Negative Library
*14 March*
M —
The house you described — the one with the green door and the river behind it — I went looking for it on a map and found three that could plausibly be yours. I will not ask which. I prefer the version where I imagine you opening any of them.
Thank you for the book. The inscription was kinder than I deserved.
E.
*2 April*
E —
The door is blue, actually. I lied because I wanted to know if you'd look. You looked.
The inscription was not kindness. It was an opening move. I am embarrassed to admit how long I spent over the choice of pen.
It has been raining here for nine days. I am writing this at the kitchen table at an hour I will not disclose. There is a particular silence in a house at this hour and you would, I think, recognize it.
M.
*19 April*
M —
I recognize it. I am in it now.
I want to tell you something and then take it back in the same sentence, which is, I suppose, what letters are for. I have not stopped thinking about the way you said my name at the reading in February. You said it once and then again half a second later as if checking the pronunciation, and the second time was different from the first, and I have been listening to that difference for two months.
I am being indecent. Forgive me. The rain here has stopped and I am taking unfair advantage of dry weather.
E.
*7 May*
E —
Do not forgive yourself. I have nothing to absolve.
You should know I read your letters twice. The first time quickly, the way one drinks water after a long walk. The second time slowly, with attention to where the sentences turn. There is a place in the April letter where you almost say something and then do not. I have read that almost more times than I will admit.
I am writing this from a train. There is a man across the aisle reading a newspaper and I am writing to you about restraint, which is a small joke I am making to myself.
M.
*3 June*
M —
The almost. Yes. I know exactly which one.
I will not say it now either. Not because I am playing — I am past playing — but because I have begun to suspect that the unsaid thing is doing more work between us than the said thing ever would. A door left ajar admits more weather than a door thrown open.
You asked, in your last letter, what I do with the hours after I read you. I want to lie and say I sleep. I want to tell you I am a reasonable woman with a kettle and a cardigan and a sensible bed.
I am not, in those hours, reasonable.
E.
*28 July*
E —
I am writing this in the dark. I do not need the light to find the page.
I have been imagining, lately, the small geography of your wrists. Not the rest of you. Only the wrists. I think if I were ever permitted to put my mouth to the inside of one of them, the rest of my life would arrange itself around the memory of having done so. This is the kind of sentence I would never write in daylight.
It is August next week. You said once that August is the cruelest month for letter-writers because nothing is decided and nothing can be. I have been counting the days like a man counting his change.
M.
*15 September*
M —
You may have the wrists.
I will not be coy. I am writing this in a hotel I will not name, in a city we have both been in but never at the same time. I came here for work. I have done the work. What remains of the trip is two empty evenings and a window that opens onto a courtyard where someone, every evening at nine, plays the same three bars of a piece I cannot identify and then stops.
I keep thinking: he is going to play the fourth bar tonight. He never does. This is what you have made of me. A woman waiting in a strange room for the fourth bar.
If you wrote back and said *come*, I would not pretend to consider it.
E.
*4 October*
E —
Come.
M.
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*Tuesday, 1:47 a.m.*
I cannot sleep. The house is making the small ticking sounds it makes when the heat goes off and the wood remembers what it used to be. I have been awake since just after midnight and I have been turning a single image in my head the way one turns a stone in the palm to feel where it is warmest.