Creek Running North

I found this morning a letter from someone I haven’t talked to in five years, someone who came into my life like a glacier into a valley, an image that fits the scouring effect she had on me as well. I was digging through some old files looking for the article Carla had written for me, and I found a sheaf of paper covered in 12 point Arial.

I looked at it for the longest time before I realized it was from her.

Curious, I read it through, and was surprised at how remote she seemed in those pages. What is it that has changed in me to make her groping for feeling seem so inauthentic, so forced? There was no semblance of intimacy in the letter: it described a trip to the Trinity Alps and some hiking, an emotional crisis brought on by overlaying the scenery with expectation of psychic healing. That was acceptable enough: I do the same little destructive trick to myself. So why did her letter ring so hollow?

I read it, growing impatient with the self-absorption and the whining. Anger at herself, wounded shock at some imagined shabby treatment by her housemate, resentment of some town somewhere for being uninteresting, layered over with an undirected self-loathing. Self-criticism is a wondrous thing, and second-guessing a high art form. But destructive flailing for its own sake? I remembered the sodden sameness of how it was with her, and wondered what I had ever seen there to derail my marriage so.

I am still occasionally beset by the odd fond memory, but they have been played back too many times, and I suspect they bear little resemblance to the events that begat them. The outpouring of need on those pages was, by the letter’s end, repellently familiar.

So this is what “over” feels like.

Five years ago, I took the three thousand pieces of email she had sent me and deleted each one, wiping their sectors of my hard drive so that they could not be recovered. It was an excruciating, blessed relief, and I played her lost words in my head for days without meaning to. How odd to feel nothing at all this morning when I fed the letter into the shredder.