Five Letters

Divya Maniar 黎雅

I am reaching out to you. (Not really.) 

But know that I am always reaching, arms outstretched, toward these things which have long ago turned away, retracted themselves. You are neither the first nor the last. 

I know that this is hardly anybody’s concern, but mine. 

I would like to tell you some things: 

The furniture left behind in the home has become a specific kind of inheritance, as have the cracks in the cream-white wall. 

I like places that are worn, that carry stains of lives lived, the same way that I treasure the bras my mother passed down to me, even though their bands have stretched so that they are not tight enough on my back. 

I imagine, by the pencil markings, the old tenants had a tall son.

I imagine they were messy cooks, from the red splatters behind the old gas stove that requires a lighter to function properly. Perhaps they ate pasta frequently, and preferred red sauce to cream. The microwave is hideous, bearing the many scars of uncovered soup. 

I made popcorn last night and could just barely taste onion and leek; though maybe I was imagining this, too. 

I watch a lot of reality TV but cannot for the life of me understand the obsession with newness. Sparking clean houses, selling for four million at the least. Did you know that re-doing the interior of a home could make you hundreds of thousands of dollars in value? Surely, a house ought to be worth less, if renewed. 

I have always thought that history ought to be worth more than paint and plywood. 

I have always thought that we had too many interior decorators, and too few archeologists. 

(I am an archeologist, but not by choice. I am an archaeologist because I am alone.) 

This is all to say that I am nostalgic, and that nostalgia is a word far too small for what it contains. But you already know this about me. 

♢ ♢ ♢

Spring began white, and then the flowers grew, a blush on earth’s spotty cheeks, growing warmer, warmer. 

With life comes embarrassment, fluster. With spring comes a forgotten passion, one we thought we had lost in ice and colder wind. I watched my plants wake up as they sat atop the windowsill, slowly their arms and legs livening in half-heat. I wonder if it hurts the way it hurts to stretch a long stationary body, the way it hurts when anything dead nor near dead is coming into life. (Eliot said that April was a cruel month. I am the dull roots, stirring with rain. I am a lilac out of dead land, my memory and my desires mixing like the pigment in an artist’s paint pot.)

I took a long walk on the beach. The little mermaid, a poor thing. I thought that, and then I thought this: the little mermaid learned, through her perpetual foot-ache, the price we pay for new life, new love. Love which might not even last long enough to nullify the suffering it caused. 

Somewhere in the sand, her tears might still linger. 

I thought of the little mermaid when I fell in love. I, in bed and waiting for you to return, watched the sunlight dance on the ceiling. I, in bed and waiting for you to wake, watched the slow movement of the curtains. 

I would walk to your place under blooming trees, back when I thought renewal was easy, beautiful. That a flower bursting forth from a bud would not feel the force of its explosion. The nights were still cool and you would play the piano to impress me. “Stay there,” you had said. You would breathe in, a long breath, and then set your hands down upon the keys. It was very impressive, I assured you, and you would come back to me. 

“I’ve always wanted to have sex with a pregnant woman,” you told me one morning, before shaking a branch of a cherry-tree, so that the petals would fall. “Why?” 

“Well, it’s just all that life, in one body.” 

You, in pursuit of one perpetual spring. You, who wanted to take spring’s flowers and crush them in your fist. 

We had breakfast the next day. It was just cereal, but you had poured the milk with enough care to deceive even the most skeptical of lovers that you would take care of them, somehow.  

♢ ♢ ♢

To be entirely fair, I was eighteen. 

I desired, above all, to be coveted. 

To carve myself into somebody, to make a marking on some map, some body, some history. 

But we were together for six months, maybe. It takes ten thousand years more for something to be considered a fossil. 

Why? Where are the bounds of our pre-history? History is about drawing and re-drawing lines in the sand, which disappear every time the wind picks up.  We are surrounded with shards of past that we too easily discard. A snail-shell in the garden, those soup-stains, an old text-message. 

It must matter, somehow, that the old tenants maybe liked cream of onion. But, I suppose, when we talk about history, we talk about the big things. The blazing guns, the conquered cities. We keep just enough to print in books, never mind the infinite marginalia. The headline says: “10 of the oldest bugs ever, trapped in amber.” How soft and sweet it must be, to swim in incandescence for ever and ever. I wish to fashion a necklace, of a creature stopped in time. 

I open my mouth but am stalled, my words hanging tautly over years. 

Big histories. I know these. But I also know some small ones: my broken-down car, my shattered pan of eyeshadow, my lost sweater. My parents. Myself. My dead cactus, over-watered. Listen: what if everybody wrote their personal histories in the corners of big old books? Instead of printed lines I wondered what if we read the marginalia, the hand-scratched notes.  Notes to self, and notes to others.

♢ ♢ ♢

I have ripped five pages from my notebook; each contains a short letter to you. 

1: 

Hey, I know it’s been a while. I miss you. 

Love, 

2: 

Fuck you and your pretentious fucking smile. Never contact me again. 

Fuck you, 

3: 

Unfortunately, I am likely to love you forever. Please write back. 

Best, 

4: 

I am thinking of your broken window, and the bicycle leaning on the side of your house, which you said was not yours. I am thinking of the long sunset we watched on the fire escape, and your thin legs. How do you miss something you do not love, love something you do not miss? Unless you are lying, on either count. I am a terrible liar. You are, simply, terrible. We were terrible together, weren’t we?

I am waiting for the sound of the wind. I made fun of my friend, for writing an awful and unbearably pretentious breakup letter, and here I am; we are all hypocrites, if we reach deep enough. But especially you. I don’t have to tell you why—you’d already know, or you wouldn’t believe me. That’s how these things go. 

You either know why you’ve hurt someone, or you think you’ve done nothing at all. Where do you stand? I’ve always wanted to know. I suppose, though, that it is too late. 

All my best, 

5: 

I have nothing more to say, still I write. Hello? Where are you? What are you up to? I hate you, but I must know. 

Sincerely, 

♢ ♢ ♢

Unfortunately, having lost my lighter, I had no means to set the letters aflame. 

I believed, once, that if I wrote a letter and burned it, that the intended recipient may dream its contents. I don’t quite know why I believed this. Maybe it was to feel less lonely. Maybe it was to counteract the sad reality, which is that when I write something and never send it, I’m the only one who’s haunted. 

I suppose this is the point of all things written. Look at me, it says, I deserve to haunt you! 

I deserve, in other words, to be seen and felt. 

Still, what could you possibly know about me? 

I buy books. I pay to be haunted. See, it does not bother me that I cannot hope to understand even half of the histories that I have read. Cannot hope to understand half the histories I have interacted with, through loving, through meeting. I haven’t loved many, though. Just one.

Lives are lived, spun slowly into tapestries. I am happy to follow threads. To think about the tall son who used to live in my old-new house, without knowing him. Maybe I can love him, now. 

I am pressing my cheek against a hole in the wall, unaware of where it leads. 

I think of Arachne, rocking back and forth on her string, weaving the web of the universe in bitter regret. It is hard work, I think, making art of eternity. I am scared of spiders. Still, I think I share a kinship with them, somehow, since they were all descended from her. 

♢ ♢ ♢

The garden was very bare when I moved in here, and there were cobwebs all down the walls of the shed. The house in the next lot over is being demolished and rebuilt, and I have been planting tomatoes. 

I like watching the tomatoes sprout against the backdrop of that small construction crane. Life springs, I think, pretentiously, even where there is erasure. 

The bird drinks water from a small fountain I have left on the table outside. I carved my name into the one tree standing stiffly on the property. I apologize with every knife-cut I administer. 

Evening comes early now, and I am sitting at my deckchair. I am patient. I await the summer when the tomatoes are ripe. I want to eat the fruits of time. 

I am older than eighteen, but I am still young enough. I pretend this is my house, though it is my parents’. 

I pretend I live here alone, when the truth is that they are on holiday, and that they have hired me to house-sit.  

The house: bare. This is true, in all senses of the word. They only just moved in, my parents, before taking a trip somewhere. A road-trip; they have much more fun than I do.

♢ ♢ ♢

I will be back in my city soon, but this can wait. I will move into a new apartment, boxes and all. Still, I will be here for another week. 

Where was I? Right. The letters: in everything I do, 

I am a messenger who strives to leave things behind. 

I fold restaurant napkins into paper cranes, I carry a pen to scrawl secrets on the wood of benches, and when there is sauce left on my plate I try and draw a picture so that the dishwasher sees something beautiful before wiping it away. 

I read somewhere that Dickinson wrote her poems on little things laying around the house. “Scrap poetry,” we call it now, on the back of a chocolate wrapper, on a torn off piece of letter paper, used envelope. The words only half her poems. 

♢ ♢ ♢

I feel the past in my chest when I cough. I hear that “upcycling” is very trendy now. I see people buy sewing machines and go to the used clothes store to make crop-tops out of someone’s old basketball uniform. I suppose this, in its way, is an acknowledgement of history. 

We are making strides, I suppose. 

When I stood in the river last December, cold water up to my shins, I did not have the courage to submerge myself fully, even though I had read on some lifestyle magazines that icy baths were the key to a revitalized self. I wonder if my body is one which resists reawakening, and that is perfectly satisfied in the half-dream between present and past. 

Scars disappear with time, I am promised by my dermatologist, when she looks at the thin scratches on my back from when we had sex against a rough wall. 

 “I don’t want them to,” I wanted to tell her. “I only needed your advice on the small fungus spot on my thigh.” 

But I nodded quietly and smiled. 

♢ ♢ ♢

The body is an insufficient cartography, like everything else. I watch those markings fade the way they do from parchment over years of disuse. When I am at museums looking at old maps I think of my skin and how it is, in truth, more fragile than paper. 

When I write something in ink, I am prepared for it to be discovered in two thousand years. I am prepared for everything I have ever written to be dissected. Why else would I have written it? 

I am envious of paper. I covet its longevity. Paper withstands time, when the body cannot even withstand death. 

♢ ♢ ♢

I resent you, I whisper. A whisper addressed to every single body which has ever lain atop mine, including yours. 

I resent you even more, I whisper at my own body in the mirror. 

I am preoccupied with this. My reflection. Reflection, generally. The mirror-perfect image of a body in motion. “He looks better in real life.” A familiar plea. One I hear whenever somebody shows me a picture of a person they have chosen to sleep with. The picture is somebody in a moment, and a moment is not enough. 

A million Vitruvian men are caught in the middle of their jumping-jacks, waiting to be released. Ink-bound to paper and to time. 

Me? With every second spent in front of this mirror, I realize that another second is gone. 

And where is the right now? This instant: even now uttering these words is grasping at water which has already slipped out of my clawed hands. 

♢ ♢ ♢

When I speak of time I must inevitably also touch upon destiny, to which all things are doomed. Whenever I turn to look backward, I believe that I am embarking on some trip, hair set aloft in the wind. I am riding the sails of a particular curiosity. I am traveling on the back of an inquiry, a journey into the heart of the question, a question of destiny.  

Destiny, which was never on our side. What is it? 

Look there, to see all that is fixed, that is static. I know that to commit to memory is to commit to fate. I am free from destiny only when I am in motion, so I seek a history that moves and surprises at every turn. I seek a history that flows as water does down a mountain. I seek not the still river but its many streams. I have loaded myself onto a small paddleboat, and I wait for the moving tide.

Beside the base of water, where river meets sea, salt gathers. It constructs itself into a mound, tall and oblong, nearly a pillar. This is to say that I have no answer other than this: 

I am trying my best to forget. 

♢ ♢ ♢

In the summer after the spring the air was too hot, moving quickly; all sweat stuck to skin and hung in the air. The rooms were humid, the nights were unbearable under a blanket. The sky was fresh light until eight-thirty, or nine. 

We were not together then, not physically. Still, I remember it, and fault myself for doing so. I still have all the text messages, voice-recordings. (You asked me to read to you in French. Obligingly, I sent this over Facebook messenger.) I regret all of this now, and I hold on to my regret as a remnant of past love. 

Sometimes, you must expel love from your system. You must flush it out or commit to being plagued by pain. Sometimes, all that is left is the debris of love: anger, despair, regret. You told me once that you didn’t love me, but that you could. You told me afterward that the possibility of love was more important than the reality of it. That’s not only wrong, but also quite stupid. Yet more stupid is the fact that I had believed you, at the time. 

♢ ♢ ♢

The imperfections of this old house remind me that other pasts exist, that are not my own. I know that one day, I will be overrun. That the waterfall will swallow me whole, crushing the sturdy oak of my small vessel. Will you see me then? Or will I be slowly submerged, with nobody watching? 

Here is the armchair, a deeper brown than I remembered. The sweat and dead skin is not dirt but a gift. Here is the wall-clock, already broken. It is always two-thirty-one in the afternoon. It must have broken last summer, gears rusty in the hot humid air. 

The spider looks up from her web. For a moment we stare into each other, blankly. I understand, I wish to tell her. I understand. Oh, of course, I understand. The housefly dashes past me, and into the sun.

I wish to be encased in amber. 

I wish to be given the space and time to fossilize. 

I wish that everything I have ever known could be stalled in time, so that it would last an eternity, never to be displaced.

But that is impossible. There is only one sentence that remains to be spoken, which is this: “I am upset.” 

♢ ♢ ♢

All I have to me are these old furnishings. I pack up and retire from the garden. 

Divya Maniar 黎雅 is a Singaporean writer with a B.A. in Comparative Literature & Philosophy from Brown University. She is currently pursuing an M.Phil. in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Cambridge University. She writes fiction, poetry & narrative nonfiction, & has been published in Joyland, Hobart, HAD, & elsewhere. She’s been nominated for Best Small Fictions. She is at work on her debut novel.

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