Three Sentences to Carol

March fifth.

I have been aware for a while that I haven't written to Carol since the email exchange last spring. Not in the way where you feel guilty exactly, more like noticing a plant you forgot to water but which has, somehow, continued not to die. The awareness just sat there through fall and into winter and I kept not doing anything about it, which is its own kind of answer, and then this week I pulled out the small box of notecards I keep in the kitchen drawer and I found one that seemed right and I wrote three sentences. It took me maybe four minutes to write the sentences. It took me considerably longer to pick the card.

I don't know what it is about the container. A letter feels like a commitment. An email feels too easy, which sounds backwards but isn't, with Carol there's something about the weight of a proper handwritten thing that matches the frequency we've settled into, the low-and-warm register we've landed on after years of misstarts and gaps. A notecard is smaller than a letter. It doesn't announce itself. It says: I was thinking of you, not: I have a lot to tell you. These are different statements and only one of them was true right now.

I sealed it and put it on the counter below the windowsill to remember to take it out.

The windowsill, March. The envelope on the counter below it.

Standing there I noticed the arrangement the way I always do, the collapsed bowl, the letterpress card, the two photographs, and it occurred to me that the arrangement has been complete since last June and this is the first March it's existed in its finished form, which is not a significant fact but felt like one for a moment. I mailed it on the way to the gym. It is done. The correspondence will pulse once and then settle again, and that is the correct rhythm for it, and I am glad I finally wrote the thing.