Dead Letter Department #12
did you miss Dead Letter Department # 11? Catch up here!
filling in the blanks
I did a short questionnaire recently for my literary agency that was partially about interests and obsessions, what I could give a TED Talk about. The list, once I got over the knee-jerk, blank-minded reaction of “Life experience? Never heard of her!” could have gone on forever and was fun to fill out: video games & hockey & the authors I adore, pop culture & literary culture, the particular fictional characters and worlds that have sunk deep down into my various emotional & intellectual cavities. After I sent it off, though, I kept swirling down into another other kind of obsession, or maybe fixation. I think it’s been even more obvious since these Corona times began that a lot of us are running some pretty dark films back behind the curtains at the front of the theater.
Mine are both repetitive & obvious: the virus, the numbers, the ever rising graph of deaths; these are new since the beginning of the pandemic. But I think about climate change every day, I have thought about it every day for years and years, I expect I will be thinking about it as long as I live: vanishing fog in California, wildfires, sea star wasting syndrome, extinction, which fills me with a dread so total it feels unbearable. The dams that should come down, the salmon that will die if they don’t, the two orcas born to the local pod; whether they will be enough to keep the pod going, whether we care enough to save them. The tally of what is lost, this & this & this that will never come again.
What people my age (geriatric millenials, what a phrase) have latched onto instead of the previous markers of success: houseplants, side hustles, pets. Nothing permanent: we can’t afford it. No retirement: we can’t even imagine it. What happens when chosen family fails, or fails entirely to coalesce. When it doesn’t get better. The huge banner flying from the condos I pass on the way to my dad’s house that say “Stop Asian Hate/Am I Next?”
The things I spent my twenties avoiding only to have them kick my knees out from under me in my thirties, and now that my thirties are done & I’m a lot more tired, the stark view down the horizon line of my forties.
I suspect you have a list like this. I suspect most people have a list like this, if not longer & stranger. It’s hard to write without about without feeling like I’m dumping a bucket of nightmare crabs directly onto your head, hard to talk about without whirling up into an anxiety spiral if our griefs are similar enough.
this week’s beloved stranger
This week’s beloved stranger is the lady waiting for bloodwork at the clinic with me who very sweetly complimented me on my hair (which was looking objectively terrible) and then proceeded to tell me that she lives in a community where people refuse to wear masks.
“Lynden?” I asked, which is the very conservative town slightly upper-right of me: heavily Dutch Reform and lagging well behind the rest of the county in vaccinations.
She nodded, looking distressed behind her little paper mask.
“I work from home,” she told me.
“Me too!” I said, way too excited about bonding over the weirdness of working from home with this nice lady.
“I only know four people here and they’re all my neighbors and none of them will wear masks,” she explained. “They say they won’t be forced.” She went on to tell me that she’d moved close to the border to take care of an aging relative in a care home—the border she now can’t cross. I was about 65% of the way towards offering her my phone number so she would at least know five people but then the nurse called me to steal my blood and pee and also take photographs of the inside of my eyeballs and by the time I got back the lady was gone. I wish I’d been quicker on the draw.
reading room
It’s still Thomas Cromwell hours over here, kids: the Mirror & the Light is my constant companion. On deck, once I finally depart the 16th century, I’ve got Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption by Susan Devan Harness & Courtney Milan’s Unraveled.
I also read the hell out of Take This Bread by Sara Miles. I love a conversion memoir, especially by a radical gay, & that sounds flippant but it is extremely true. I am so interested in how people find their way into a faith if they didn’t grow up with it, how they get onto those grounds without their family & background giving them the secret passcodes and shortcuts.
things to think about before sleep
sleeping on Totoro’s belly: it is very warm and soft. he smells like green leaves and clean fur.
you are in a train compartment. the person you like best is at the other end of the journey. the train is rattling over the tracks and outside is a vast green countryside you have never seen, rolling hills and hidden brooks. sometimes a crossing light flashes by the blinds. sometimes other passengers go by talking to each other quietly, or a cart wheels by and the cutlery clanks against the glasses.
turns out it is possible to compress your problems into a single sheet of paper. coincidentally the paper is the exact right size for origami which means you can make your intractable worries into a tiny airplane & send it shooting out over the edge of the world.
the capybara resort is finally open: you can sit in the wooden soaking tub with a yuzu on your head. no one will ask you any questions at all.
they have let you inside Beauty’s library. every book is there. your books are there, the ones you haven’t written yet. you don’t have to read them, because you know you’re going to write them as soon as you can, but you can touch their spines where they're sitting on the bottom shelf.
you found Moominvalley. it turns out you could have been living there all along; you were always invited and there is a little blue house already waiting for you. in the morning you will go and have tea with Moominmamma and she will give you advice on what to do next.
you are a jellyfish. no thoughts, only plankton & drifting.
you’re house-sitting for Baba Yaga. the house walks through the forest all night on its giant chicken legs: but you get used to the swaying gait & in the morning you wake up in a wide open clearing ringed with birch trees. there are berries in the hedges, & eggs for breakfast if you don’t ask too many questions.
smooth stone. smoother than that. a pebble that started sharp & got all the edges bumped off of it over the course of many years, lying at the bottom of a nice tide pool.
one good thing
Turns out my neighborhood has not only a glut of tiny free libraries but ALSO a tiny free gallery! Someone mentioned it on Facebook so I went looking & it was exactly as charming as described. I took a tiny exquisite print of the sun sending long sharp beams of light out over a rocky coast. There’s a place to leave free art supplies, which I am already assembling a pile of, but I want to leave some good shit in there, and by good shit I mean terrible little doodles & maybe some of the little scrap fabric guys I used to make.
write back
If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you back here at the Dead Letter Department soon & in the meantime may your problems be as easily flung away from your person as a tiny origami airplane. You can always write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com.