If I wrote you a letter, this is what it would say

Hello Darling,

I hope this letter finds you in good spirits or something approximating them. I’m going to try this again, this time written from the perspective of someone who is very sad. I’m not very sad. I’m constitutionally unsuited for it. Whenever I feel myself getting sad I take a drink of bourbon, or go for a stroll in the woods and try and identify different species of birds merely based on their calls. I know shit about birds, but listening for their unique calls distracts me. It slows me down. I suppose it connects me back to our old animal instincts, which have nothing to do with feeling sad or grey on particular days and everything to do with staying alive. I am happy to report that I am staying alive.

If you walk due north from the cabin where I’m staying you’ll find yourself soon greeted by a trail head. Keep walking north and it tells you that you’ll reach the top of a mountain. To the east, at least according to the sign, is a waterfall. Traveling west leads you back to a loop trail, and heading south leads you back to the cabin. I travel west most days because I have a strong sense of irony. Life is cyclical now isn’t it?

Stranger still though, at least to my admittedly feeble intellect, is how much sense the signs make. Go here: see this. And I take a great deal of pleasure in knowing that east lies a waterfall. Life, as we both now know, manages to be queerly related to well-labeled signs. Once you’ve chosen a path it gets rather hard to deviate. If you start out heading east, chances are, you’ll wind up seeing a waterfall. Head north, a mountain. And yet, the sign in life’s case is also illusory. It is entirely possible that while traveling east you will tumble down the hillside, spraining your ankle in the process. In which case, you will not see the waterfall. Or perhaps a tree branch will fall and strike you in the shoulder, leaving you incapacitated. It is a tension that we all live with at least on some small level.

I say this all not entirely to bore you, though I admit that was at least a part of my intent. I say it because it seems strange to me now that we’ll never see each other again, when months ago, even a year, I’d have said that we’d know each other for the rest of our lives. In life’s infinite branching of circumstances it’s hard to know if this was inevitable or not. That is to say, I’m not sure whether we slipped off the path and broke our ankles, or whether this was the path all along. Do you know? Does God? Could we ask him in prayer? I think not. Even if he exists, such troubles as ours lie even beneath the birds of the field. To believe otherwise would be a form of pride, which is the greatest of the sins.

Of all the things that you said to me during those months that we spent together I remember one thing the most. We were sitting at picnic table, eating sandwiches from a local shop. A hornet was buzzing around, menacing both of us. I said we should just abandon the sandwiches, knowing when we were beat. You laughed warmly and said, “That’s exactly what I thought you’d say. You’re always willing to give up.”

And you were right. Look at me now. I’ve given up on nearly everything. I’ve given up on us, on you. I find it so much easier this way. Snow started falling this morning, think flakes from a grey sky. I hope that it snows for months that I’m trapped here, in this cabin, thinking of you, not thinking of me.