Dear D,
My mind is skittish, racing from one unfinished idea to the next. Unsettled, flighty, fractured.
It's not that I don't have Things To Do. Even in this uncertainty, there are things to make, produce, achieve. As always, structure and order get me through, but when endlessness is at the top of every day what does one do?
I can't stop seeking the last iteration, of every news story, email, and social media post. I am searching, scrolling, seeking: what happened? what happened?
I am hungry to know, but dulled with the knowing.
___
Good grief, why is everyone Zooming?
For years I've lived away from the people I most know and love, and carried each one in letters and my heart — letters, that beautiful and enigmatic exchange. I don't need to see you, especially in bad lighting and distorted angles. Let’s keep those distortions hidden, private, perfectly intact.
___
The other day I laughed, hard and unexpected.
As good laughs tend to go, this one was brought on by nothing especially funny. One of those throw-away remarks that hit at just the right time and right place so that the laugh travels through the body and fills the room with relief.
___
I'm writing more than ever. It's a welcome compulsion, this drive to record, though I imagine the poems are mostly process.
Purists insist poetry is not therapy. They get huffy, as if insulted to both write and feel. Yes, poetry is discipline, study and craft, but it's also therapeutic in the way that a walk restores physical and emotional health.
Do we have to argue everything?
Anyway, I'm writing a lot, mostly pandemic poems. They likely won't hold up over time (and that’s okay). In three months, six months, a year . . . when we have put the pandemic on a shelf and looked away (as we tend to do), we'll not want to revisit these difficult days.
And yet, there is a restlessness and a rush, a desire to notice and note. In all this, writing is lifting me up and carrying me through.
Well, writing, tortilla chips — and you.
With love,
Drew
Postscript:
• An excellent book of letters is Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker.
• Letters have souls, is not from the Hints from Heloise homemaker but rather the French love-torn nun.
• An anonymous writer keeps a beautiful blog of letters, here.
• Are you writing through this, too? Write to me.