Most People Wait for a Letter Every Morning

The last story for this year

“I can’t lie.”

With this, he tries—still tries—to justify what his friends call carelessness: the obstinate neatness of his days. Why would one feel guilty over tidiness, as if guilt were some kind of price to be paid?

“I sometimes think that if men were sincere, the whole world would collapse.”

No one hears what he says. The world should collapse every time people disclose, truthfully, what is on their minds—and isn’t that precisely what happens more and more often? And still, the world, this system of blunt continuities and indifference, remains. What collapses is not the world, but the private arrangements we make with one another.

A week before, when no one mentioned names, vertigo took him by the shoulders. Something rose toward him. He lost his balance; a badly joined beam came loose and broke his fall, then pinned him there, down there. They had to prise him free from beneath it. At first, it seemed serious, but later, when it turned out to be an ordinary fracture of the forearm, he surprised himself by relief. Weeks of enforced quiet, the doctor said. Time, finally, to attend to what he had postponed under the noble alibis.

It was there that he read aloud the passage he had copied the night before, careful not to alter a word, as if fidelity itself might be a form of shelter:

I had been worrying for some time about the long-delayed arrival of your letter, as you can imagine, when I came across a passage in Regius just before hearing from you. Under the title ‘Waiting’ it reads as follows: ‘Most people wait for a letter every morning. That no letter arrives—or, if one does arrive, it contains only a rejection of some kind—generally holds true for those who are sad already’. When I came across this passage, I already felt sad enough to take it as a foretaste or presentiment of your own letter. If, ultimately, there was something encouraging for me in the letter (I say nothing about the unchanged perspective it expresses) then it is in the fact that your objections, however staunchly they may be shared by other friends, should not be interpreted as a rejection.

If there is melancholy and anxiety in Benjamin’s life, it is not an abstract condition, not a temperament he could be persuaded to shed, he thinks. It is here, lodged in the practical matter of getting published. Memory demands paper, paper demands patience, and patience is precisely where money never thinks to stop.

***

He meets her in a kitchen with a table too small for conviction to rest its elbows. She sits opposite him, coat still on, hands folded as if they have learned restraint from long practice. Her face wears a severity. When she speaks, it is without preface, as though the sentence has been waiting and she has merely arrived to deliver it.

“You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms.”

She says it without emphasis, as one might name the contents of a drawer. He thinks of roofs, of vertigo, of the beam that loosened itself. He thinks of how thunder is always elsewhere until it is not. He tells her about the fracture. She nods in recognition, the way one recognises a map known by heart but makes nothing of it.

He imagines the line of women, the cold that makes time granular. He realises then that his carefulness has been a form of faith: faith that words, once set down, would not betray him.

She leans forward. “I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, turn my living soul to stone, then teach myself to live again. I know you will understand.”

Outside, thunder gathers its instruments. A distant rumble. He watches her hands—strong, capable of anything.

“It’s possible,” she adds, seeing the question on his face. “Possible.” She stands, finally removing her coat, as if deciding to stay a little longer. She does not sit back down. Instead, she moves the chair a few centimetres with her foot, not to make space for herself but to test the room, as one tests ice before stepping out. The sound is small, abrasive. She goes to the sink, rinses a cup that was already clean, dries it with a towel whose edges have thinned into threads.

“As the future ripens in the past,” he says, “so the past rots in the future.”

“Yes,” she says. “That is exactly it.” She reaches into her coat pocket and takes out a folded scrap of paper, worn soft by handling. She does not offer it to him. She smooths it once against the table and slips it back again. “We think time is a line because we need it to behave. But it doesn’t. It composts.”

“The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours. That exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed. The whole time I was praying you would read my eyes.”

She watches him closely then, not with pity but with attention sharpened by long use. She steps closer and places her hand flat on the table between them.

“Look at me,” she says, and he does. “See, we were never about butterflies.” She presses her palm down. “We’ve always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.”

He thinks about what she said; small and medium stars (like our Sun) burn steadily for billions of years. When their fuel thins, they swell into red giants, shed their outer layers, and leave behind a white dwarf—a dense, cooling remnant. All that is left of long patience. Massive stars live faster, more violently. They forge heavier elements until fusion can no longer produce energy. At that point, gravity wins. The star collapses, then rebounds in a supernova, scattering the elements it created across space. Those scattered elements—iron in blood, calcium in bone, carbon in memory—become material for planets, bodies, and future stars.

Outside, thunder finally breaks its rehearsal. He feels the echo of it in his arm, in the bone that is still to become whole again. For a moment, neither of them moves. Then she withdraws her hand and picks up the chair she nudged earlier, setting it back into alignment, correcting nothing and everything at once.

She opens the window just enough to let the storm be heard properly, then closes it again, firmly.

“That,” she says, putting her coat back on, “is action enough for today.” What time takes, it takes slowly, he thinks. He understands now that there is no price of turning time into matter, but the cost of telling the truth early, so that what must arrive, doesn’t stink or burn without royalties.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Some of the highlights of THIS year:

ART DISPLAY PROJECT - INTERVIEWS WITH THE ARTISTS, ARTICLES ABOUT ART

TENDER LETTERS