epistolary beginnings

In her books, The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson quotes an epsiode in which the recipient of a love letter, written by Wayne Koestenbaum, responded succintly: "Next time, write to me."

I've written love letters galore. I've written them to people I was dating, people I was fucking, and people who hardly knew of me from across the coffeeshop. But of course, I wasn't really writing to them. I was writing at them. Anyone who's ever fallen in love with a poet will understand the difference as they find their own minutia scattered through verse as a resounding point for which the writer's words can bounce off of. 

For me, it was the poppy tattooed on my arm that made it onto the page, but that doesn't mean that the poem was about me. For one thing, it was written in Esperanto. I also never even saw the poems until after the relationship had ended. It was years later, upon rekindling a friendshop, that I had to ask for a translation of my own love poems. Admittedly, this part came after the love itself had faded; maybe the love would've excused the frustration in its mercy, or maybe it would've seethed. But I never had to find out. 

I practiced bemusement at the poems and translations, though I found myself editing one of my own I'd written for that person some days later, entitled, "The Sonar Love Poem." In it, I lamented how my words could only ever echo off the person I was trying to capture in verse, showing their silhoutte through its absence, but not the actual person. At the time of writing, I seemed to have missed the point: that is, who were these words echoing back to? Who was the poem for?

All of this to say I've been guilty of writing at people rather than to them. But this blog exists purely for two friends born of a union almost a decade old, christened by quiet singing to Paramore in the car on the way to an overpriced coffeeshop. That coffeeshop doesn't exist anymore. It didn't survive the pandemic, or gentrification, or this step in late-stage capitalism. The friendship, however, has held fast, across miles and oceans and substances and heartbreaks and frustrations and decadence. And that's why I'm entering this space with the intent to write to them, and to be written to.