Lost Letters

I have been carrying them around for years, these letters. Not because they are necessarily meaningful, or that their contents are even true. It was a self-imposed writing project to get me out of a block, which turned into years of love letters, hand-typed on my peacock blue Smith Corona and folded neatly into small envelopes, stamped with the month and year they were written.

They were all addressed to C, a man who maybe did exist at one point, but who eventually turned into many men, all men. The ones I'd loved and lost or couldn't shake, imaginary and real. Boyfriends, strangers, characters from books. The process was not really about them. It was about teaching myself to feel freely again, and to be present in my feelings, and to turn it into art that I could throw away like a Zen sand mandala.

I used to leave them on the bus, in restaurants, under seats in theatres and in pockets of coats left in the coat room at parties - places lovers might go to lose a letter. They were passionate, detailed, occasionally erotic, prose poems in longform; tangible, small, secretive. I've watched people find them, furtively stuff them into their pockets to open later - what are they hoping for? Most people would be surprised at what they found. There is so little poetry in the world, so few expressions of love and longing and loss that a person might actually sit at a typewriter to say.

I have decided, after nearly ten years, to free myself of the remaining letters, and what better day than Valentine's? A small box of letters that deserve to be found, especially by the lonely. I will spend the day losing letters all over the city, in ode to romance and lost art - both literal and figurative. But before I do, here are two that might inspire you to go looking:

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August 2000

C,

I hope you catch me. Follow me, waiting for me to drop. You have already started looking: under tables, behind the drapes, wedged in the cushions of second-hand furniture. I hope you are suddenly aware of all the world’s hiding places, the undersides of everything. I hope you are already checking your pockets, and your friends’ pockets and mine. That you go through my purse when I go to the bathroom. That you will start taking me out to give me opportunities to lose things, because I am forgetful. You will make me more forgetful. Close my eyes with one hand and steal this envelope with the other. You are already watching for the signs, my hand to reach into my bag, waiting for this paper flower to unfold. Waiting to find out what I would say to you in my sleep. If we were to sleep together in your cowboy bedroom. Your motor hotel. You are waiting to find all the plastic daisies, the green marbles, the sand, everything I would leave behind if I fell asleep on your couch like a tide going out. You are shaking out the contents of your sock drawer.

I am standing here singing. Walking backwards with my eyes closed. I’m burning my house down. Putting matches in my shoes, piling sticks in the kitchen. Talking in my sleep even when you aren’t listening. I’m telling stories to make you kiss me, making things up so I’ll kiss you back.

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August 2000

C,

You tell me you’ve been places that I’ve told you to go, and you get all the names wrong and we fall down laughing. You show me a famous painting that you didn’t know was famous. A page from a book I sent to a friend last year. Tell me you don’t remember me being at your party, then tell me exactly where I stood. Tell me that you want to find all my love letters, and that you’ll go to every restaurant in the city till you find one, but you never go back to the last place you took me, the last place I left this letter. In a stranger’s pocket in the coatroom at the party you had when I didn’t know you were you, or that I’d be leaving these letters for you one day.

This is the most romantic thing you’ve ever done. You think I’m cupid, sticking arrows in everyone’s back pockets, making strangers fall in love. Or out of love; you think I might break your heart. I might make others jealous or sad, I might make two people see each other for the first time as though they’d been standing together for hours.

Every time you close your eyes, all you see are the sparks I make, the impression I leave on your bedspread, the letter for you that I hid beneath the record player, the wink of my eye from when I caught you stealing from me. From when I handed over this note, with all its stories intact, and made you see me for the first time.