compose a real letter without doing the voiceover in my head of every word I type. And as I write, I imagine you reading this. Obviously I can’t imagine you thirty-four-years-old as you are now, because I haven’t seen you since we were eighteen. But I imagine the eighteen-year-old Marietta in stage make-up, wrinkles and white hair powder, dressed up for the part. And that little actress is reading this letter with my voice in her head. Everything about writing to you seems somehow fake. This is not how letters used to written.
And this setting is all artificial too. Letters should be written in derelict prairie cabins or else in crowded candlelit Petersburg apartments, not in this sterile hotel room that smells like an airport. Also I should be writing out by hand instead of on my laptop, but I found that I can’t live without the ability to instantly edit. Otherwise the typos get out of hand; my vocabulary has always exceeded my orthography. But to lend this letter a semblance of authenticity, and as a small comfort to myself, I have chosen to write in this font that looks like typewriter printing.
With all of these hangups about writing an actual letter, it seems like I shouldn’t be writing a letter at all. I should just give in and email you or call you. I’m sure your information is somewhere on the internet. But I was born without any organic feelings of nostalgia, so I have to manufacture them for myself. I have to write this to you as a letter. If I’m going to write something completely honest, it needs to be from a more honest time.
So here it is—the uncomfortable honest truth: I think that I may be in desperate danger of sinking into mental illness. I’m writing from a hotel room, at the middle of this spinning island city in the rain. With the door closed, the room is motionless and burns with the feverish lucidity of three sleepless days. Everything in here, from the bathroom mirror to the doorknob to the drawered bedside Bible, is preposterously obvious. ‘Of course this is a room and of course that is a bed,’ I say out loud to myself and then laugh more than you should when you’re alone. The ticking seconds quicken like the beat of a bad liar’s pulse, but I remain calm. I am so calm that you could inject my veins with gasoline, light a match, and I would only object on principle.
I’m writing to you because you always loved my wordgames, Marietta, and I always loved that about you. Even back in high school. Most people don’t like them and my wife hates them, she always thinks that I’m being condescending and overly intellectual. There was one wordgame of mine that she liked. It went like this:
In my wedding vows I said that my wife was the context that gave the word of my life meaning. Without her, I said, I was an abstract and dead concept, like a noun without its verb. And as our subject would lead to its predicate, the pitter-patter of little objects would flesh the phrase out. My wife told me that she loved my vow, and she seemed to like a few good sentences after it. But somewhere along the way we disconnected and I lost control. It used to seem like my life was a story that I was writing, then at some point it became a book that I could only read. Now it just seems like a videotape playing for no one. Look where I am: in a hotel room writing to you, separated from my daughters, about to turn the page on nine years of marriage.
But I didn’t just write to tell you that. I am writing you because I want to tell you the story of our first date. Do you remember it? I can’t help but remember. With the present tense of my life dissolving in the air around me, I am becoming lost in the static of memory. The fillings in my teeth are tuning into radio time-waves. I can hear them picking up a weak signal of remembrance which—as I peer ever more inward—is getting stronger and louder. I can faintly make out the sound of immortal bandwidths that are broadcasting forward from my very first memory: the rush of the ocean and a sailboat thudding into the waves. And as the dial continues to tune itself I can hear, through a wash of static, the rattled breath of my deathbed. It seems as though no memory is beyond me.
With my whole life in my ears at this moment, our mutual biography tunes in more clearly than the rest. I know it seems silly, but I want to write out the story of our first date as best that I can. It’s a story that I’ve been telling for years to other women. It always makes them fall in love with me for at least a moment. For a long time I used the story as a tool make myself seem sensitive and kind. I told my wife the story when we were dating. She later told me that when I was looking her in the eyes and relating this story about you, Marietta, it was the first time she thought that marrying me seemed possible.
But please, old friend, read the story without remembering it, because some things have probably changed. Over the years, I’ve told this story so many times that I think I may have accidentally perfected it. At this point, I have no idea which parts come from the honest truth and which parts I invented. Who knows how memory works? Is it like the televisions in this hotel where I can call up old movies from a list using a remote control? Probably not.
I have always thought of recollection as an act of constant creation. Memory and imagination sometimes are forced to meet up in the back of the mind, two old rivals confabulating for a common cause: the fight against horrid ordinariness. So I may have edited my memories through constant re-telling, but don’t worry Marietta. Erase the tape in your mind of our first date. Read these words as I write them and once again we can make the story together. There was always disagreement between us anyway, if you recall. We were reflections of the same shape, two exactly congruent opposites, like left and right hands. So grasp your version of the story in mine and we can stroll to the end together as though through the pleasant dream of a park at noon.
