Letters to Wieczorek

August 31st, 2015

Dear Wieczorek,

Snagged a deal and the landlady seemed pleasant enough about it. Here’s a letter hailing from Lexington Ave, few blocks from Central Park. She told me about how she inherited this place and it goes pretty back, but she didn’t seem too thrilled about it. It was statements and smalltalk between the typical transactions, though I’m sure you’re well aware.

Anyway, I wanted to write to you as I do terribly miss Munich and its Maultaschen, spinach rich — how accommodating that was, and a craving I’ll insist shall I ever visit again! And it’s not such out of the realm of possibility, just yet-to-be an inevitability to which, I would hope, you’d not mind at all should it happen.

So, I hope all is well with you. It’s only been a few months since our parting, but it still feels in arms reach. As though if one did fling open this shabby closet right behind — a wooden desk with a typical apartment crooked view, one room, bed & chair standing — one could step into a portal for your city center once more, however drab you’d claim it’d be, though charming in its overcast, August’s promise indeed. Strange, isn’t it!

That’s not the only strangeness though. A confession is well overdue. With this arrival I would’ve hoped to have found a resurgence of stability, or a centering, or at least consideration, or that dreaded term: belonging. One certainly gets used to the Foreigner designation until a muted background dressing, though the invisibly insipid walls sprouting between simple city interactions always prods and gently makes one consider what’d it mean to be born elsewhere. So while we roamed around I did sometimes think, “maybe back in New York these unsettlings shall wash away” and yet, so I admit, they’ve only multiplied.

Maybe each city one visits so stays attached to you, until you are the chimera. Maybe not! But, to be honest, I have a hard time seeing anything in anybody and meaning anything to anyone. It is an international city after all, what else to expect? Conned about it being anything other than a shopping mall with streets and honks one could guess.

The other strangeness is your insistence on letters and descriptions of a place you’d most likely never visit. Well, you did say it’s a maybe. The same maybe hanging around my “inevitable” departure once more.

Such a trouble, isn’t it? Just as I had a bag of What Ifs back to New York so we share another bag of What Ifs on our next visitation, whether in either city, and to this, my dear Wieczorek, seems to be a mild case of delirium surging.

See, I’m writing this letter but the effects of it shall remained sealed between our imaginary worlds. And though professed that it’s only the imaginary things which’ll remain, the invisible things waiting toward our end — well, I must confess there’s still a whole bunch of things in front of us that, well, will take the majority of our time. However fanciful our plans do seem. Life happens while we keep making them, don’t they?

It’s appealing, isn’t it? Writing letters and locking away worlds as though they’re a few steps away. But even if it’s right in front of you, it may as well have never existed.

Correspondence like this fails to stir anything in me other than a mild melancholy. If we’re going to surf imaginary worlds and string together our fantastical plans of what shall be, well, it seems only mothballs follow.

Always keeping one foot hanging out the door, I suppose. That’s the attraction. The ability to suggest that, yes, perhaps this current situation wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps all of these letters link me with individuals to which a beach summer day would be spent meaningfully.

It’s just such a funny riddle. The question being, why do you write letters?

I think it’s just a way to forget you’re dying alone, gleefully or not.

November 27th, 2015

Dear Wieczorek,

I was leafing through the library and so came a flush of guilt about my letter prior. It’s understandably so you wouldn’t be sure what to reply with, with its aimlessness and life-line wishing between.

Leafing through the library I came across a fountain, and then I remembered our first meeting at the University — cold adjusting. Who would’ve guessed!

Compounded with guilt so comes another confession. While recollecting the details — careening around the campus we did — a most uncomfortable fact surfaced in the midst of it: there wasn’t any presence.

But, rest assured my dear friend, I’m not sure if I was ever present. I’m not sure if I’m present writing this letter.

There are moments that pass and you certainly think, “Well, I ought to be present for this” — if you have the fortune to such thoughts — and yet thoughts rarely do any good for enactment. Rarely do any good at all. Restrained in motion so it passes you.

Our first meeting is hung in this mausoleum, up next to a first crush and a unknowingly final goodbye. Do you have moments you can only hang, and nothing more?

You could certainly argue that, whether you’re present or not, so it’s locked in memory, and whether hung or more intimately invoked, nevertheless there’s our invisible barrier and trifling through one’s temperament with the end results.

But I realized something recently. And it’s that you may as well forget everything is temporary. That instead we ought to make the days immortal, and when we die we’ll be able to revisit it all again, only if we gave it an immortal stamp.

If you are in front of me, sharing this endless day, then why are we clacking the abacus around to bargain for four more days after? It’s not about the evil thereof, but the good therein, and what else could one possibly hope for?

You have my most sincerest apologies Wieczorek. Even though we don’t share this day most immediately, so you shared this day with me in writing.

Yours Truly,

—

February 14th, 2016

My Good Wieczorekian Riddle,

I probably won’t send this letter. But if I do, please understand that I’ll follow up with another letter profusely apologizing and so, to save some stamps, why not preemptively apologize now?

That is, of course, if apologies meant anything. They don’t mean anything at all, doesn’t it seem? Surely you’d agree if you looked through all your apology memories.

It’s always the same song and dance if you think about it. It’s magical too, how it makes the lower class move along. Whatever accosting, beer bottles to break, so one waits a measly five hour retreat and hangs a head a little lower, utters the magic, and suddenly we’ll march ahead!

Unfortunately, Wieczorek, I’ve seen too many to know it’s just waiting for the next one. Until the skull breaks. And I’ve said it too many times to realize that, whatever mistakes you made, they’ll revive in a flash of fury; no penance shall ever it wash away.

So I won’t apologize, but I will take full ownership of any disdain invoked. I’ll take ownership of it all, as anyone should, for they’ll brunt the aftermath. So it at least helps, indeed, to embrace it whole.

I can’t believe it’s already been three years since I first landed in Munich. How lovely it was to stop by your office, watch your moustache flicker about whether a grimace or a little delight from a student grading. I couldn’t help but think if I clasped strongly enough with our first handshake, perhaps an imperial angel from the first kingdoms, a sweet messenger and a nod toward a life I would’ve rather, would ordain we shall never part.

Alas, it seems I’ve burdened you once more.

You probably feel the smouldering between these lines — this restrained sickness of mine always peaks out at the worst times. And it’s always stayed, especially visible on overcast days. I can see the ethereal vapor floating on and up from me, from whatever houses it, perhaps parts of my soul departing.

Maybe if all the fragments hope to return to the idyllic pastures of a campus life once more. The leviathan churns nicely with all the government funding and assurances one’s little pittance of knowledge keeps their tenure uncontested. But, you see, dear Wieczorek, please don’t get angry, well, maybe you should get angry, but nevertheless those tea gatherings you forced me along soured me so much about everything I left the following month.

That’s my confession. It’s so silly isn’t it? And I sometimes feel this anger and wishing of blame upon those parties, but I am the one who attended them after all.

I am the one who cannot nod and smile while living in the aftermath of The Empire’s fall.