I Wrote Letters to My Dead Friend for a Year
Fifty-two envelopes, no address, and somehow every one arrived.
The first letter I wrote to Sam was an apology for missing his funeral. I did not miss his funeral. I stood in the second row in a borrowed black blazer, close enough to smell the lilies going sweet and rotten in the heat, and I watched his brother's shoulders shake. But I was not there, not in any way that counted, and Sam would have known the difference. He always knew when I was performing being fine.
He died in March, three weeks after his thirty-first birthday, on a road he had driven maybe two thousand times. A truck driver fell asleep for four seconds. That is the whole story of how I lost the person who had known me the longest.
Four seconds.
You can hold your breath for longer than it took to end twenty-two years of friendship.
The letters started six days later, at 2 a.m., because I had picked up my phone to text him a joke about the casserole situation at his own wake. Seven casseroles. Nobody in his family eats casserole. My thumb was already moving before I remembered... I sat on my kitchen floor with the phone glowing in my hand and this unsendable joke inside me, and it felt like choking on food at a table where everyone else had finished eating.
So I got a pad of paper out of the junk drawer and I wrote it down. Dear Sam. You will not believe the casserole numbers. I wrote two pages, mostly nonsense, ending with the apology about the funeral I had attended with my body only. Then I put it in an envelope, wrote his name on the front with no address, because what address... and sealed it.
I want to be clear that I did not think this was healthy or literary or brave. I thought it was embarrassing. I hid the envelope inside a boot in my closet like it was contraband.
But the next Sunday I wrote another one.
And then it was a thing I did. Sunday nights, kitchen table, the blue pen he once stole from a bank and gave me as a fake birthday present.
I told him about the weather, about his mother's voice on the phone, about the promotion I got and could not celebrate because celebrating felt like leaving him behind in March while the rest of us got to keep having a year. Some letters were three lines. One was eleven pages and I burned my dinner writing it and ate the burned dinner anyway because getting up felt like hanging up on him.
People online have a phrase for this, writing letters to the dead, and when I finally searched it, months in, I found grief counselors recommending it in calm, laminated language. That almost made me quit. I did not want it to be a technique.
I wanted it to be a correspondence.
Because here is the strange accounting of it: I was the one writing, but I was also the one receiving. Every envelope I sealed arrived somewhere. It arrived in me, usually about three days later, when I would suddenly remember something I had told him and understand what I actually meant by it. I wrote that I was fine about my father, and Wednesday I cried in a parking garage and knew I was not. The letters kept delivering me to myself, one Sunday at a time.
Grief has no mailing address, so everything you send it comes back to you, opened.
Around letter thirty I did something reckless. There is a site where poets post work on a community wall, and late one night I typed out a piece of letter nineteen, the one about the casseroles and the choking feeling, broke it into lines, and posted it on the wall under a name that was not mine. I told myself I just wanted the letter to exist outside a boot in my closet. A stranger in another country commented that she had been writing to her sister for three years. Another wrote, simply, envelope people, we are envelope people. I sat with my hand over my mouth.
There were more of us. A whole quiet postal service of the bereaved, all of us stubbornly writing into grief as if it might write back.
The turn came in January, letter forty-five or so. Sam's mother asked me to lunch, which we did every couple of months, both of us pretending it was casual and not the only hour in which we could say his name at a normal volume. Over soup she said, out of nowhere, that she had been cleaning out his apartment desk. Then she slid a white envelope across the table with my name on it in Sam's handwriting.
My whole skeleton went cold.
It was not what you are thinking... It was not from the end. It was dated nine years earlier, from the winter he spent in the hospital after his first bad depression, the winter I drove up every weekend with gas station coffee and terrible magazines. He had written me a letter and never sent it. In it he said, in his cramped left-handed scrawl, that he did not know how to thank someone for sitting in a beige room with you while you are at your worst, so he was writing it down instead, and that maybe someday he would be brave enough to mail it.
He never was.
He just kept it in a desk for nine years, the way I kept mine in a boot.
I laughed at that lunch table, and then I did the other thing, loudly, in a soup restaurant, while his mother held my wrist and let me.
We had been the same kind of coward, Sam and I. All those years of jokes and we each had a hidden envelope where the real sentences lived. The difference is that I got his late, and he will never get mine at all, and I have had to decide, week by week, that late is not the same as never mattering.
The year ended on a Sunday, the way it had been ending all along. Letter fifty-two. I did not write anything profound. I told him his mother taught me his dumpling recipe and I ruined it exactly the way he used to, too much ginger, and that ruining it correctly felt like a séance. I told him the letters were ending but I could not promise I would stop, because apparently he and I both need paper to be honest, and some inheritances you do not refuse.
Then I did the last thing. I took all fifty-two envelopes out of the closet, and I put his one unsent letter in the middle of the stack, right around week twenty-six, so that the correspondence would have both of our handwriting in it. Fifty-three letters now. A complete exchange, if you squint. That shoebox sits on my bookshelf where the photo albums are, because that is what it is.
I still write to him sometimes, on the bad Sundays and the strangely good ones. I am told this is part of healing, and maybe it is... but I think of it more simply than that. My oldest friend moved somewhere with no address. The mail is slow, and it only travels in one direction, and every single letter still arrives.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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