Dear X,
Please don’t make me contemplate eternity. It’s one of your most debilitating side effects. For me, all’s well that ends, period. What I love the most about your poems is that they all fit on a single page. I used to try to stay awake all week but these days I would rather have a lone thimble of sugar than a whole jar of syrup. And yes, I see you in the doorway, smiling and refusing to check your watch. There’s nothing I appreciate more than your perfect attendance.
* * *
Dear Y,
Thank you so much for the walking tour. I don’t think my feet touched the ground more than twice the whole night. I’m amazed and more than a little alarmed how few of the neighborhoods I recognized, especially the new houses along the old shipping canals. And I very much approve of your plan to introduce bioluminescent algae along the docks, as well as establishing a meditation center in the southernmost turret. But do you really think this will succeed in attracting our young people back to the province?
* * *
Dear Z,
It’s such a relief to be free of all this mammalian pretension, to party like my lifespan is less tortoisean, to take flight on the strength of an idea. Today, for just a moment, the streetcar construction paused and I was able to drag my toes through the grooves and soak up the low currents of electricity, my hair standing on end and my unending anxiety relieved for a precious few moments. I had carved out such an exquisite niche I nearly disappeared.
* * *
Dear W,
In your last invitation, you asked how I was doing. The best answer I can give you is “exceptionally not bad.” On one hand, I am trapped in America without a valid passport. On the other, it is the very lap of luxury. For a while I considered attending one of your famous séances, until I realized it would no longer be prudent, family life and all. Though I do miss the lights that used to flare up in our eyes when we ran around at sunrise, gesturing with sweeping arms at the miracles of animation in the natural world and in ourselves. I am happy you have kept a steady column of sacred smoke rising above our home state, which is in desperate need of such radical imagination.
* * *
Dear V,
I know my sight is not what they used to be, but I can always sense when you are near by the way the bugs vanish, the way the big cats begin to purr and the train whistles bend into slowly dissipating echoes. I try to meditate, but mostly I drift, and when I return you are as present as a whisper. Remember when we bought those galoshes and waded into the storm sewers to see what relics had surfaced during the flood? Meanwhile our public symbols left a lot to be desired. The state flower was the corsage, the state insect was the fire ant, the state shape was and remains the trapezoid. Today our once-proud, once-rural estate languishes in escrow. On the wall of the toolshed is a laminated picture of you and me at the dance, a cardboard sickle moon hanging above us like a glittering half halo. For now I remain all ears and eternally at your surface.
* * *
Dear K,
I had a good laugh when you said your spirit manimal was a sad sasquatch who makes pots of coffee that he tosses out after barely so much as a sip. I know we typically define leaders as those with a track record of getting things done, but there is also room for folks like us who drum up all kinds of excitement about things we never see through. All I ask is you write more than once every fifteenth Friday and/or whenever you feel inspired. Consistency will take you places. Maybe not the promised land, but certainly somewhere more interesting than this.
* * *
Dear T,
I know how much you love getting high, but you have to admit it’s marvelous here on the floor. Eating crumb cake with your fingers, no need for apologies or napkins. You’ve been walking around town in a leather aviator helmet for almost two decades, and the furthest you ever got was county line. But now you’ve got a new script.
* * *
Dear S,
I remember when I saw you in the stairwell the Friday before Halloween. You wore a cape and a black feather boa. There were red wine stains on your plastic vampire teeth. Back then your sustained campaign against equilibrium rivaled even my own. Our ancestors were equal parts fun-loving and puritanical, and at times that moral seesaw hit us in the head. Now your profile pictures are all blank and your last posted coordinates don’t show up on any app. So it’s funny to be writing you now, when I don’t even know where to send this. But I hope this reaches you all the same.
* * *
Dear J,
I’ve been asked not to renew your lease. You may thank me later, if things go where they’re heading, which is nowhere fast. For now it’s best to lay low. Speak only when spoken to. Dispel with those myths of sparkle over substance. Nostalgia is a hansom cab whose driver has no face. The flora is brittle, the fauna has no scent. What we forget about first impressions is that these scenes were often only made fresh by virtue of their freshness.
* * *
Dear Q,
When did you go from being an omnivore to a nadavore? I know there is nothing new under the sun, but I’m tired of viewing everyone as phonies. I believe in pseudoscience to the degree it is metaphorically true. A fire burns in you, too, I know it. Even if you don’t always know where to find it, you’ll know what to do with it when you do. Right now the gaps between where you are and where you thought you’d be seem insurmountable. But they themselves are of little matter. What will you fill them with?
* * *
Dear H,
“Don’t lose sight of the stars,” you said. If only it were that easy, with all this light pollution and space debris, unsanctioned drag races on the rings of the gas giants. I was much happier not knowing about all those Kepler giants, the mirror solar systems. I still feel bad for Pluto, the now demoted planet first discovered by a young man from Kansas. But tonight the local heavens have opened, while I sit here flightless and free of labels, on the rooftop terrace below the paint-stripped billboard, basking in the light of something long since burned out.
* * *
Dear P,
I was not expecting your explicit text, which caused me all kinds of anguish as I tried to decide what not to do. The moral imperative was clear, but that made it no less disappointing to say no to your faux proximity, your hot tub temperatures, your trick photography, your disregard for consequences. And of course the grand promise of Historical Mistress, the kind all biography junkies grow up believing they must have at least one of. Only this affair was over before it began, dream crushed by dreamcrush. I suppose we will always have tomorrow. And perhaps only tomorrow. But for now, please please disappear!
* * *
Dear M,
I am touched by your concern about my soul, which I can assure you is healthy, if perhaps a little opaque. It’s possible we do not find God in the same places. My glimpses into the eternal often arrive unannounced, like the child scientist alone in the barn, studying acorns and silently praying. In spite of my apparent apostasy, I feel the peace of the Lord quite strongly at times. Yesterday, for example, shirtless and holding my sleeping baby, who had just moments earlier awakened, crying. And later, in the muted sunlight of a December day, when no sunglasses were needed. There are truths I have always known and of which I need to be reminded. There are lights.
(originally published in “The One Thing That Can Save America,” 2016, revised 2019)
lucas wetzel 