Unsent Letters #16

Letters across time

Photo by Liam Truong on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Dear B.,

What a rocambolesque turn of events it was that made us meet again after so many years. If, the day before yesterday, I hadn’t thought that I had to go to the post office to dispatch back to Luc the spare keys to his Paris apartment, where he let me stay two weeks ago, and if I hadn’t decided to go to a different post office, just because it was a nice day and I wanted to take a longer walk, and if I hadn’t decided to go to that different post office right before lunch, instead of the usual early morning, we would have never met. And I would have never known that you live here.

Last time I saw you we were in junior high, and we promised each other eternal love. Eternal love in junior high sounds like an oxymoron, or a cacophony of thoughts. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe as kids we possess a degree of purity and clarity about what we like and want that we will never have again. I read somewhere that college students’ brains are only half-baked, and that’s why they’re protesting so vehemently on campuses these days. How wrong. 

I was so in love with you that, the day you told me your family was going to move to Brazil for your dad’s job, I expected the skies to crack open and the ground to swallow me whole. It was an afternoon in early June, school was over, and instead of abandoning myself in the arms of quasi-summer happiness, I was devastated. Life was miserable for a long while thereafter. The only thing that gave me solace was writing you those long letters where the ink got smudged by the drop of the occasional tear. I was a sensitive, emotional boy, and your sudden departure was still fresh, hanging unscathed in the meanders of my heart. And every time a reply from you arrived, in one of those airmail envelopes with blue and red stripes along the edges, the world came back from the abyss, blue skies ripped open from behind dark clouds, and life was worth living again. Emotional extremism at its best. 

How magical is it that two humans kept together by a long series of letters while on opposite sides of the planet, meet again after forty-plus years by pure chance in a post office, of all places? 

Then, one day, after a whole year of epistolary back and forth, I received your final letter. You said that you met someone in your new life -- the son of the photographer, as you called him -- and found his company enjoyable. So our lives parted. It was only a matter of time before they would, and only fair they should. You vividly stayed on my mind for years, until you gracefully faded into non-existence. There, I confronted myself for the first time with the harsh realization that even the most profound feelings, at some point, vanish. And you’re left wondering how they could have possibly been so profound at all, in hindsight. How they could have possibly led you to isolation, misanthropy, loss of appetite, and life contempt. Was I stupid?, you think. How could I possibly be so vulnerable? Emotions always feel lighter and less important -- at times even ridiculous, laughable -- in retrospect. It must have happened the same to you. 

And yet, in the midst of it all, these emotions were as profound and overwhelming as they could possibly be. Your letters suspended them in time, made them immortal. They are proof that, even if in hindsight emotions may appear lighter or laughable or absurd, they were the real, living matter I was made of.   

I still have all your letters. They’re in a portable safe that I used to keep my collection of rare coins. The safest place in the world, I thought. I know they're in there -- after your last one, I remember very specifically that I bundled them all together with a rubber band, put them in the safe, locked it, and hid the key somewhere. Where, I forget. The safe must be stored in the basement at my folks’, together with the boxes of college books and papers. Over the years, I caught myself thinking about that portable safe from time to time. I thought about where the key might be, and what it would be like to open it one day and travel back in time. But no action ever followed.       

When you’re in your fifties, it’s hard to recognize someone you last saw at thirteen. And so the other day, in line at the post office, when I noticed you staring at me insistently, I thought nothing and kept minding my own business. Plus, I’m terrible at keeping eye contact. I think I know you, you said. The moment I realized it was you, that very moment, every word of all those letters flashed before my eyes, as if resurfaced from the depths of the ocean where they were trapped inside a chained chest, like in a Houdini trick.

You’re no longer whom I knew forty-plus years ago, and I’m no longer whom you knew. It felt as if what went on back then belonged to a different life, in a different universe. It’s still me, you said. No, you’re not. But I was in a rush and didn’t want to get into an argument about how life changes our personal identities. So I let it go.

That afternoon I went to look for the portable safe, in the basement of our old house. I knew what it looked like: a light blue, flat, rectangular metal box with a handle on top. Although I hadn’t opened it for several decades, I vividly remembered the inside. There was a plastic layer, with little compartments for the coins, and some space underneath where I had put your letters. It rested on a pile of boxes, covered in dust. Locked, of course. Its key nowhere to be found. Tempted to force open it, on second thought I decided not to. It felt like an attempt at overwriting memories that should be kept intact.

But yesterday I found an airmail envelope, with blue and red striped edges, in my letterbox. It’s funny that I went to look in there; I rarely do. There was no sender name on the envelope. It contained a key, and a brief note written in an unknown calligraphy. Unsigned. 

“Sometimes memories don’t want to stay closed in a box; they want to be revisited, their emotions felt again.”

I went back to the basement and tried the key on the portable safe. It opened, and a wind of memories blew out at once, filling the room with the scent of my teenage days. The urge to binge re-read all the letters quickly took possession of me, and I started undoing the rubber band that kept them all together.

Maybe you can do the same with my letters, if you still have them. And we can meet again there, in nineteen seventy-nine.

---

"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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