the love letter

“Where did the time go?”

still from The Seventh Seal (1957)

The power is out, and the darkness is compelling—things you keep hidden in the daylight come crawling out, the heat distorting the threshold of what’s acceptable and what isn’t. You think about the heat, perspiring through time, and wonder about the last time you walked the museum grounds on a hot day just like this. You think about how, at eight, you said you’d play the guitar and sing your favourite Billy Joel songs.

It’s suddenly later and soon; the future and the world are at your doorstep, bleeding through the city noise. It reminds you of how you told your best friends you’d tour the world, backpacking across Europe and the Alps, before life shut doors and this damning heat settled in. The kind darkness also reminds you that you haven’t spoken to them in decades.

“Where did the time go?” you ask the walls.

It is time that holds you. It is the darkness that strokes your head and the heat that runs down your spine. They tell you how time never went anywhere, how you simply stopped counting, and how you fell into a cage so cosy like so many lovely souls do.

It is your nth summer day on this big blue earth, and you are telling your imaginary friends you haven’t spoken to in forever about your dreams: how you’d sell paintings on the streets of Venice and how you’d live in Shakespeare’s house and write stories at the same desk the Brontë sisters used. You tell them about the Himalayas and the monasteries you’d visit. We talk about ochre and Buddhism and wonder what God makes of us now, sitting on the floor in shorts, the heat driving us absolutely insane. We’re seeing lives that are ours in some lovely world where grief has no place.

I’m talking about God, and you show me the birthday cards I made, the thank-you notes, and all of the random painted paraphernalia that served as pouches, pen holders and memory boxes. You tell me about life and its colours, how there was always more to it than beige, muted greys, and elegant whites; how we were yellows and burgundies, greens and turquoises. I’m suspended in limbo, drowning in a liminal state, soaked in sweat, nodding along as I realise how utterly dark and grey our words have become.

We talk about stories, and you tell me about our plans to walk the streets at 2 a.m., talk to truckers, ask them about their lives, and hear the wondrous stories from the road—the ghosts they’ve seen and the people they wish they could have saved. We talk about our dreams to feed on stories and lie on hilltops watching the stars, sharing things we’ll never say aloud.

I ask you what you remember best, and you tell me about middle-school summers and Enid Blyton afternoons with mango nectar juice boxes. Fleetingly, the world lights up. The summary videos, training courses, and every abomination this inhumane craving for efficiency has forced us to conceive fade away. We sit in the heat of the powerless room and stare out the window at crammed apartments and youth on rooftops, wishing away the suffocating summer night. In the middle of it all, we are thirteen again, with our whole lives ahead of us.

You tell me about your dog and the day you brought him home. There is love, beauty, and desire; the world seems kinder. His warm memory brightens the room as we talk about how he snores, how he shivers in the cold, how he loves food and sits with you through breakfast, lunch, and every middle-of-the-day snack. You miss him, and the ache only grows in the terrible loneliness of adulthood.

You introduce your array of imaginary friends again, and it is sad and hilarious. We’re losing our minds in this heat, and everything is amplified—the pain and the ecstasy. You’re telling me about quaint bookstores and grand libraries, about buildings that exist solely for research, about how there is a world beyond all this. I tell you about the sun and the stars and the laboratories in numerous corners of your big blue earth and show you people who dedicated hundreds and thousands of their summers to understanding the subtle art of uncertainty. Our little window overlooking the street is merely a sliver of the enormity waiting for us if we’d only stop, look, and seek.

You throw open a box of pen drives packed with obscure movies and tell me we should watch something from the 1900s—something dark and sweetly sad, something that mourns our inefficient lives and grieves for all the time we’ve let slip away.

Then you chuckle and ask, “What is life without regret?”

Evidence that you wanted more from the world than it could give, you tell yourself. I’m shedding a tear and saying a prayer, even though you can’t see me.

We’re back to sixteen and seventeen, and there are no memories there. We flit through school and grades, and you tell me how you thought you’d pursue art and learn the violin.

Look where we are now, I think.

It is a sad state of affairs because this is what it means to be human: to want a heart and make do with a plastic box. You’re leaning against the only piece of wood in this tiny room, your silhouette folded in on itself as you rest your head on your knees and surrender to the heat. I can hear you thinking about the music, swaying to Bach and Vivaldi. You’re telling me how music makes you feel part of something kinder, something human, and how art has always saved us.

And yet you tell me you couldn’t save yourself after all.

“Look where we are now,” you say.

I know you mean the corporate world and the forced pleases and thank-yous, but that is not all. Every unsaid goodbye and half-abandoned story, every unfinished project, every friend who drifted away, every family member we no longer have—all of it descends like a sack of unwanted presents. The room is suddenly filled to the brim, suffocating and burning, and you are one tiny human wanting all of it because that is what it means to be human: to want and hope until you can no more.

I loved you then; I love you now, I think. There is so much that we forget to put up on our little pedestals—lovely words and happy memories, stranger smiles and stray puppies, a good hypothesis and sensible formulas. I list these down in a list I know you’ll never put into writing, and I wave it around, hoping some of it assimilates into the darkness that we have been soaking in.

I’d smack you and your delusions, but it is this damned darkness and heat. We are suspended in the deepest reaches of memory, among the things we’ve kept tucked away because some things must never grow. And yet here they are: old, withered, festering. You’ve got up to sit against them because it is all that feels real now.

You lean on them and tell them about Patti Smith and Backman and Wilde and Chbosky. They nod their approval. They worship words and art, and it is curious to see beings born in the dark exuding so much light. They live vicariously through you, as you have lived through the words of named and unnamed strangers, and all of it explodes into a burst of pastels: red, pink, and baby blue.

I watch as you dance your way into a world I cannot follow—shut eyes and fluid limbs.

Grief is just love with no place to go.
- Jamie Anderson