WREN’S LETTER
Dear Oliver,
I have written this letter four times now and thrown three of them away, which is perhaps fitting, given that someone has been writing letters to me and I have spent weeks trying to work up the courage to respond. This is me working up the courage.
I think it's you.
I have thought about it carefully: the way you ask about the stock, the books you choose, the things you say in passing that are a little too precise to be passing. The Wizard of Oz comment particularly.
Ten letters. I have read them so many times that some of them are soft at the folds.
I want you to know what they have meant to me.
I want whoever wrote those letters to know what they have meant to me. That man has been paying me a kind of attention that I did not know was being paid. He noticed the small things. The things I do when I think no one is watching. He wrote about books the way I think about books, from the inside, as thoughthey are places you can actually live rather than objects you admire from a distance.
He made me feel seen. Fully seen. Not the version of me that I put on in the morning with my cardigan and my glasses and my professional opinions about shelving; the actual version. The woman who sits on the floor between the poetry section after closing and talks to her cat about things she wouldn't say out loud to another person.
I did not know I needed that until I had it.
So, if it is you (and I believe it is) I want you to know that the feelings are returned. That I have been hoping for something real, something present, something that does not arrive folded in thirds through the letter slot after dark. That I am ready for that, if you are.
You know where to find me.
Whether it is you or not, please come and tell me to my face.
Hopefully,
Wren
