I have loved to write letters for as long as I can remember. Strangely, it's one of the ways I feel most comfortable connecting with someone else. I find it can be more thoughtful than an in-person conversation because there's time to think about what, exactly, you want to say.
That's why, when I found myself intrigued by a man I barely knew, I asked him to do the infamous New York Times "36 Questions to Fall in Love" with me -- via letters. I was heading abroad for the summer after graduating college. He was on a Fulbright in Brazil. What could go wrong?
We wrote the answer to one question per letter, back and forth and back and forth for months. That summer, living and working as a volunteer at a vineyard in Italy, I was lonely. I didn't know any of the other volunteers. I had never farmed before. I didn't eat meat, and Italians love meat. I missed my friends, the easy connections of college. I can remember sitting in the tiny, shared room of the volunteer apartment and opening a letter from him. The sun poured in through my round window, facing out into the valley filled with vines for as far as I could see. I literally felt my heart pounding as I scanned his words. And as I read, I was already planning my own perfectly crafted response.
We never said we loved each other, or even came close. But I felt something like love as I read and wrote and read and wrote. Really, it was the act of being vulnerable that made me feel this way, not anything about him. Vulnerability, I've learned, fosters initial closeness better than anything else. After all -- what is more vulnerable than someone holding your hopes and dreams and heartbreaks in their hands?
At the end of the day, nothing went wrong. I'm still fond of him, though we don't keep in touch very well, and I'm immensely grateful for what I learned in writing those 36 letters. I learned how easy it can be to imagine someone as you want them to be. How words can, at times, warp reality. How vulnerability is important, but not necessarily the right first step in a relationship. I learned the power of crafting a personal narrative. What that narrative looked like in that moment, for me. And what I wished it looked like instead.
This week, poems about closeness and vulnerability.
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For Grace, After A Party
by Frank O'Hara
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
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The Red Poppy
by Louise Gluck
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
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Fifty
by Marie Howe
The soul has a story that has a shape that almost no one
sees. No, no one ever does. All those kisses,
The bedroom chair that rocked with me in it, his body
his body and his and his and his.
More, I said, more
and more and more....What has it come to?
Like dresses I tried on and dropped to the floor....
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Postcards
by Sarah Kay
I had already fallen in love with
far too many postage stamps,
when you appeared on my doorstep.
wearing nothing but a postcard promise.
No. Appear is the wrong word.
Is there a word for sucker-punching
someone in the heart?
Is there word for when you are sitting
at the bottom of a roller coaster,
and you realize that the climb is coming,
that you know what the climb means,
that you can already feel the flip in your
stomach from the fall, before you have
even moved--is there a word for that?
There should be.
You can only fit so many words in a postcard.
Only so many in a phone call.
Only so many into space, before you forget
that words are sometimes used for things
other than filling emptiness.
It is hard to build a body out of words.
I have tried. We have both tried.
Instead of lying your head on my chest,
I tell you about the boy who lives downstairs,
who stays up all night playing his drum set.
The neighbors have complained:
they have busy days tomorrow.
But he keeps on thumping through the night,
convinced, I think, that practice makes perfect.
Instead of holding my hand, you tell me about
the sandwich you made for lunch today, the way the
pickles fit so perfectly against the lettuce.
Practice does not make perfect.
Practice makes permanent.
Repeat the same mistakes over and over,
and you don’t get any closer to Carnegie Hall.
Even I know that.
Repeat the same mistakes over and over,
and you don’t get any closer.
You--
never get any closer.
Is there a word for the moment you win
tug of war? When the weight gives,
and all that extra rope comes hurtling
towards you, how even though you’ve won,
you still end up with muddy knees and
burns on your hands?
Is there a word for that?
I wish there was.
I would have said it, when we were finally
alone together on your couch, neither one of us
with anything left to say.
Still now, I send letters into space,
hoping that some mailman somewhere
will track you down and recognize you
from the descriptions in my poems;
he will place the stack of them in your hands
and tell you, There is a girl who still writes you.
She doesn’t know how not to.
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