History

Dear Sir,

I feel like I'm on a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, lucky not to be thirsty or hungry. At the same time, I know I'm home because I hear music. I wish I could write it down. You'd like it here, if only you'd stop writing stories for bankers on bathroom breaks. Yes, you and I know it, that's the only time they find them worthwhile and afterwards, a corn cob or your page, they're the same thing, admit it, except one of them costs a little more.

Today, someone said he never reads fiction. I had to laugh. I've seen him surfing the net. And that biography of John Adams on his magazine table, he insists it is nonfiction. I wonder if John Adams would agree. You could write my story, an epistolary novel like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, alternating, your left hand could be me and your right hand could be you. Then you could stick the letters in a metal box between some rafters in the attic. Two hundred years from now, when someone finds them, they will be history, letters between two real people.

Now that would be an investment, all your time, pen and ink, not knowing if the pages would last or anyone would ever read them. An investment in what, you ask. No different from 99.9 percent of the artists in this world, would you say their work is wasted? Or the hours you spend tending your soil, which most people think is plain old dirt, it may feed you and yours, but in 200 years no one will know unless maybe you write those letters. See, think of them as a building with your name on it. Mine, too, together we might be remembered, even become famous.

Look, someone may say what's the use, if we don't kill the atmosphere today the Earth will explode in a billion years. Nonsense, this is all we have (but for an afterlife, which might be of little use if we have no descendants to join us, sharing time-less space-less-ness with the same worn souls for billions of years. Even retirement communities invite different people into their emptying rooms. I don't want to think that after seventy or eighty or ninety years I may never meet anyone new. Well now, don't forget the people from other planets).

Your message is bigger than you know.

Cheers,
Virginia