Letter

Dear S,

I spent the last few hours rereading your letters. I have them bundled together and bound with silver string in the back of a desk drawer. They’ve followed me to a house and three apartments since we lost touch.

By the time your mother called to tell me you died, we hadn’t spoken a couple years. Our friendship——if that’s what it was——cost us both plenty. Two broken marriages, dozens of friends estranged, so many drunken blurry nights and days. We only “worked” in counterpoint to our other entanglements. Our bond served to torpedo the success of any connection to others.

Yet we were never enough for one another. I was never what you wanted. There were times when I’d talk myself into believing I was in love with you. But the truth is I was just lonely and you were there and vulnerable and I felt like you needed me. It wasn’t physical attraction. You were every other guy’s type, but not mine.

My pile of letters is out of sequence. I took the time to gather yours aside from other correspondence but didn’t bother to order it. Perhaps it isn’t necessary. The themes recur and recur and recur. Whatever guy you’re with falls in love with you and you’re shocked and put out. You can’t understand why they can’t just be friends without needing to fuck you. The frequency of your writing always increases when the paramour du jour is pressuring you into commitment you don’t want or need. You always leave the door or window open a crack for your other admirers when things get serious with the one you’re with.

We get along best when you’re far away. Face-to-face contact confuses things. In letters and phone calls the ties that bind us can remain beautiful and clean.

Dear B,

I was surprised to hear from you. It’s been awhile. I thought maybe we were done with each other after that last visit. People grow apart. It’s what we do. Kids don’t know that. They think their friends will be their friends forever. Rarely happens. Still, for all those miserable school years, you’re all I had.

Now I don’t even remember what brought us so close. Sounds cold to type it out in ink on paper. When there are gaps in friendships, it gets hard to pick up the thread. What felt so sturdy, so permanent, now looks tired, insubstantial. I get weary trying to reconstruct whatever it was that tied me to you.

Why did you write today? Are you feeling cast off by whoever you’re with? Is it a cry for help? You always played so tough, but underneath the bluster, you’re soft and weak. You romanticize childhood in embarrassing ways. Do you really want to go back to that kind of helplessness? All we were in charge of was what cartoon to watch or what junk food to swipe from Jaffe’s. You recount those awful years as if they were a paradise.

I feel pity for you if that’s what you truly believe. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and chalk up the whining and wallowing to the current breakup.

When a thing falls apart, we shrink, retract into our shells, nurse our wounds. I guess your cocoon is packed with Strat-o-matic, popcorn, and Warner Brothers cartoons. The chick walking out the door is tired of paying for your pot, tired of hearing your elaborate reasons for not getting a job, sick of indulging your monomaniacal kinks in the boudoir. But all you can think of is a nostalgic yesteryear.

—I wrote about a play full of old memories, the Reader reran my Navalny review, and a new one of the first Barry Levinson movie worth seeing in at least twenty years. 

I like getting postcards from your travels.

I hope you find what you’re looking for. I wish what you were looking for was me but know it isn’t, no matter how much I want it to be.

You can’t make someone love you. It’s not enough to tell them or show them if they don’t feel anything in return. I know I mean something to you, but what is it? Feels feint, distant. Siberia or the Twilight Zone.

It’s a banishment, no matter how posh the accommodations. No way out without severing all contact.

But sitting here waiting and hoping, galaxies away from you, I can’t cut the cord completely.

Call me a coward or a weakling. I keep hoping your feelings will change. That you’ll stop your rambling and return to me.

It’s so stupid dreaming to have back something that never was. But even ‘real’ relationships are 90% projection. You see the one you want rather than the one you’re with. You ignore the flaws and discrepancies so long as your ideal is remotely visible when you squint.

When A and I got together, she’d tell me all about her exes. How and why things went sideways. She always talked about potential. Like they were hovels in need of a little TLC to turn into gems. But the first time we hit a rough patch, she left town.

Guess I wasn’t the kind of fixer-upper worth salvaging.

That French expression—l’esprit d’escalier—has been knocking around my head lately. Maybe this is one reason to write—to say the thing you’re not quick enough to utter in the moment. I know I feel a day late and a dollar short most times I open my yap.

I looked up the English equivalent and wit of the staircase popped up. Clunky, imprecise; staircase wit is a little more elegant, but still not quite right. The Russian one’s not bad: задний ум which roughly translates to back wit or maybe wit in retrospect. My birth country and its people are horrible in many ways the world is being reminded of now, but no one can argue about their way with words.

I’ve never been that quick with words. Zingers and witticisms don’t naturally jump out of my mouth. I resume conversations in my head that ended hours, sometimes days or years ago, all the time. Even then, in the imaginary continuation, I rarely form the sharpest phrase or the subtlest insight. 

I marvel at natural talkers like comedians. Their minds and mouths are synced in such a way that what they say comes out seamlessly, without effort. That’s probably not so, but it looks that way from the seats. The times I’ve spent onstage have mostly passed awkwardly. It’s gotten easier with reps, but it’s rarely a thing I look forward to or believe myself to have any aptitude for. 

My stage is made of paper and canvas rather than boards.

It’s rarely revenge or payback that my staircase witticisms consist of. But I find myself wishing I could’ve said what I felt in the moment. It’s like there’s a time-delay in my brain. A lag needed to process what people have said until it makes sense and I can formulate a response. Nobody should have to sit there quietly while the creaky gears in my head do their thing, so what they get is something flippant or smartass, more often than not. I have to stop doing that and tell them to wait for a proper response next week or next month. But would anyone actually be okay with that?

On the staircase, back at home, in other cities and times, the conversation can go and go and go for as long as it needs or wants to. But in the room there’s a time limit. When dinner or drinks are over, the talk is supposed to end as well. But it doesn’t. I wonder what percentage of people never consider what they’ve said or would like to reedit or amend their half of the conversation?

I feel so ill-equipped and unskilled while talking. Yet, now I spend hours recording conversations, then, literally replaying them over and over. Granted, this is mostly to edit sound quality, but I can’t help catching this or that fragment of my parts off these files and wanting to go back and redo it better. The only time that wish comes true is when my technical ineptitude forces me to ask a guest to rerecord our talk. That’s not a thing I can do too often for logistical and ethical reasons. 

Everyone’s time is in short supply. Comes the moment when we must get off the stairs and move on.

—I wrote about Heather McAdams’ art show , discussed Heavenly Creatures with Mallory, and talked to Emmett Kelly. Keep an ear out for my talk with film writer Kat Sachs this Wednesday. Listen to other talks hu u no here.

—Listen to my pal Gil’s talk with the painter Celia Paul about her book of letters to Gwen John. So strange how things align, because my new thing is also made of letters, though not to a famous dead artist.

—I contributed a drawing to a forthcoming anthology of Chicago poetry. Pre-order your very own copy right now!