Dear Nancy:
Sometime this week while I was staying in the cottage on the farm up Gettysburg way, I dreamed deep and hard. I was in a car with a several students. One new one, a young man who is serious about his words, who writes about sailing and Newport and the sea. One former student, a woman who can be hard-edged and hilarious and full of heart. We were all driving across a bridge in search of chocolate. Suddenly the bridge burst into flames and we backed up seeking our way. How about that other bridge, I said, and we all looked in the distance at the other bridge, the only way off the island. And there we all were, stuck, stranded, having to stay put, chocolateless.
I don’t know what to make of this letter right now, except that my heart wants an island, a piece of land, a farm, a pasture, a road, a tiny square of red earth that no one knows about. I am deeply tired. I want a big, fat, anonymous retreat. I don’t even want any letters to reach me in this private place.
Letters. You and I have been exchanging them for over two years now. The letters have been rich, kind, passionate, writerly, disconnected, connected. They have been about the heart, the public, the private. I have valued them so much, and I am excited that this bounty of exchanges will, for me, be evolving into a collection of short essays that I will dive into revising. The land between. But for now I am exhausted, letter-wise. The palms of my hands and my fingertips feel no words to send you. I want to harbor my essay-words for awhile, hold them close, love on them like little creatures that have not yet figured out how to walk.
A long time ago, when I was in India, you had to go through this enormous process to even send a letter. You had to wait in one vast line to have your letter dolloped with wax on its seal. You had to wait in another long line to have the wax stamped. You had to wait in another line to hand the letter to someone who, you hoped, would send the letter to someone else who might mail it. Sometimes you’d get so tired, you’d just forget the who thing and walk off and not send anything. I spent some months in India, sometimes without anyone knowing where I was. This was hard on my friends and family. I disappeared.
Yet, as a poem says somewhere, there is much to be gained in the art of disappearing. I need to go letterless for awhile. I want to burn the bridges on either side of me and wander the island, even without chocolate.
I hope we find our way back writing these letters about our lives as writers at a future point. I would like that.
With love,
Karen