October 12, 2024

I am reading Sally Rooney’s new release Intermezzo. (Still only a few chapters in, but I think already I’d recommend it. Dripping with feeling. Ache. Details of human yearning.) Anyway, something in it made me nostalgic for our days of email correspondence. Or maybe it’s just that I’m visiting Michigan this week for a wedding and reminders of you abound.

So I thought I’d write you. But if it takes weeks or months for you to reply or you never do, that’s okay.

I don’t think I ever told you, but you made an appearance in two of my dreams this past year. One I’ve forgotten completely. But another I was in some dire situation and found you in the middle of a chaotic corridor in a curtained booth that made us invisible. In the booth, I told you all my dream woes, and you told me what to do. Wish I’d written it out when I first woke. That was months ago and I don’t remember much else.

All to say, I miss you. And wish for a weekend spent slow hearing all about your world.

It sometimes feels like looking into a one-way mirror/window. I know you’re on the other side there with a whole life of feeling and circumstance, but I am usually caught up in my own, unable even to wave from beyond the glass. A text feels like too small a gesture. Too hurried.

Hm. How to make a doorway into how I am now. I am realizing that this year maybe the last two years have all been waves of transition and change. Sometimes survival mode. And I can’t see clearly the condition of a season until it’s passed.

Most days I follow [my son’s] whims, which lead me to lots of hours spent coloring cowboys or driving to a coffee shop for a treat (coffee for me, cookie for him). Playgrounds and pretend battles. He is very into superheroes. His imagination astounds and sometimes alarms me. Like maybe he should live in reality a bit more… but he shouts “I’ll battle the bad guys and rescue the friendly guys! I am brave!” and he is.

A couple weeks ago he climbed a tree all by himself and made it higher than twice my height. Unstoppable. He’s so capable I frequently forget that he’s not even three years old yet. And I’m hit with an impulse to shelter him better. Protect him from the brute world, that too ever-changing. How can we hold it?

You don’t have to answer that. But, I do want to know, how are you?

Tell me everything.

xx
Katie

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