In the summer of 2018, Gabrielle Bates invited Jennifer S. Cheng to engage in an epistolary experiment. For two weeks, we wrote letters to one another and waited to exchange them, all at once, at the end. In 2021, in the midst of a long pandemic, we revisited the letters and were surprised by how far the distances had come to meet us.
August 19, 2018
Dear G,
I mean, I am having trouble connecting the fragments around me, where geometry was once a way of moving through the world. I mean, I can no longer say, with any definition.
(
Today in the garden a small animal was making holes underground, disappearing roots.
(
Listening to my husband practice the same composition on the piano each day, I lose the distinction between his sounds and the memory of my fingers on the keys. Lately things just are what they are, yet their concreteness is not grounding. The flowers on the deck are yellow. The body circulates blood. Every day, details accumulate and remain empty at the same time, and that is the hardest thing about all of this—the way nothingness takes over as one sits waiting for the unknown. I am observing every small fluctuation of the body so anxiously, I cannot think of anything else. The fog that accompanies the medications is relentless.
(
In which suspension is a state of being, with no expiration date (how does one decide when to begin grieving?). In which tenderness is a point somewhere in the vast space between grief and hope.
(
I mean, I am trying to make my way through something, toward something. In the meantime my world does not know whether to expand or contract, as if I am straining to peer into a tiny telescope measured in nanometers. Instead of it being a comfort to have a world so small and all mine, it feels like I’ve forgotten something, like I’ve been forgotten.
(
The truth is I often feel awash in the marginalia of my own life. The idea has followed me around for its plainness: an ongoing audio diary of (( )). A record of ephemera, our most habitual wrinkles of air. Like John Cage, I am aware that inside silence are merely the sounds we ignore—am I placating myself when I say those non-sounds carry a meaningful soundness of their own?
(
A friend recently described my essay on the poetics of blank space: an epistolary labyrinth of absences.
August 19, 2018
Dear J,
A man says the miscarriage in the poem doesn’t make him feel anything, and all the women in the room turn into warped boards. Horrible. His toes flex into us.
(
I am sorry to send you this. These spare fragments.
(
My heart has been beating very fast here.
August 20, 2018
Dear G,
(
What does it mean to address—to speak to, across a distance. To say, this is where I begin and end in this moment, without expecting anything in return. To send a haphazard envelope of shapes and echoes and tempos.
I don’t have any poetry these days. Language is too slack; I lose hold of it. I am either gripping my fingers too tightly or too loosely; I can either hold everything in my hand or nothing at all; the universe is either gathered or it is terrifyingly dispersed.
Today is perhaps the sixth straight day of fog and cloud. I woke to a wet mist mottling the wooden deck shamelessly. Gossamer threads traveling through the branches of that old cypress tree. There is light between my fingers if I look close enough.
(
Here is an envelope:
Here is an envelope:
Here is an envelope:
August 20, 2018
Dear J,
Here is a memory chain. I conducted it in two parts, starting inside and finishing outside.
Geometry reminds me of triangles, which remind me of mountains.
Which, together, remind me of a child’s hand.
Which reminds me of my own hand, and the hand inside that one.
Which reminds me of how the video felt, the one my mother created for the custody battle, in which I am crying, “I do not want to go [to my father’s house],” which reminds me of how much I love my father, his way of saying “damn” the way others say “so”
and “so” reminds me of that song from the Sound of Music, in which the single father is left with many children and plenty of money—has such a glut, in fact, he hires someone to love them and cut curtains while he does whatever it is he does during the days and nights.
My father recently came to peace with the fact that when I die, all memory of him ever having been on this earth will be gone forever; now it is up to me to make peace with that, sitting here at a picnic table next to a big bowl of cigarette butts and gravel—
the gravel being there, presumably, to keep the bowl weighted down against the wind, which can be a spectacle here, barreling over the top of the hill, launching like an action hero diving out of a building that’s about to explode,
that moment when the shot slows down and it all goes silent, when the fire is billowing behind, spreading like an aura, before the moment when it speeds up again and the sound returns,
when you know—despite the shards of glass suspended in the billowing orange—the hero will survive,
those seconds when we all get to luxuriate in this knowing.
August 21, 2018
Dear G,
( You spoke once of boundaries, of your fear about where you find yourself making them. Do you remember? I was trying to listen closely. I have been thinking about how I relate to people. It isn’t as easy as saying that I hold people at a distance, but more so that I am always sensing the insurmountable swimming between us, and sometimes this feels like an overwhelming failure. Rilke says love between two people is loving that very expanse, even considering it sacred, and I wonder if there is something transcendent here—a definition for community. Across the distance we hear the air shifting between us, and recognize it for what it is—miracles of texture and movement, tiny collaborations of our bodies navigating an unwieldy space. )
August 21, 2018
Dear J,
I am glad you brought up the topic of marriage.
Tonight, at the house where everyone eventually gathers, the only light was made by battery-powered pucks with pointy-tipped orange bulbs programmed to flicker along the porch railing. In this light, two violinists faced each other—a man and a woman. The woman had her back to me.
Their bows were like warped mirror images, one stretching out and up as the other pushed down and in, the two lines moving in relation. And in this manner, they made not the same music but an overlapping.
I began to wonder in that moment (and I still wonder now) why my lips twitch at each discordant twoness.
Is it joy? A grimace? Recognition?
August 22, 2018
Dear G,
August 22, 2018
Dear J,
Last year, I didn’t get in the water here—this year I did.
I swam to where there were some waterfalls, but the boulders were too slimy and slick for me to trust them. I didn’t follow the men up to where I could have let the tumbling water crash on my shoulders. I stopped at the base of all that, where the sun hit a few dry rocks smooth enough to sit and recline on.
Why do I always feel my role, the only thing I have to offer a moment, is the look of me: arranged over a rock in a splash of sun; leaning into a house while violinists play; drawing in a book in the corner of a room?
Last night my eyes felt embarrassed to land on any human form; they hopped like flies from object to object. I wanted to see, but where to linger, where to stay? There was no purchase. No welcoming ledge. And yet I was not sad, not really. Curious, yes, but not quite sad.
August 23, 2018
Dear G,
(
Yesterday I found out by way of a blood test that the embryo inside me no longer exists. I looked at a screen, and there was a number, and the number did not fall in a specified range.
When they executed the procedure where they scoop up the cells with a long eye dropper and inject them into a corner of my uterus, the doctor handed me a photograph of the embryo and said beautiful. What he meant was that it was the picture-perfect image of an embryo at this stage. Did I already feel discomfort then? For a year I have been trying to perfect this process, to pin all the moths in place, even the ones as thin as ghosts.
In the doctor’s office today, I kept trying to discern where in my body I was feeling the loss, and the doctor kept pointing to the photograph, calling this part baby and that part placenta, over and over—
)
August 23, 2018
Dear J,
I do not find my birthstone particularly beautiful. Today I told a man this, and he claimed it interesting. It’s just like with your posture, he said. You misname it “bad” because it is yours.
Back straight as a stack of coins, I nodded my head, but it did not make sense.
He thought he had unlocked something about me.
You are throwing plastic over it, he said. An ugly plastic.
Yes, I said, not because I agreed, but because I could visualize the act. Me, throwing a dirty milky tarp over something invisible, to see the form. How else but to ugly it?
But I did not say this.
We have been told certain colors are colors, he said, beautiful colors. You are uncomfortable with adornment.
Yes, I said, uncomfortable.
How so are you stone? I asked my forearm silently.
We just are, it said.
What should I adorn you with, if not yourself? I asked.
August 24, 2018
Dear G,
(
When I was a child, a playmate once showed me how to put socks inside my undershirt to emulate my mother’s body. I was shocked because I had grown up believing we ought to bury our softest parts.
Once I took a shower with my mother after swimming in the public pool, and I couldn’t stop staring, couldn’t stop looking away.
My mother had warned me: the body does not always give you what you ask of it. When I married my husband, she told me over the phone that never mind what I feel, sometimes my body must lie there to serve another’s needs.
In the corner of my childhood bedroom, by the window light, my mother told me, if anyone ever touches me here or here.
So later I was confused, when, in the doctor’s office, she simply stood by as he touched me here, and here.
(
Throughout this whole year, I have been asking my doctor, a man who touches my innermost parts and never looks me in the eyes, Is this normal? Is this normal? Like so many things, it feels like a question I ought to be able to answer by myself, for myself.
(
I have womanhood on the mind, that is, I have tenderness, though by that I think I mean something else.
I am learning new ways to be empty.
(
To have spent my life holding my hands in tightly hidden fists. To try to understand what it would mean, now, to hold them open. I have always felt ashamed at being witnessed in the act of wanting something I could not have.
(
How does a gathering of cells disappear? Does it dissolve slowly? In an instant? Does it lose a piece here, and then another piece there, like a continent dispersing its coastline?
August 24, 2018
Dear J,
Today, this was all I wrote into my pocket notebook:
So We must meet apart (Emily Dickinson)
August 25, 2018
Dear G,
(
Maybe what I’ve been trying to say all this time, as an explanation and apology, is that I sense a mass of white noise in front of my face wherever I go. It stands between me and the world, between me and other people. More and more I am finding myself lost in it, unable to make it through to the other side.
(
I went toward the water today,
(
I got out of the car by the sand, and walked, falling through the dunes.
August 25, 2018
Dear J,
Today I drove over this country’s borders for the first time. Three lanes, a brick building, concertina wire. Someone took my passport through the window and asked what I do for a living. I said, preparing my throat: “I’m a writer.” How stupid I felt when he didn’t laugh, my lips already coiled to laugh along.
I am composing this to you in my head as he hands me my passport, as I carefully avoid touching his hand, as I reach into the warm, humid air of an almost-storm.
Soon one country will end and another will begin. Or, maybe this has already happened. He waves me on, and I’m moving forward unable to read the signs.
Notes:
The authors write about the collaborative process behind this piece here.
