She Corrected the Grammar in My Love Letter
Red ink over my feelings, and somehow I loved her more.
The first love letter I ever wrote came back to me in four days, graded.
B minus. Circled, top right corner, red ink. Underneath, in handwriting so tidy it felt like a personal attack: "Strong opening. Argument collapses in paragraph two. See notes. Resubmit."
I was twenty three. I had spent three evenings on that letter. I had quoted Neruda, possibly incorrectly, and I had ended it with a line I believed would be carved into stone someday: "I think about you the way the tide thinks about the moon." Rachel had underlined it and written in the margin, "Tides don't think. Also, the moon does the pulling, so in this metaphor I am doing all the work. Accurate, but is that what you meant?"
It was not what I meant.
Some necessary context. Rachel worked at the campus writing center, where I had gone twice with essays and once, catastrophically, with feelings. She was the kind of person who read the errata pages of books for fun. Semicolons obeyed her. I, meanwhile, wrote the way a golden retriever greets guests: with enthusiasm, volume, and no structural integrity whatsoever.
A normal man, receiving his heart back with margin notes, would have taken the hint and transferred schools. I want to be honest about what happened to me instead, physiologically, when I saw that B minus...
I fell completely, irreversibly in love.
Because here is what I noticed on the second read, sitting on the floor of my apartment with my roommate pretending not to watch. She had corrected the commas. She had flagged the tense shift in paragraph two, where past and present were, in her words, "wrestling in public." She had bracketed the Neruda and written "citation?" like my longing required a bibliography.
But she had not touched the feelings.
Not one red mark on any sentence where I simply told the truth.
Next to the plainest line in the letter, the one I almost cut, "I save things all day to tell you, and then forget them the moment you look at me," she had written a single small word.
"Keep."
Revision History
So I resubmitted. Obviously I resubmitted.
Draft two came back B plus. "Improved structure. The tide is gone, good riddance. New problem: you are hedging. 'I think I could maybe be falling' contains three escape hatches in seven words. Commit or cut."
Draft three: A minus. "Almost. Paragraph four is the best thing you have ever written and you buried it in the middle like you are ashamed of it. Lead with it. One comma splice remains, you know the one."
I did know the one. I had left it in on purpose by then... the way you leave a light on for someone.
By draft three, you understand, this had stopped being about the letter. We both knew what was happening and neither of us said it out loud, because saying it out loud was not our genre. Our genre was marginalia.
Other couples flirted at parties. We were conducting a courtship entirely in revision history, and every red mark was her way of saying: I am still reading. Keep going. You have my full attention, which is the rarest thing I own.
My roommate, watching me hunched over draft four at one in the morning, asked the correct question: "Why don't you just ask her out like a person?"
"Because," I said, "she would say yes to the wrong draft."
I did not fully know what I meant by that, but I knew it was true. Rachel could get asked out at a party by anybody. What I was doing was different. I was showing her, at a rate of one draft per week, that I would revise. That I was someone who could hear "paragraph two collapses" without collapsing myself. It was the most honest advertisement for marriage I could have run, and I did not even know I was running it.
Draft four took me nine days. I led with the buried paragraph. I fixed the splice. I cut every hedge until the sentences stood there with nowhere to hide, and I ended it with five words and no metaphor at all... "I think I love you."
It came back in one day, not four.
No grade in the corner. No margin notes...
Just one correction in the entire letter, red ink, straight through the word "think."
Above it, in that tidy, devastating handwriting: "know."
And at the bottom, where the grade should have been: "Accepted for publication. Pick me up at seven."
The Style Guide of a Marriage
That was eleven years, one wedding, and two children ago. People request the funny love letter story at every dinner party we attend, and I perform it, and Rachel sits there doing her editor face, and at the exact same point every time she interrupts to clarify that the Neruda was, in fact, misquoted. It was. I have never once gotten it right, even now. At this point it is load bearing.
The B minus letter hangs in our hallway in a frame, red ink and all. Guests assume it is a joke gift. Our daughter, who is seven and can already spell "necessary," recently read the whole thing standing on a chair and delivered her verdict: "The tide part is weird." Genetics is real.
Here is what I did not understand at twenty three and understand completely now. Correction, from the right person, is not criticism. It is investment. Rachel bled red ink on my letters for the same reason she now reads my drafts before anyone else does: because she believed there was something in there worth the trouble of getting right. Being edited by someone who loves you is one of the great intimacies. It ranks above hand holding and just below being brought soup.
She never once corrected the feeling. Only the grammar. The feeling, she told me later, was already perfect.
She is the reason I eventually stopped fearing my own weakness on the page and enrolled in actual writing classes, at thirty, like a man finally going to the dentist after years of chewing on one side. She is the reason I read essays about why safe poems lose and feel personally indicted every time, because hedging was always my vice, and she circled it in red before any teacher did. And when I finally wrote something true enough to send into the world, a poem about the kind of love that shows up holding a pen, she went through it twice and handed it back with the highest praise in her arsenal.
"No notes."
I framed that too, in my head at least.
Last month I found out she kept every draft. All four, in a folder, in the same drawer where she keeps the children's birth certificates and our passports. Filed under the important documents, my comma splices, my collapsing paragraph twos, my tide that could not think.
I asked her why she saved them.
She looked at me the way she looked at the first letter, like something worth the trouble of getting right, and said, "Writers keep their revision history. That's how you prove the good draft wasn't luck."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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