In Which We Open The Manila Folder

Dear Derek

by LINDA EDDINGS

I got the letters back today, in a manila folder. It looked like he had been collecting them; at least, like they were given care.

The first one was about how I could not shake the feeling I was better off without him, but by the end of the letter, thematically, I wasn't so sure if that was the case. There was the note of apologia – an apology always smells to me like sulphur and the inside of a camping tent. With that said, there was no actual sorry, just the idea that something negative had taken place between us, that had not been accounted for and would not for some time. He left my apartment before I woke completely. I begged him to stay and forced him to go. A girl on the street played hopscotch with her sister. I bought a pregnancy test, but I didn't mention that until the third letter.

installation by katja novitskova

The second one was all about regret. I wrote it in a Starbucks, the one near his place where I always hated to go. It is not stalking to revisit these old places, right? I had already met someone else by the time of this letter, but I was not one hundred percent sure about him. It felt weird to write to him and pursue this other romance, but it is best to be practical about such things. He was, I wrote, never the type of human being I could count on completely. But I still missed him and wanted him back, so I listed all the things I missed about him: that cinnamon smell to his clothes, the way he pressed his cock against me while I slept, how he never once overstayed his welcome.

The third one was in pieces. After I write a letter, all the feeling I put into it is drained from me. I walk around like a skeleton, which is all we are anyway. Ask any x-ray technician. In this epitaph I listed all the problems I thought he and I had. They included a struggle to communicate, a reluctance to bring our true emotions out for fear of hurting the ones closest to us, various issues with trust brought on by the existence of his ex-girlfriend. I wonder – did she write him letters? He deleted all his e-mails, so she must have, in order to leave something permanent in the place we both know.

The fourth one is hardest for me to read. I am a mess by then, barely able to wake or sleep. Stuck between those two poles, I ache for his physical presence. In life it is not enough to be betrayed; we must know the meaning of the betrayal. I ask him all about his new girlfriend, who he posts about incessantly. She is substantially younger than I am, with a different hair color. Worst of all she has a positive mental outlook.

By the time of the fifth letter they have broken up, and I am reassured by this, potentially gratified by this. It has opened up a world of new possibilities for me. Then again, when you want something as much as I do, actually getting it would come as such a complete shock to the system that it might destroy me all over again. Reading back these particular words fills me with delight: I am legitimately impressed at how delusional I become given the right circumstances. "I know you don't love me," I almost write, but hold back. Could saying something make it true?

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

In Which We View Most Things As Omens For The Republic

Heartstrings

by LINDA EDDINGS

He and I went away for the weekend. In that warm place, we made a plan to grow closer together. Here is how we did it, and all the reasons I am explaining it.

Say you start at a fixed point. We can call this point moonrise. At moonrise, shadows mean everything. Seeing the light reflected on the ground is an omen. Here is what the omen means, and all the reasons I am explaining it.

After moonrise: what comes into the world is a view of masculinity. The type of man I always said I wanted. Sometimes, I know, it is so difficult for me to be loved. I can't stand it; it feels like clutches from which I must wriggle free or die. It bothers me that I get that feeling of affection for others so rapidly. If something (anything!) takes longer to develop, does that make it intrinsically more valuable?

Forget I asked. After what comes after moonrise were these little dates. I know it is going somewhere when I feel like the time together passes too quickly. I don't know what other people talk about, but here is what I brought up and my reasons for doing so. Have you ever heard someone say the familiar expression, "I have my reasons." Nine times of ten, the reason was sex. The other time it is money.

He likes to plan the entire date, which I regard as somewhat controlling. Inevitably we are to ride to the top of something. (His name is Paul, and he lived for two years in Antigua because of his father's job. He still has a pendant from there.) Paul likes to look down on things.

painting by janne parviainen
On our third date, he told me about his ex-girlfriend. "How long were you together?" I asked. He said two years. "How much did you love her?" I asked. He said a lot. "Do you still think about her?" I asked. He said he did when he came across an old greeting card she made him. She liked to draw little pictures of them together, doing what they enjoyed.

The end result of the conversation was that I made him wait a lot longer to have sex. From this vantage, the air above massive buildings and structures seems insensate, porcelain. The wind is the breath of a most high god. The skyscrapers resemble an infection. The man and woman perched atop them have a long way to fall.

Moonrise begins in the early evening, and lasts as long as we want it to. After awhile you forget the touch of a man, and what it means to you. I have a friend who still calls her intended a boy. What a waste of time for both of them. I know that Paul is not like that. He texts me in the morning, before I wake up, before anyone does. Usually it is a quote from Plato. (Sometimes he says, "isn't philosophy wonderful?")

In Antigua they have this kind of polenta. It really is not so different from what my mother made. Paul can also make omelets and other basic stuff. I asked him if he enjoys cooking. He said, "Whatever you want to hear."

Growing so close with Paul does make me afraid. He is not the type to vanish, which makes me attracted to him. He is the type to keep some pent-up hurt beneath him, nursing it far past its natural life, which makes me wary of him. There is always a chance of stepping inside someone else's anger. You do not even have to be sleeping with them. I know in my head there is that possibility.

painting by jeanne parviainen

Fighting with Paul is like pressing yourself softly against a brick wall. On occasion, part of the wall will give and unveil a secret room. Most of the time it is just cold and hard. Try forgiving someone of their most basic flaw. I did, and became a lot happier for it.

One of Plato's iMessage remarks was this: "And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty." People are such a fucking paradox.

Before moonrise, we know that we are in love by the shapes it makes. I knew what I felt that for Paul right away. Letting him grow accustomed to it is grimy, patient work. I was always used to realizing things before others. That is why I found out it was a weakness, not a strength, earlier than anyone else did.

When things are going well, I have learned all my important lessons. I wish to impart to you, so you can be as I am. Then there are times when I feel so precariously emotional, that even in my own happiness, there is a sense of pending dread. Is this how I will always be composed? Whatever the underlying feeling, it can be replaced. Whatever the pleasure, comes penitence. After the moon, so sweetly and slowly, rotates around the earth.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Open Up All Of Our Office Hours

Red Dust

by LINDA EDDINGS

Office hours begin at three. Who knows how long they'll last?

I run into my therapist at the opening of a local juice bar. She does not see me, but I notice that her hair is done in a completely different fashion than what I have come to expect. I am so shaken I have to sit down.

On a bus downtown, a man carries a thousand little parcels and packages, attached to each other by string, cord and tape. A teenager asks him if it is an exhibit or something. The man opens one of the packages and inside is a business card.

My friend Stacy is a major theme of this essay. She has a very useful test that I have sort of made my own. If she meets a new person, she has these two restaurants that are very easy to confuse and not far from each other. She shows up at one, and if he doesn't, well that's just too bad.

Instead of finding out what someone is like when they are really, truly angry, make them a little angry.

My therapist recently discovered some of the things I had written about her. She says, "Your depiction portrays me as sounding weird." She says, "Self-expression is the most innocent form of flattery," and then she rotates a mug in her hands upwards of ten times. I say, "Your hero is Kafka? Your summer palace is on the Rhine? You say you have questions for me?"

In Agata & Valentina, Emmy Rossum asks an employee for aspargus. My dad called to tell me to watch the full moon tonight. "Did you ever think there were so many types of lettuce?" he says. His version of being retired is like a bird who has had a wing repaired, but doesn't know it.

My brother is getting married in the fall. I am very happy for him, the way you go to one store in a strip mall, and another store is celebrating their grand opening. You wish and don't wish the attention was elsewhere. I am so tired of the concept of attention. It seems like a modern conceit, maybe the only modern conceit. One that demands we be observed or acknowledged.

Stacy has a boyfriend now. When she tried the restaurant trick on him, he said he doesn't like to meet women at restaurants. Stacy says that it's because he feels uncomfortable eating in front of other people, like he is a pig at the trough. Do you see the connection between this anecdote and the line about attention? Would you even notice if the moon in the sky was upside down.

Lately I have been doing a lot of whispering. Nattering quietly to myself is the function of living alone, in the apartment I am renting. It was just built, and so no one in the building expects anything to break. I'd like to own a place, but not in New York City. Maybe somewhere upstate.

My therapist wants to know my evaluation of her. "I love how available you make yourself," I begin. "Once I saw you in a juice bar... Never mind, never mind! I think that you are great at staying internally consistent. Sometimes I wonder if you are remembering what I said or remembering what you said. Then I think, what's the difference? If you hear one side of the conversation, you can probably reconstruct the other! It will be as if one person is there, and the second participant exists only as a shadow of the initial act." She says, "I'm not a shadow of you, Linda," and sips Tropicana.

Last night I walked along 60th at the bottom of Central Park. Rats sprang out of the greenery to feast upon all the leftover horse feed. They are mad to be satiated, wild with abandon. In order to start a new thought, it takes more than simply matching the taste to the palate.

Stacy thinks she is in love with her boyfriend. "He's kind of a weird guy," she confesses. I ask if it something other than his apparent eating issues. She says that when they went to the movies the other night, she found herself massaging his temples and touching his dick. I ask if he told her to do that. "It seemed implied," she says, cutting celery into the smallest possible pieces.

I want you to know that standing there is no more than an affectation.

My dad asks me to choose a color. He's painting my old room. "What goes on in there now?" I ask. "Mostly the same stuff as when you were here," he says, even though that was very long ago now. "Self-loathing. Pride. Catnaps. Sometimes I come in here when your mother is snoring." I say, "Imagine being invisible only at night." Half the shades he forces me to compare I can't manage to see any difference. I imagine that for a god, the variation between the worst human being and the best would be this kind of tiny shift in color.

For example, have you looked at the Periodic Table of the Elements lately? Has there ever been a more outright obvious scam?

I ask my therapist about Stacy's boyfriend. "They were in line at Starbucks," I say, "and someone stepped in front of them. He got all up in the guy's face and smacked down his coffee cup." She says, "So?" I say, "Isn't that kind of reckless and unwarranted?" She lets out a sigh that could inflate a balloon.

Full moon tonight. I whisper it and text everyone I know (the list is not long – as I get older it is more difficult to meet new people, and even when I find someone I like, the context is always wrong). In my text I detail how much more fun it will be when we are all wolves. Imagine the licking alone! I crow and cackle. Feeling like I could run up the face of a mountain, I start crumpling up all the useless pieces of paper I keep around here. Everything made or unmade was with my hands.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.