Open Letter - Chapter 1: Trace
It is 15:19 in the evening!
I have been staring at this blank page for so long that the lines on it have begun to feel like a taunt.
I was sitting here trying to figure out how to begin this, staring at the rain and the scratch on the desk and the small stack of photographs I’ve allowed myself tonight.
just one small stack, I set rules for this and the photographs are face-down now because I found that I couldn’t write and look at them simultaneously.
One or the other.
Not both.
There is also a book on the corner of the desk. It is a collection of short stories by a writer “SHE” introduced me to, years ago.
in the way she introduced me to most things she loved not by recommending it but by simply leaving it somewhere I would find it.
as if the introduction were accidental, as if she were just setting it down and it happened to land in my hands.
I found it this morning in a box I hadn’t opened in almost two years.
When I lifted the cover to check if it was the copy she’d given me or one I’d bought myself. Then a single strand of hair fell out from between the pages and landed on my wrist.
I don’t know what you do with something like that. There is no correct response to finding a strand of hair from the head of a woman who has been living without you for two years, tucked between the pages of a book like a peacock’s feather like something someone kept for goodwill.
I don’t think she kept it on purpose. I don’t think she even knew it was there. It was just her, weaving into the margins of things. The way she always did.
It reminded me that she exists in the world still. That she is somewhere right now, in some room, in some afternoon light, and she does not know that a strand of her hair has been sitting inside a book on my shelf waiting to find me at exactly the moment I was most unguarded.
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She always had timing like that.
Even in her absence. Even without trying.
She moved through the world like someone trying to hold it carefully.
That is the sentence I keep arriving at when I try to describe her, the one that feels most true, most complete. she would have rejected perfection immediately and loudly as a standard.
But carefully. With attention, tenderness and with the full weight of herself behind every person she loved and every thing she made and every room she walked into.
She moved through the world like someone trying to hold it carefully.
She loved people with the full weight of herself.
She noticed things others walked past.
She made every room more worth being in.
I have been carrying this for a long time.
Long enough that it has stopped feeling like weight and started feeling like weather.
I only wanted, before this particular day was over, to make sure it was written down somewhere. To make sure it existed on a page the way it exists in me completely, specifically, witnessed properly by someone who paid close enough attention to do it justice.
I don’t know yet what the rest of this letter will become.
I only know it starts here.
With a strand of hair on a wrist.
With a book left in my path, years ago, by someone who was always leaving things for me to find.
With a blank page that has been waiting long enough.
