I can’t stop weighing what a similar loss would have cost me. The territory of my years is much, much larger and not so easy to map. Much of my life is chronicled in my journals, but not all. Words cannot (should not) attempt to capture everything. You, for example, are not a matter for my journals. So, I fear I almost lost you beneath the lake this morning.
I write to you today in a language you didn’t know on a page you will never see.
We spoke so often about travel. I think we always assumed there were limits to how far a body could go. These limits meant that one could only become so lost, so far away. This was the unspoken safety net that hung beneath all our grand plans and imagined discoveries. My love, I don’t assume this any longer.
When I think of the distance in time and miles between the young woman you knew and the person writing this letter, I feel my own life as the ship of Theseus, repaired and remade until I doubt my relationship to any cohesive identity. And yet, my fear of losing you to those stinging tentacles tells me that there is still living tissue connecting my present with my long ago.
Maybe you would be sad or even angry with me if I told you that it is possible to outlive the beliefs of your youth. Not easily and not often. But it is possible.
There, in my imagination, I see you frowning at the person I’ve become, the unimaginable changes I have weathered, body and mind.
Don’t look at me like that, Ivan. If I could let you hold the number of years on my back, even for an hour, I think you would understand. This is the generosity we give to people who do not share our life experiences but insist on judging how we are shaped by them.
“If you knew, you would know.”
It is how we love those who insist on being wrong. I call this generosity.
My dear, my unreasonably long-ago love, my haunting friend, how would our conversations beneath that spreading pine by the roadside be different if we knew then that there was such a thing as too far away?
Just one more thing I cannot know.
Self-preservation dictates that I must see the walls of ignorance as shelter, lest I begin to view them as a cage.
Tomorrow, I return to study the anemone. I will exercise extreme caution, but if something unforeseen happens, at least your name will be safe within the shelter of this letter.
Love from too far away,
Valentina
Texas 1934
Green closed the book.
He felt ashamed.
It was hard to imagine a less appropriate thing for him to read.
He slapped the notebook back down on the shelf as if it were the object’s fault for tempting him to look.
He returned to the cot.
Sitting, he was eye level with the table’s surface and the moth looked bulkier than from above.
Could that thing actually fly?
The proportion of wings to body didn’t seem right. Then again, of all the unlikely things about the rag moth, Green supposed aerodynamics were the least improbable aspect to consider. Perhaps it flew the way a piece of litter flies, a plastic shopping bag billowing down an alley like a jellyfish in an ocean canyon.
He shut his eyes and wished for the time to stop trickling and start cascading.
He cradled his head in his hands and didn’t wake even when his body slumped sideways onto the cot. Sleep is cousin to death and even fear is mortal.
If you put enough caterpillars in a room, they stop being animals and start being weather.
Even so, Green didn’t wake when the clouds rolled in. Not at first.
He was dreaming about rose petals falling from the upper atmosphere. They bloomed into existence so high he could see the curving haze where air meets vacuum. Somehow, even on the ground, he could track their progress, whirling down through a cloudless sky, dancing like maple seeds to touch his face with surpassing gentleness before tumbling earthward to crimson the grass.
Touch.
