Letter 1

Letter 1, never sent. Found tucked inside a copy of* Middlemarch *that she'd given him as a joke, which he'd kept for twenty years.

I wrote the last one from the airport in Lisbon. This one I'm writing from the kitchen table in the flat I share with two strangers who leave their dishes in the sink and play music through the walls at 2 a.m. I should hate it. I find I don't mind. I keep thinking about what you said on the quay—that every place is only a location until someone you love has stood in it.

You've stood in a great many places now. I've been tracking the postcards you don't send me—I found your name in a photography credit in a magazine, standing in a field in Hokkaido. You looked cold. You looked like yourself.

I am becoming someone I think you might still recognize, though I'm not certain. The work is different. The work is good. I make coffee in the mornings and sit by the window and think about a conversation we had when we were twenty-two, about what we wanted from our lives, and I think: *we were so earnest. We were so right.*

I don't know what I'm saying. I don't send these letters because I know the answer to every question in them, and the answer is simply: yes. All of it. Still.