On the corner of the envelope, where the return address belongs, “Late Great” is written in place of a name. It is December 2022, and I am standing in O’Hare Airport leafing through a shoebox of old letters, and this is one is from a friend I loved. The postmark dates it to May 2007. I open the tattered flap and pull out a sheaf of neatly folded loose leaf.
Dearest Friend,
I received your letter and have tried to appreciate it through several readings. Despite the grim content it was still a much welcomed surprise in this first heat of early summer. You say that the intellectual consolidation that letter-writing gives us opportunity for (self-determination also) is done for purely selfish reasons. Even if this is true – which is not unlikely – think of the positive effects this may have in the future!
He goes on, talking about our recent graduation from high school and what it means, commenting on my notes on Kierkegaard’s Letters (which I had just finished reading around that time), and ruminating on American politics. The whole letter spans four pages and I stuff it away without paying too much mind to the later parts. At the end he writes, “I hope you find a moment of lucidity” and signs it “In truth, [redacted]”
There is another letter beneath it in the heap, this one from a year and a half later. In the span of that year a great deal happened to each of us. I went through a period of depression. I wrote him long letters describing how lonely and alienated I felt at college. He wrote me back trying to console me. I remember feeling lost and afraid.
The following summer (July 2008) he attempted suicide. I became obsessed with checking up on him, pestered him for a few months with unreturned letters and emails. We fell out of touch, and eventually I moved on. In my memory we stopped corresponding for good that summer, but I find that that isn’t the case.
So then there is this letter, postmarked September 2008. On the reverse of the envelope, over the flap, he has written “Only the wicked fear reproach.” I am standing near my gate, bags set down beside me as I pull it out, and I feel heavy with anticipation. I hesitate a few minutes before unfolding the pages, and read:
Dearest Friend,
It seems that you worry about what I think of you, and your stream of correspondence, which I do not respond to with the degree of earnestness, sincerity, and thoughtfulness which which your notes are sent. I will try to explain myself I guess.
I adore your letters. That is one part of me speaking, it may be a mask. But when i get mail from you I feel that thoughtfulness and openness are possible. Most of the time the part of me that is writing right now dives down somewhere to wallow and is ashamed of its existence. It is unpleasant to be sad all the time, especially for those around you. So another part of me pushes down the part that wishes to be open. The part of me that is sad really has very little strength or substantiality. It fails to express itself. But it is the one that receives your letters, in the first step. It is tickled by your writing and relishes your quiet thoughts. But it is weak, and destroys itself. It wants to respond, but it looks at itself in relation to the world and sees only overwhelming inconsequentiality. But somehow I still believe your letters are a boost to it. They give the [redacted] that is honest with itself some hope that it can have a period of sustained existence, and that another one who observes it will embrace its merit—merit that I can never find. I love your letters, speaking from this part of me.
There is another part of me that always keeps its eyes shut, drinks irresponsibly, and has no real capability of feeling. For this part your letters are indeed a burden. They grab on to my eyelids and pull them to give me a strange, tainted half-view of the things around me. It says things like, “Humans are incapable of meaningful repetition, since the womb I have been unconsciously categorizing all my experiences to make them less sacred and meaningless.” This part snickers at the thought of trying to express itself. All that is possible in its mind is the use of cliche to send tired messages, or a failure in communication, a shortcoming of any expression it could hope to have. This part says, “oh well,” and sighs.
I think both parts feel inadequate to respond, actually. Now, upon re-reading, I don’t even know if these two parts are different. I don’t really know which is writing right now either, and I feel very self-deluded. I am working, which is often very boring in the mornings. We sit on awful uncomfortable chairs and I fidget constantly, there is no companionship and I have to be nice to all the customers and make small talk in order to get some tip money so I can buy milk on the way home. My day is a stream of habits, some harmful, most meaningless. Cleaning my apartment and organizing things has become an obsession, I think. I can’t do anything if there are dirty dishes in the sink. My summer roommates have moved out and now I live completely alone, which I prefer. I can pace around or just sit quietly, undisturbed.
I wrote this awful poem in Mackinac Island, because I was being very melodramatic over a lost romance.
[Here he inserts some free verse.]
Now I’ll ask instead that you read lines to me, with the hope that you know colors I’ve not seen.
All my love,
[Redacted]
By the time I’ve mustered enough courage to skim over the whole letter, put it away and take it back out a few times, and read it through in detail, I’ve boarded my flight and we are airborne. The lights go off in the cabin as I reach end end of it, and I shed a few tears in tenderness over what I’ve read.
My memory of that period is of deep concern morphing into sadness, frustration, and, gradually, cynicism. It was a period of time when everything felt extremely important, everything laden with meaning. Everything mattered terribly, and life was exploding with emotional resonances and meanings that gave gravity and depth to people, music, poetry—everything I encountered.
On the flight home I reread that letter a couple of times and thought about what it meant to me. I started writing this post, but got distracted remembering some lines from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte and trying to re-translate them into English. That night I wrote to him for the first time in over a decade.
Hey,
I was back in Chicago for the first time in a while this past weekend, going through boxes of old crap in my parents' basement to throw away, and I came across a shoebox of letters from you from 2007-2009. I'll admit I wasn't sure what I'd find, but I read a couple and somehow they really moved me.
It's been a long time, but I wanted to reach out to and thank you for writing such beautiful, thoughtful letters to me. I imagine you saw this to some extent at the time, but I was really tortured and hated myself, and you meant a lot to me as a friend. Eventually that got mixed up with romantic feelings, and because I wasn't comfortable admitting to myself that I was gay I didn't know how to handle that.
I told a friend recently that everything I really love in literature, music, and philosophy I'd already discovered by the age of 22, and you remain a part of some of those memories. In so many ways I ended up nothing like the person I imagined at that age, though I suppose I'm better off for it.
Who knows if you're still using this email address. I figured I'd let that be the dice roll that determines whether you ever get this message. I hope you're doing well, and, well, it's probably selfish of me but I wanted to say thanks for loving me when things were so bad.
Best wishes,
Elliot
In her novel A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle has a discourse on the nature of personal identity, and one of her characters claims that “Love [is] what makes persons know who they are.” This idea has always stuck with me, because there is something bizarre and yet intuitively true about it. The experience of being loved for who you are is a big part of identity formation and helps us maintain a sense of personal dignity and security in life, regardless of who we’re dealing with or what we’re doing.
I’ve returned to this book and that particular passage many times over the years, and I used to get pretty emotional reading it, because something about it resonated with me deeply. One of the things we struggle with when we hide away a big piece of ourselves from everyone is the conviction that no one ever really knows who we are. And no one can really love us, since we are unknown. And in the absence of that love, that knowledge from the outside that functions as a mirror of the self, it becomes difficult to know for myself who I am. Every expression from another person which bears on this topic is subtly bracketed, treated as non-evidentiary, or tossed aside as of little significance.
The result is that the feeling of loneliness one has inside is perpetually magnified and reinforced. No one really knows me (even when they have known me for years). No one really understands me (even when they understand quite well). No one really loves me (even when their love is explicit and present). I think what was so shocking to me about rereading that letter from 2008 was the discovery of evidence that yes, here was someone who did understand me and did love me in his own way, even if it wasn’t the romantic, unitive love I wanted deep down. And maybe more shocking was the extent to which his concerns at the time mirrored my own—further evidence of a genuine relationship, further evidence of empathy and mutual understanding.
I’m not really going anywhere in particular with these thoughts. They form one loop in a yarn ball of extremely intricate memories and ideas I may never fully untangle. But I wanted to share them anyway, in part because this discovery was so beautiful to me, and because it represents a kind of liberation from that myth of loneliness I told myself about myself for so long. Which is to say:
Sometimes we are loved, and known, and desired by people close to us even in the absence of our ability to see that love, or to know ourselves. And sometimes we are lucky enough to retain breadcrumbs pointing back to a reality we didn’t know was there, so that we can discover it, years later, hiding beneath all the lies we told ourselves about who we were.