An e-mail to my lover

I’ve been thinking… or so I was before I had to quest my way into finding the keyboard for my old PC… I’ve been reading Joan Didion since I arrived, the day I was flying I was supposed, I say supposed because I said so months ago, to read Goodbye to All That, which I thought was in The White Album, yet I had a pdf of just the essay on my phone to read. As I started reading Joan’s feelings about leaving New York, nothing really struck me, for our experiences are so different, yet! She said something about loving NYC: “I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in a colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.” I’m not the first nor last person to love NYC, in the non-colloquial way, and yet leaving feels like a first breakup when you think that absolutely no one has ever felt such pain in their lives. I’ve chosen you, my dear Cole, to send emails to. Not as your lover, not as Maria your lover, but as a woman, a person that needs to ramble from time to time to someone other than her diary. You can block me or not read me, and yet I kindly ask you not to, please read the words I send so maybe they can find comfort in someone else’s chest, a less cold one, one that maybe wants to carry them instead of wanting to get rid of them. I cried today, for the very first time since I arrived, my mom asked how I was, and I simply wept. It felt so good, I felt, at last, simply felt. And that’s when I realized that whatever life I had built in this city was no longer my life, which is hard when there are people that surround you that think you’re still that person. You know me, I don’t care for people’s descriptions for they’re never accurate. But that’s the thing about “home” and I guess that it happens to you when you go to Alabama, there’s no way other than actions and sometimes conflict to inform that you’re not the person that used to live around there. Which brings me to the next Joan Didion essay - by the way, Goodbye to All That is not in The White Album, it’s in Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Going Home, there she describes going back home, quite differently too, for when she went back home she changed into the person she used to be, which seemed terrible to imagine. I could never do that unless I fall victim to my own sentimentalism, which she did. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I came back to a place that knows nothing of me, and I’m trying not to be burdened with the past versions of myself, which can make me very jumpy and a bit paranoid. A joy to be around. I’m not sure I like my friends anymore, but I cannot be sure about that. Right now, I feel like I’m rejecting everything around me for the mere reason that it isn’t New York. Don’t we all? Honey, I hope you see that this is not the same writing that I’ve written for you, it comes from a different place of myself, it comes from a glamorous despair - in the Clarice Lispector way - it’s messy, and quite frankly I’ll have to spell check because as I’m glancing at the document it looks like a mess. I’ll attach a picture so you can see it for yourself, all red, bleeding, a mess. I really want to get my hands on that copy of yours, the Clarice Lispector one, with that preface by that lady. That piece of writing changed my life, the grammar one. I’m all empty now, I love you always and please feel free to either comment or not, or simply respond to this email with whatever piece of your writing you choose to share. Again I love you.

Maria.

03-10-24 

Medellín, Colombia.