August 18, 2014

Sarah Please <sarah.please@yahoo.com> 

to Corinne Anderson <coriander254@gmail.com> 

Re: as the crow flies

Dear Cori, 

You’re right! It is strange to think that our epistolary relationship is dependent on something as illusory, as incoherent, as The Space of yahoo.com. I will choose to consider it an archive anyway—full of juicy gossip, or links to youtube videos, anyway. We are too young to believe in or aspire towards fixity anyway: that would be un-revolutionary. 

I like the in-between-ness of writing to you from my computer. I like thinking about you reading each word, the crease in your forehead as you derive their individual meaning.  So let me restart this email. Let me organize it around an idea that makes sense. This weekend, as you know, I moved into my new apartment with Etta. We’ve spent the past three days dragging used furniture up the stairs of our walk-up, grunting and sweating our way towards a mutual home. Etta is what I wanted in a roommate: she’s a good cook, and she’s quick to laugh at herself. I told her about you, and she said that she ‘didn’t really understand’, but that she was glad that we are so connected to each other, even across the distance. My new room faces West, toward the sea (not that I can see it from here), and I have three hours of perfect honey sunlight, directly on the carpet and into my upturned face. I am eating it all up right now, spoon-in-mouth shoveling the end of summer break and the happiness I feel at starting a new semester. This fall will be two years since we met. We’re creeping up on another anniversary. 

I didn’t like trying to explain you to Etta. You (and by extension, Us. The Capital Us, the living breathing Us), you/we are untranslatable. You/we exist in too many forms in my head. Sometimes I call you lovely, especially when you do or say something stupid. I call you hero, but I can’t figure out why. I call you crow, because you’re an omen to me. You showed up in my life as a sign of what was about to change, and then you thundered through the city. You were a many-winged thing, crow. I don’t want to dilute you by explaining you away, or making you real to other people. And—simultaneously—I want you to stop being my pen pal and start being my girlfriend, goddamnit. I want your voice to merge with mine. I want to share this bed, this apartment with you. 

Ethan is the only person I can talk to about you, because he is probably, fundamentally, the person who knows me best. Having shared a home together, we can pick up on each other’s ticks immediately. When he came over yesterday, he had smoked too much weed right before, and he was so angry at Simon he could barely speak. I’m still not sure what Simon did—I’m not sure that the boundary between real and imagined slight is a transient one in their relationship. But Ethan has been this way for months. He told me that it’s as if there’s a fly buzzing in every room he’s in, a slight peripheral disturbance that prevents him from landing anywhere he goes. I slipped my flip flop off and said ‘where is it in this room, I’ll fucking kill it for you’. When he asked about how you were doing—after I fed him soup, right before he left—I said that talking to you was drawing from the reservoir of myself and finding it deep again. I am a shallow operator with my college friends; I am easy. Ethan gave me a little shove and took off on his bike. I think he’s rooting for us. 

This is turning into a nothing-letter. This letter is to poke you and say ‘hi’, please call me tonight. Please spend your time on me so that I can feel freshly happy. I have given you all this arbitrary divinity, and I hope you will use it to transform me forever. I’ll discard my current form for you—that’s what I’m trying to say. Make me bigger than this apartment building, so I can stomp across Arizona like a giant. Make me like you, make me a crow too. Fly me over the desert red and purple and pink and black. 

So there. I am deep in my illusion of you today. I am drawing water out of my reservoir and pretending that I’m sad I can’t go to the beach with my friends. I am not sad. I am happy because instead I am going to lay on my carpet and have the sun for these next afternoon hours: feeling my very real emotions for you, hearing the very real cars on the street below, picking at the very real ends of my newly dyed hair. 

very real-ly and sincerely, 

Sarah Please