Dearest Rachel –
I woke up this morning from what felt like a dreamless sleep – by which I mean that I can’t remember a single thing that I saw last night, even though I’m pretty sure there was something of a phantasmagoria that I wandered through – and wondering what exactly I could tell you about today. There wasn’t even anything about yesterday’s walk (which, when I think about it, is meant to stay between Lars and me anyway) or the evening’s lesson at church that felt remarkable, like it was worth relating to you.
It’s actually unnerving at this point to not have something started, or at least in mind, at this hour of the day.
I know I’ve talked to you about days like this that seem like ‘filler’ before; life is full of such days. Life and marriage are built on enduring them every bit as much as they’re meant to survive the days of tumult and drama – more so, in fact, as these days are what they are because of their commonplace nature. Granted, as I’ve pointed out before, what we would consider commonplace might fascinate someone else for the sheer fact that one person’s mundane is another’s exotic, and vice versa. It’s difficult to grasp it when you’re in the midst of it, but it’s always going to be the case; we just don’t see it because we don’t live those other people’s lives to find out what is ordinary to them.
Then again, what you and I – or, let’s face it, just I – would see as ordinary has been made self-evident over the past two thousand plus days. I’ve kept you as up-to-date as I know how; as I’ve cleaned up and out the house (with plenty of outside assistance) and renovated several room and set aside another for a tenant; as I’ve nursed Chompers through his last few months (and more than either of us expected there to be, although it’s astonishing to realize that he’s been gone for five years himself at this point); as I tried to find a new life partner, only to rarely get a date (and never a second one); as Daniel and I navigated our way through the Covid restrictions and other societal changes; and as we finally managed to get out of the country as they began to lift. But in between some of these arcs – and they do feel like character arcs – there have been lulls in which not much has been going on. This moment feels like one of them.
I guess part of it has to do with the fact that I’ve been going back and forth with various AI chatbots over these letters; having them examine them for literary merit, and determining which ones are truly significant, and which ones could be safely excluded from some future compilation. Not that I expect to publish them elsewhere but here, but since there are those reading these over your shoulder, I’m sufficiently self-aware to know that these could use some editing. I don’t want to alter them, as such, given the moments in which they were written, but some need to be featured, and others downplayed. And while I hate having to downplay some, I can tell that these days, a lot more of what I have to say isn’t particularly of much interest to anyone but yourself, and that mostly because of how our lives were intertwined.
“Now wait a minute,” you might say, “You’ve had yourself a perfectly eventful year so far, haven’t you? You’ve done an absurd amount of traveling; twice to Honduras – to teach! – and twice to Japan – with Daniel, both times! – and you’ve got another trip lined up in less than a month. Sure, things around the house have been fairly humdrum, but that’s a good thing; you don’t want drama or chaos there, do you?” And I suppose I don’t; but just as you liked to keep up your streak, so do I, and I’d rather not be boring you about it.
It’s like when you might page through Facebook or the like to see what your friends were doing here, there and everywhere (not that you did a lot of that – that I know of – but you understand the process). You would see this or that moment from a trip or a triumph, and feel like your life was that much duller than their by comparison, even as you knew, if the back of your mind, that this was a curated, “best of” compilation of their life, while you lived the full-length, uncut (and uncensored) version of your own life, complete with the long, slow takes and B-roll filler – not to mention the messes and mistakes that didn’t wind up in your friends’ Instagram reels. The funny thing that’s occurred to me as I’ve gone through each letter (and since the chatbots throttle how much I can share with them in any given day, I’m still only up through the middle of 2022) that I’m basically Instagramming myself, wishing things now could be more interesting, for the sake of telling you about it.
Does this mean I actually want more drama in my life, for the sake of content? Hardly. Honestly, I think what I most want are solutions. For one thing, I’ve never figured out what I could or should be running toward – as opposed to away from, to borrow Nightelf’s admonition from back then. Except, at the moment, I’m not so much running to or fro at the moment; in fact, I’m not running at all, which doesn’t seem the way things ought to be.
Now, this may be due to the fact that I’ve essentially given up (at least for now) the search for ‘Megumi’ – and concurrently, most of my desire to lose weight for someone who isn’t showing up. I like eating too much to give it up for someone who might not even exist. So that’s two whole character arcs that have just… been abandoned for now, since they seem to be turning into pointless side plots. Leaving… what now? I mean, you and I would be talking over one subject or another every day regardless of whether anything important was going on, but I’d rather not have a day where you could read this and think you read it before a few months ago.
Maybe that’s the difference between conversations and letters; the words are spoken into the air and disappear, so that if they come up again a day, a week, a month later, you don’t notice the repetition. But the written word, especially when stored and archived together like this, requires a certain amount of variety – and nobody’s live is that exciting.
Except in fragments on Instagram.
