lian

Someone told me writing in books is disrespectful, and I have been composing a response for four days now, which probably tells you how well I took it, so here it is at unreasonable length.

A book is not a museum object, and I would happily make an exception for a first edition of something genuinely rare, which is a different conversation entirely, but a…

Wrote another one tonight I am not going to send. That makes about thirty.

They are all to the same four or five people and none of them are angry, which surprised me when I noticed it. I assumed unsent letters were for the things you cannot say. Mine are mostly for things that are simply too late. Updates to people who knew a version of me that has been out…

On leaving somewhere small: nobody warns you that you will have to keep doing it.

I left at eighteen and I have left again about six times since, in the sense that every time I go back there is a version of me waiting that everyone still refers to in the present tense. Not maliciously. It is just the version they have. You correct it, gently, over a weekend,…

Found a letter I wrote at twenty and did not send. She was naïve, obviously, that part is not surprising. The strange part is that she was right about two things I later talked myself out of.

I have been assuming the arrow of improvement goes one way, that every year I am slightly less wrong. On the evidence it is more like a trade. I have gained a great…

Sunday phone call, forty minutes, almost entirely about the weather and a neighbour I have never met.

I used to try to steer these towards something real and it never once worked. Now I understand that the weather is the subject. Forty minutes of nothing in particular, every week, for years, is a fairly clear statement and neither of us has ever had to make…