Dearest Rachel –
I’ve been told by some folks who have a habit of reading over your shoulder that doing so feels like reading someone’s diary. And I can see why; if for no other reason, the fact that there’s something said to you every day gives it that quality right there. Then there’s the overly personal nature of some of what is written here – although given some things that people put up about themselves on the internet, this all seems rather tame and restrained in comparison.
But I would take some issue with the comparison to a diary, for a few reasons that can be explained here – as well as a couple that either escape my recollection at the moment, or should probably just go unexpressed. For starters, you can guess that these letters don’t sum up to the entirety of my own interior monologue. It’s far too organized, and – as a rule – tends to stay on a certain topic on any given day. I don’t need to tell you how scattered my thoughts are in real life; you know full well exactly what I’m talking about. You and I used to have conversations that would range all over, and after half an hour, we would wonder aloud as to how we got where we were with our discussion, and we would occasionally (as you would put it) wade back up our stream of consciousness to connect where we started to where we ended up; an interesting conversation in its own right.
And those were just the thoughts that we expressed to each other; our minds – everybody’s minds – run faster than can be spoken out loud. Humanity is a scatterbrained race, and I don’t mean that as an insult – we have to think about so many things all at once, just to stay upright and keep moving forward. It’s an absolute wonder sometimes that our thoughts can keep things organized, given how many topics are clamoring for our attention – and we give it to them, as best we can – in any given day. And all I’m telling you about is maybe one or two of them. I assure you, there’s so much happening that’s being left out, although it’s usually the stuff I consider too routine or otherwise less deserving of comment.
Likewise, a diary will often include certain sentiments one would prefer to keep under lock and key. And while I may have said a few intemperate things here throughout the course of these past five years, I don’t think they’ve gotten too extreme. You know, for instance, about how I try to avoid politics; thus far, I seem to have been sufficiently circumspect about that to keep from getting kicked off of BlueSky (which you’ve never heard about, but no matter). As for other information, I may give away a lot about you and myself, but no more than the average Facebook user or wannabe Instagram influencer. Honestly, if someone wants to gather the breadcrumbs, it would make no difference to you, and as far as I understand, it isn’t as if I’m giving away more than anyone who’s particularly determine could already dredge up about us. Privacy doesn’t really exist on the internet; all one can rely on is the indifference of most of its inhabitants.
No, this isn’t a diary, as such, honey. To be sure, it’s basically turned into a blog, with my addressing you as something of a framing device for each entry. Rather than dwelling on an aspect of your character, or some little quirk that I remember and cherish, there’s a lot of ink spilled (or, more accurately, pixels fired off) by me about the things going on around much in the days since your departure. I’m not particularly thrilled about that fact, but it’s how life runs in your absence.
But it’s also becomes something a little bit more than that, as well. I’ve mentioned the streaks you used to keep up with online; be it Gardens of Time, Candy Crush, Odd Socks or one of those other games. Why, sometimes you’d enlist others to keep your streaks going when we would travel and might have limited internet access. There’s a little bit of that “got to keep the streak alive” attitude in my constant daily updates, I won’t deny it, but with the added discipline wherein I can’t feasibly fob the duty off to anyone else (although technically, I could allow access to others to write about you, if they wanted to. I doubt they would, though, especially at this point, as their work would likely get lost among everything I’ve already posted). There’s a ‘need,’ a compulsion, to see if I can’t keep this practice up of dropping “a line a day [now that] you’re far away” for just one more day.
It’s a deliberate exercise of the mind, where I try to not only write you every day, but also write at least a certain amount. It’s meant to keep it sharp just as my physical exercise is meant to keep my body healthy. You should recognize the effort, as you used to spend time filling out sudoku puzzles to work out your own brain. After all, you had seen both your grandmothers and your mother in turn fall victim to dementia in their old age, and were determined to stave it off in yourself for as long as possible; this was one of the means you used to do that. Not that it turned out to be necessary, of course, but you couldn’t have been expected to know that. For all any of us knew, you would be able to live to ninety years of age, but lose your grip on reality after crossing eighty; the question was, how soon after turning eighty would you have to deal with this? You concluded that, with a properly exercised brain, it would happen later rather than sooner, although there’s obviously no testing the theory now.
Still, it seems a reasonable hypothesis, enough that, now that I’ve gotten started with this practice of writing to you like this, I intend to keep it up for a similar such purpose. This may not quite exercise the same corners of the brain as sudoku, but the principle is the same. In any event, not only will I have a record of events that I might otherwise have forgotten for not having written them down, I’ll have made a practice of organizing certain thoughts each day so as to make them presentable to you in this format. Whether it will make me less prone to the vicissitudes of age – assuming I’m as susceptible as anyone to them to begin with – won’t be determinable, as I can only choose one path for my life (and this is it, for now at least), but I can’t see how this could possibly hurt to practice.
With that having been said, then, I’ll have to ask as I always do, that you keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 