I Am Always Writing a Letter 01

Somewhere between memory and fiction: a stick of gum, a paper boat, and the shape of trees

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“Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.” — Natalie Goldberg

Dear LMNOP,

Were you surprised to find the envelope in your box?

It has been a while. There is such push and pull to the “by hand” thing, an ebb and flow to my resistance to the time and the tunneling an old-school letter invites. Then there is the waiting. Texts are faster, but they either skim the surface or are unwieldy. Not all truth can fit into such a limited container.

I have been circling memory, feeling things give way and fall beyond reach and yet also finding doors, portals unexplored, dark as night, but with a tell-tale shimmer.

Do you remember the daily recording of three things? It was always harder than I expected, but there was comfort in the routine of it, in the continuity, in the challenge of sifting through a day and finding three. It was a stabilizing thread, a line of basting loosely holding things in place. It was a point of light, even if not always my own. My ability to play along eroded as things got dark. Rarely am I content to skim along the surface.

Maybe I do miss a certain kind of gloss, a vase of roses, a blueberry scone, the wind in my face at the ocean, the magic of the heron, beets, and a drizzle of honey on soup. I miss someone anticipating words.

I no longer write letters, but I sometimes hear echoes, feel their phantom weight in my hand. There is something layered and lush in the idea of a letter, a good crinkly one, right? Onion skin, vellum, translucent paper saturated in paint, ink sinking into the surface with each stroke of the pen. You can feel the impression of each a or b or c, the lifeline of each word, when you run your finger lightly across the paper on the other side.

If you pull at the string of a word, will it unravel?

I write on both sides, which doubles the texture and sometimes makes it harder to read. The “double the fun” slogan just ran through my head, peppermint twins. Remember Doublemint gum, Big Red, Spearmint, and Juicy Fruit in the yellow pack? What was that flavor supposed to be?

Curious, I looked it up. Apparently the answer is a trade secret, but it seems to have been a mix of lemon, orange, pineapple, and banana. I can’t even imagine that combination. Banana gum? Despite my surprise, there is a hint of sweetness on my tongue as I write, a phantom taste. Seeing those rectangular packs, the red, the green, the white, the yellow, and even the light blue, does open a door.

There is an unexpected conduit, a fragment triggered by something small and seemingly inconsequential.

I have a story about the fence at the back of the yard of my grandparents’ house and the fact that the man who lived on the other side of that fence would often give me a piece of gum from a pack that he kept in his shirt pocket, the same way my grandfather did. In my story, there was an apple tree at that fence, and the man’s name was Mr. Applegate. I am sure. I have always been sure, just as sure as I remember trying to get close enough to a squirrel in that yard to put salt on the tail, which would supposedly allow me to catch it. Just as sure as I know there was a walnut tree with a tire swing.

I have been surprising myself, pulling single images, faded and discolored, something out of nothing. I am tacking them up on the walls around me.

I can’t remember being on that swing. I can’t remember fear or exuberance or the sensation of spinning. I can’t feel the rubber of the tire or the roughness of the rope. I simply know there was a tree. There was a swing. There were walnuts in the grass.

You have made a fresh cup of coffee or tea? Are you sitting by the window? Do you stop at times to look out, to ponder a word, to follow a thought, to open a door? What color is the chair? What color is the sky? Are their birds?

I sometimes wish I still had a rocking chair.

Mr. Applegate with an apple tree. When I say it out loud or see it on the page, I realize how deeply flawed the story must be, a memory built on the foil wrappers of those sticks of gum, and yet this memory has persisted for many years as one of the very few things I believe I know to have been true.

Everything I write is true, but the lines between truth and fiction are invisible.

It isn’t really a story. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak. It is just a singular image. Two men, each with a pack of gum in their shirt pocket, the apple tree, and me. They are still in this landscape of the unknown, this diorama I find myself building as I return again and again to this space. I can’t see myself, but I am there. I am the recipient of sticks of gum from grandfatherly men.

I have been following threads that seem to have shaken loose, making lists, capturing details that for the most part cannot be proven.

Writing you helps me think things through from a distance, one that allows a bit of air, a bit of water, and a bit of salt. Will the picture come more fully into shape as I brush water across the surface, or will it remain flat, a sheet of faded dots?

Do I have keys I didn’t realize I had?

Can you picture your childhood house? Can you map the rooms? Do you remember colors and patterns?

At the very end of what has always seemed an empty hall, I am remembering this space.

I need to spend more time with this house. I didn’t live there, but it is the anchor of my memory of those years. I can’t picture the exterior, but I know there was mint somewhere, maybe under a window. Games of hide and seek? A fig tree.

It is such a small pile of sand. It may never amount to more than a single image. But it feels sacred. I feel such a need to write it all down, to keep repeating the details, an unexpected chant, hoping others will come into view, lights suddenly clicking on.

Does it matter? Some might ask that, but I don’t think you would. We all know that no one has time for living the present much less reliving the past. I wish I could explain the incessant drive and the piercing, growing fear and sadness that goes along with not remembering.

Oh, that smudge? I sloshed my coffee. Hopefully, you can still make out the words. I would draw you a picture, but so far, that would mean packs of gum, an apple tree, and a tall skinny older man in a gray shirt and pants, or was the shirt blue? Or maybe he was heavier? Was his name Fred? Throw in a sunny blue sky, white puffy clouds, a nearby squirrel, and green grass, and we’ve got an image from a Little Golden Book.

The illusion of a memory quickly spins to dissolution when I press for details.

The house next door is one I should know, the one I am told I visited with my grandmother for tea, but I have just the barest of impressions, a whiff of a back room, maybe something that would have been a called a sunroom and had some kind of vinyl wraparound bench. Could that be? I keep trying to pull it into shape, to see colors, patterns on china, or someone’s face. I keep trying to pull something solid from the shimmer. I can’t accept the unknowing, and small flashes of memory have me wandering the darkness, looking for shards, looking for anything that might hold a clue.

I keep trying to find myself in these places and spaces. Do you do this?

All memory is fabrication. The words we write, the photos we take, and the images we draw become artifacts, markers of truth, but reassembling them is always an act of creation, a construction of narrative. There is always a point of view, an angle. There is always a process of filling in, giving air to the past. We cannot escape this truth, but it feels different as time passes.

So many prompts ask us to remember. I always squirm, uncomfortable, and look into an empty void, blank. Even these rooms I am trying to give shape are silent, dim, and blurred. There is no me.

When was the last time there was a letter? I carried around postcards and stamps for weeks. I type everything these days, often just with one finger. It is deliberately slow. My world has slowed down, but my thoughts race and spin. They climb and spiral and dig and burrow. They nestle. They lodge. They branch. They swing as a pendulum. They dart and vanish, a fish zipping around the tank.

You remember the betta fish? I can’t remember the name. I feel it just on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t pull it free. It started with an A.

Red herrings are everywhere. Narrative is perpetually unhinged, layer upon layer, the palimpsest flattening time into a single image of unrelated bits and pieces.

I do not have the patience to write by hand anymore, but I know the value of a letter, of writing to someone, of hearing the voice in your head, and of being read. I imagine my words take shape and form and space in a letter that way. We always write to someone.

I am always writing a letter.

Someday I will write right up to the edges, leave just a cutout, negative space for your fingers to hold.

Sometimes there are no explanations. We never really know who will stay. Sometimes roads go only one direction.

Sometimes we just need to write into the abyss, cast and follow words and not worry about expectations and length and time.

I should number the pages, but I laugh to think they might get caught in a breeze and fly free. Words can always be rearranged. We are not trying to fix a broken machine or make toast.

Not all stories are told start to finish.

However you arrange the pages will be fine. Really. I’ve set aside several pages already. You won’t miss them. The words either are there or they aren’t.

There are places where the water is shallow, where we can see the pebbles on the bottom, where we can sail a paper boat brimming with hopes and good wishes. There are moments when we might be able to carefully step, stone to stone, across the water, but, mostly, the river is deep and wide.

We often went to the lake when I was a kid. I say that as an objective fact. What I remember most is my fear in the boat, a fear, more than anything, of being lost. I have carried this same fear forever. I have felt it when driving, the sudden sense that the road ahead was not anchored, not mapped, and that I was driving into the unknown. I have known the fear of falling off the edge of the horizon.

This letter is not pretty or crinkly. I am writing on college-ruled paper torn from a leftover spiral notebook from when the boys were in school. I am determined to use all the odds and ends of paper in the house.

You know how people write letters that they squirrel away to be found later? How I would love to receive a bundle of letters in the future. How I wish I had followed through, stopped working, sat, and took time to ask every question last year, ignored the dismissal when I suggested we write things down, followed every breadcrumb. I knew I was losing the map, that I couldn’t save it, and yet I didn’t really understand the way loss would swallow the already tenuous past.

Sorry, I know you don’t like to be reminded. Not everyone can make room for the ways the brain sticks, over and over again, on regret, on loneliness.

I was going to tell you about the crows on the roof and how they woke me this morning. Next time, okay?

I am reluctant to end this letter. There is this desire, palpable and clear, to keep filling the space, to send all the words, to write until I am out of time. I have missed this, this lack of caring about rules and word count and algorithms. I have missed the freedom of the letter, the anticipated letter.

Maybe it has been hard to find me. I have lived in the same place for almost thirty years, but maps fade and fall away. Roads turn to dirt. We are always in the process of forgetting. Pathways between here and there have been overtaken by weeds. I watch for wildflowers.

I wonder how you are today and how you have been and what your water looks like and your flowers. Have there been whales?

Sometimes the water is wide. Sometimes it is so green and sometimes so blue. Sometimes it is something in between that defies naming. I wish I was a painter. Sometimes there is gold reflected from the light, sometimes purple. Sometimes we can see through it, and sometimes we can’t.

At the end of last year, I did an experiment with capturing a postage stamp view of the morning sky each day. You would have liked it. Even I am surprised I did it, every day for two months.

I’m looking out my window right now at the trees, and I imagine you might tell me that I should do that, that I should set everything up right here and capture a thumbnail once a day or whenever I find myself sitting here, anxious or nostalgic or sad or confused, too tired to move, or simply lonely. I know I can’t capture these trees.

I might tell you that the morning sky was different each day and always new and exciting and breathtaking. In reality, there was a lot of gray, but it was always slightly different. This view of the trees would be almost exactly the same every single time. That feels both intriguing and pointless. I look at the multiple shades of green, and I have no clue how that would go. I look at the shape of the leaves and branches, and I have no clue how that would go. I would be making smudges of color at best. What would that look like over time? The idea intrigues me. I know you would say to do it.

For some reason, this bird-walking excursion through the gum and the apple tree and the tire swing and places that I may know more about than I think lead me to another place, and another house, and oddly, to the golf course and a hidden path at the back edge of hole three, a path to a spot overlooking the river.

I found myself scanning for answers this week.

Well, I should go. No one has time for such endless letters. I should go write the year on bits of masking tape and label a pile of journals, try to organize the past. I am living there more and more.

I wonder how you are.

I would be delighted if you wanted to join me in a quiet scrap of morning and paint your view. I want to see your map, your haiku. I want to know three things from the day, things that are and are not beautiful.

In so many ways, a letter has often been the conduit.

Tell me what you see. Tell me what poems drift through your awareness when you least expect them. Tell me what you could eat right now if you could have anything. Tell me what you have forgotten.

Send me a quote or two or three, not the ones that are shared all the time and that we see coming and going. Pick a word and find a quote. Put it in a paper boat when the water is at its lowest. I’ll be waiting.

Words are so often the anchor points around which we can find connections, build bridges, and tunnel our way into the recesses of memory that we didn’t even know we could tap.

I really don’t send letters. My replies will always be here.

This letter will be tucked in a drawer, and others will follow.

Thank you for reading.

Amy

PS: Remember that I mentioned that I ran out of coffee, or almost did? Ultimately, I really did run out. I ran out a day earlier than my delivery and drank something terrible and rogue I found in a drawer. When the shipment arrived, there were coffee grounds everywhere. I’ve been rinsing pods all week and setting them on a towel to dry before moving them to the coffee drawer. It was a big box. I wasn’t in a hurry. Each time I waited for my coffee to brew, I rinsed a few more.

I finally found the broken one, just one, not even broken but with a faulty foil cover. The cover was just slightly askew, and all of the coffee had fallen out. It’s amazing that the grounds in just one pod had covered the entire box as if there had been a giant sandstorm.

🎯 Thank you to those who have upgraded their subscriptions, made a donation, or sent paper or ink or other scraps for making nests, filling snow globes, and building hypothetical terrariums. I hope you are inspired to make time in each day for your creative habits and to value the documentation of your journey.

From the Week

These are beautiful!

Nothing specific, just a feeling.

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Weekly Bits and Pieces

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 28 (2025)

• Making Comics Read-Along Week 8 (and schedule for Week 9)

• Postcard 10 - Mapping

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Made It?

Thank you for reading along! I always enjoy your comments and invite you to chime in. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.

• Share a quote for a future letter, a memory of a window, or a pattern you see when you look back.

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I draw with a small group of women for an hour on Sunday mornings via Zoom. We draw. We chat. It is casual—and free. If you are ever interested in joining, let me know. You might be surprised how easy it is to just relax and be with other people when half of your attention is focused on what you are drawing.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

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