Words Fail
Dear Hugo,
It is January, letter-writing season. Resolutions and all that. My inbox is piled with them.
This will be my last letter to you, at least in this particular format.
Which is not to say that I won't ever send messages to the other people who read this -- I reserve the right to rebrand. But I don't think those missives will be directed to you, Hugo. You are too much your own person now for me to write to a future version of you. You're already your own future self, if that makes sense. I can just talk to you.
I'm not sure what writing holds for me in this moment. I've been doing a lot of, ah, alternative therapies over the past year or so. They are actually helping.
I used to think if I could cure my anxiety & depression, I'd be able to write more and be able to finish something. But at least at the current moment, decreasing my depression and anxiety has meant that I don't feel much like writing at all.
This has caused me to question the impulse I've had for so long to write things down. I've always held this artistic drive semi-sacred. That voice I hear in my head, narrating my experience back to me. You're supposed to find your voice. I found it pretty easily, but have had trouble figuring out how to use it.
I was an anxious kid. Not due to any particularly notable trauma other than the trauma of being alive in this world and being raised by loving but flawed adults. I was sensitive and a bit melancholic by nature. The narrator's voice that emerged in my head as I started reading middle-grade novels helped me get through the day. I was a girl in a book. I was reading my life, not living it. I could detach myself from the world, and float above it and observe it and describe it. It gave me a little distance, and so things hurt a little less.
The other thing that drew me to writing - specifically published writing - was that it meant people could find you. Strangers who felt the same way you felt might seek you out. If your name was in print, in a library catalog or table of contents somewhere, it made you more real. It meant the possibility of an afterlife. Even after death, someone might read your name, think it in their head, maybe even form its shape with their lips and breathe it into the air. An occasional immortality. At least some trace left on the earth other than a tombstone.
I'm not making any grand pronouncements here that writers only write as a coping mechanism and/or because they fear death. Just some. Maybe most?
(I promise I'm not having a midlife crisis btw.)
Just before Christmas, you, me, and Granny drove out to a cemetery in southern Guilford County. It's beside Centre Friends Meeting. Pawpaw's grandmother is buried there. Her name was Viola Newman.
That makes her your great-great-great grandmother, if I'm counting right. My mom's great-grandmother. She died in 1894, 120 years before you were born. And there her name is, shining in brass under a magnolia tree. She got married at 14, had five children, and died at 30.
The marker feels permanent. But then, there are older graves in the cemetery. The Quakers started their meeting here in the 1750s. Some of the stones have lost their inscriptions. They're just these mysterious, lichen-covered artifacts of human burial rites.
They frightened me a little. They reminded me that everything falls away eventually. Mansions and monuments collapse. Words fail. Meaning recedes. Publishing a book doesn't make one person more real than another.
I thought about the other traces these people might have left behind. Skills, stories, recipes. Quilts. All the unsigned things you make and give away. Things that might get passed down a few generations, treated as heirlooms, but slowly unravel and crumble too. Extending your own life past your death just a little, by means of making things with love, and then letting yourself be forgotten entirely, in peace.
That's what I feel drawn to these days, more than typing into a computer. Sewing, knitting, weaving. Things that are tactile and warm and can be used for a practical purpose. Wordless things. It makes me feel a kind of peace that words never have. Maybe I'll want that kind of trouble again sometime, but not right now.
I just finished knitting a hat for you, the first one I've ever made. For now I will give you these things instead of writing you letters. The same amount of love goes into each.
Take care of yourself,
M.