Dead Letter Department #40

an incomplete but highly specific list of what i wish i had on the morning of september 23rd

a wooden salt cellar to hold the flaky Maldon salt i put on hard boiled eggs every morning. there are certain objects which make you feel like you have your shit together—having always enough good socks, for example. digging salt crystals out of a gradually crumbling paper packet is clearly inferior, possibly detrimental, & i strongly believe that if i were opening an elegant little wooden box instead, my mornings, eggs & overall well being might be improved.

the nearly full run of Mercedes Lackey’s Herald series that I painstakingly bought up in all the used bookstores in Burlington, Vermont when I was 15 & 16 & then had to leave behind when I moved

a belief in a merciful afterlife

a three book deal (this one I hold out hope for), followed by several stand alone novels, followed by another series, with exactly the right people wanting rights for other mediums, & other writing ambitions possibly too large to list that have therefore been redacted

the sure knowledge that you remember it the way I do, or something close to it: the snow, the heavy night sky and the glow of your dashboard, the clove we passed back and forth, wet from your mouth like the kiss we never had. cloves are illegal now, did you know that? we couldn’t duplicate that moment even if we had everything else, which we never will again.

red sneakers—the ones i have are black with neon orange details which is cute but not exactly the right vibe

a dim sum restaurant in reasonable driving distance, preferably pushcart style, but i would settle for a menu option, & my sibling somehow magically present & available for brunch despite the fact that it is the middle of both of our workdays & they live 5 hours away

the glass that we found at the bend in the railroad bed that summer at the dude ranch, huge chunks of it, in blue & green, from where the passengers used to fling their bottles out the window. there was a big bowl of it in the china cabinet for a long time, & now i only have one piece left.

someone who can tell me if the green & purple stone i found at Semiahmoo last week is really jasper

the ability (or is it energy?) to return the texts & emails i owe to people i care about very much but have not been able to reach back out to because of the crawling onward, gritted teeth nature of my functionality these days

a piece of art big enough to fit above the new enormous gap on my wall—crucially, already framed—that can live beautifully with the things already in the room, especially the Tove Jansson print on the opposite side

someone for whom i come first, who i can put first—clearly not before their own interests, or before their work, or children, should there be any in the picture, but it is deeply unpoetic to say ‘someone for whom i come third or fourth depending on how we’re counting’ so we’ll just leave it

for the spiders trying to come inside as the weather cools down to stay out of the bathroom & also to consent rather more gracefully to the jelly jar taxi if i catch them and take them back out again. it’s not my fault you have so many legs & i am trying not to be a weenie, please try to work with me here

books two & three in the Murderbot series. i have four & just read one & want to inhale the rest immediately

also Lessons from the Empress because my agent just signed one of the authors & it looks really good

a coffee date with someone who’s already read the Great Derangement & can tell me if it’s going to put my climate despair into a more useful perspective or just make it worse, because i started off strong with it & now i am beginning to doubt

aforementioned coffee date to be at Ashuri Cafe on Grand where we will sit outside on the stools & drink tiny cups of Turkish coffee & eat pistachio baklava & check the apartment building upstairs to see if the white cat is sitting in the window

a top surgery date, with the logistics all completely worked out in a way that causes absolutely no inconvenience to anyone at all, scheduled exactly the right number of days away to have time to prepare & not a single hour more

one good thing

I’ve lived in Whatcom County for somewhere north of twelve years & every year the salmon run in the fall—gathering at the mouth of where the various creeks meet the salty bay waters and swimming slowly, laboriously upstream. Somehow I’d never actually seen it happen, & this year I was fortuitously reminded of it on a day when I was already downtown so I parked first by the Waterfront Tavern (if anyone can advise if their fried seafood is actually good, please email departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com immediately because I was severely tempted). At first, leaning over the concrete overpass & staring down into the murky waters, I saw absolutely nothing, but after a minute my eyes adjusted & suddenly I could see them, huge, finned shapes, heads pointed upstream.

There were dozens right underneath me, probably hundreds in spitting distance, & they looked like nothing more than commuters waiting patiently to board a too-full subway car. They seemed to be drifting, but their long, muscular bodies were clearly working hard just to beat the current that was impersonally attempting to push them back out to sea. On the other side of the bridge, I could see fins breaking the surface but I wanted to see them jump so I circled around to the post office & went down the trail to the falls.

It’s a heavily used path even when the migration isn’t happening— City Hall workers, casual strollers, unhoused folks with carts of belongings—but when I visited there were even more people than usual, including what looked like an entire class of college freshman & a very serious woman in waders who seemed to be involved in some sort of fish counting project.

I always forget how good the falls there are until I’m looking at them—I drive over them all the time, not remembering that they’re right under the street, but as soon as I go down the long, mossy concrete stairs & hear that roar, something loosens, gets carried away downstream. We had the driest summer, apparently, in 63 years, so the water is low enough to see the pools & eddies where the stone is worn away. The salmon gathered in little groups at each of the stony steps where the water was still, & I kept imagining them egging each other on, up into the white foam—no, you go first, I’ll be there in a minute, really, just have to catch my breath.

It’s almost violent, the way they fling themselves up, pushing against gravity & water & everything except instinct, only to slip right back down again to where they started. Over & over again they surge up into that unbreathable air, leaping all the way home to their spawning grounds.

This is the 40th Dead Letter Department—a number that only exists because you have been good enough to keep reading as I write to you, & sometimes even write me back. I hope to see you here again soon, & in the meantime, may you have more than enough strength to swim upstream where you belong.