Re: HELLO FROM THE OTHER!

Dearest KiT,

I think this is the perfect format of communication for us with our long winding conversations, I’m surprised we haven’t found it sooner! I’m in the basement of my hostel in Paris right now. Paris is lonely and gorgeous and filthy, occasionally brilliant. The metros run smooth and efficient and sometimes there are scary cops waiting to fine you (me, twice) for no apparent reason. My first night here I rode so many trains that I still felt it when I lay down, swaying to a stop then tugging back into motion. I think often of home with a desperate yearning in all my cells, I want to fall in the arms of someone I know and love. I want to have someone pick me up from the airport, take my bags and put them in the trunk. I want to pick up a snack on the way home. Thinking of it makes me cry with longing.

It’s a half a week or so later and I’m in Brussels. In the interim I went to Normandie and Monet’s gardens - the most beautiful garden I had ever seen - with my friend Marit. The garden was green and lush and beaming and exaltatory. It felt so good to be with a friend and we came to know each other more than ever. I played guitar from the windowsill as golden rain fell, caught in the sunlight. We went to an American restaurant with all American decorations because it was the only one open. Hilarious - Uncle Sam, yellow schoolbuses, mustard on everything, Shell gas stations…

But we had to leave and the hard times came back. Screaming babies on the bus and missing airpods and locked bathrooms and getting lost, always lost, and backache. Trying not to cry. I feel so old and so young at once. When I’m alone I find these two selves debating inside me and I am the mediator reminding them to be kind. The youth asks questions and the elder tries to answer.

I wake up always in the night, blowing my nose. I have an awful cold. I’m shocked at the amount of fluid I have inside of me, waiting to come out.

I have realized I am unshakeably wild and uncouth, uncontrollable, I’m not sure how I will fit into the world. I came here to find out, or to procrastinate on deciding, but I cannot do it anymore. I have to go home. I’m going to live with my mother and her boyfriend on Long Island for a while. They live in a big house - I’ve never lived in a big house - with a dock, in a community of townhouses that all look the same. His daughter is named Sarah. It will be nice for a day or two, then I will want to run away. I will go with my best friend to the city and to a lakehouse and we will write the fall play. I plan to return to California in August. We will start pre production on the fall play. Everyone is very excited.

Really, all I want is to return to my college house in California how it was before we took all the art off the walls. Back when it was ours. It will never be again, I am coming to terms with that. Part of why I came here is because I try to leave things so they don’t leave me first. I couldn’t bear to sit there, grasping, as it was pulled from my fingers. The best years of my life are not done but I have to build something new now.

I am not sorry I came here. I try not to regret anything. I have had beauty and magic but I had to fight tooth and nail for it. I don’t want to fight anymore. I told myself, if you love yourself, you will go home and be happy. I’m going home. I’m being happy. I’m not sorry.

Okay, now it’s your turn and you must tell me of you. Have you heard from your hospital friends? What are your days like? Your baths? Your friends? Your family? What calls to you in the darkness?

I agree with your decision, you have the spirit and talent of a writer. Although I also think you would be skilled at trauma work! You may wear as many hats as you wish. Some people say to be a writer you must write, but I believe it will fall on your head when it’s time and then you will write because you have to internally, not because you have to externally. And once you have written, then you have your currency, your face to show the world.

I believe in you.

In perpetuity,