love letters, paper trails and other ways of words

on writers as liabilities to each other and ourselves

Anais Nin, Queen of the Love Letter, 1963

I am late for a meeting when I see what appears to be a love letter on the side of the road. I do not stop to read it because there isn’t time.

By the time I get to the meeting, already late, I regret not having stopped. I am sitting in the meeting hearing myself speak and silently praying to the gods of found objects that the letter doesn’t blow away.

***

For many years, I had an affair with a writer in New York who I only met in person a handful of times. Our relationship — or whatever one would call what we had — was a literary one and while the letters we wrote to each other were some of the best sex I’ve ever had — it was the distance between us that gave them urgency. We built an entire world with words and we fucked in every country. Sometimes he would start the story and I would continue it and we would go back and forth like that for days — sometimes weeks — paragraphs with ellipses yielding to sentences without punctuation yielding to single words on a page and finally… nothing. If you have ever fucked with words, you will understand when I say, there is nothing hotter than a blank page in the aftermath — an exhale of smoke. A sigh. A swoon.

I have sought long distance relationships my entire life — beginning in my late teens when I fell in love with an English musician on a dance floor in London, lied about my age and therefor was able to keep the courtship going for months before I flew to London to see him and confess that I was not… actually… twenty-eight. I had hoped that the lie I told him about my age would not cancel out the months we had spent corresponding through email and the letters and we sent to each other by mail. It was 2000, the end of an era of mixtapes and handwritten love notes and while we also sent each other daily emails and scheduled twice-weekly long distance phone calls, it was the handwritten letters that made me feel connected to him — the look of my name in his handwriting on the liner notes of the cassettes I waited weeks to arrive.

In those days you could buy a last-minute ticket on Priceline for $200 so that is what I did. I flew to London to meet a pen-pal and tell him the truth.