Dear Friend,
I’m starting my Sunday letter on Monday this time, because why not. Do you remember how we used to do this sometimes, with letters? We would start on one day, and then the letter would travel along with us through a period of days or a week or even longer, as we carried the thought of the recipient along with us. Or we started the letter in one location but then finished it in another. I remember the feeling of being that recipient, of being carried.
Many years ago, when we still wrote letters, a young man carried me along with him in his letters. From the college dining hall where he worked, to the library, to a patch of grass under an old apple tree on a great lawn where the fireflies were coming out to drowse in the warm air of a humid summer evening. I remember these moments—the noisy kitchen of the dining hall, the library, the lawn with the fireflies, his hand moving over the pre-drawn lines of the pages—as clearly as though I had been there myself, as though it had been me there writing it. I look down and see the sea-green cuff of a cotton shirt, rolled up over a masculine wrist. This is not my skin, not my shirt, but I remember it. In my memory of reading the letter, it is as if I remember writing it, too.
It’s a bit after 4 a.m. now, and I’m up to prepare for a procedure at the hospital. Outside in the dark there are sounds that might be thunder. There are voices in the street. Male voices, laughing. Revelers out late.
A few weeks ago at about this time, I heard a woman screaming. It would escalate from raised voices, male and female, to an actual scream, and then subside. Then it would repeat. Voices, arguing, a woman’s scream. I put a sweater and a coat and scarf on over my pajamas, pulled boots on over my socks, and decided to Get Involved. I was thinking of Kitty Genovese.
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