This text was written as I learn to live with Long Covid and attempt to regain my creativity. All the posts and some more info can be found here.
The post comes with a stack of envelopes. Three are general paperwork that I throw away as soon as I glance through them, the information held within already known. The fourth letter is unusual. My name is handwritten on a white envelope in a script I rarely see. It is not hard to guess who it is from. I know the curve of these letters and I have been told of the arrival of the envelope.
A week earlier, I had sat down to write a letter of my own, one full of sadness and longing for a friend who had not been communicating with me much over the last few weeks. I was missing her and afraid that for whatever reason she was slipping from my life, wanting to end our relationship.
The post worked faster her way than mine and I received her letter a few days after she received mine which had prompted her to message me, to let me know that words were on their way to explain, to ask for forgiveness. I speed read through her missive before returning to the top to read it again slowly, carefully. It is full of the details of life I had not been privy to, full of care and love. I smile and think of us both sitting at our respective desks, miles from each other, and yet doing the exact same thing: writing a letter to a friend. It is difficult to explain but this makes sense. She and her have always been intertwined in ways I can't explain or care to explain.
We call each other the following evening and talk and talk and talk. It's effortless, as if we had never stopped being in constant communication. The sky darkens, my stomach rumbles with hunger, and it's almost with regret that I hang up.
I go to bed that evening a little lighter.
The following day is the first of December.
It is my grand mother birthday, the first one she is no longer here to celebrate. My brother has texted to remind me. I had not forgotten. I'm not sure what to do with the fact of her birthday, of her death.
I sit by the windowsill and watch the milky sky for a while. A gull crosses above the neighbourhood roofs. A copper leaf dangles in the tree twined at the foot of the whitebeam. There are no flowers in the street, nothing to remind me of her. I pick up my mug of tea and sip at it. Maybe this is the best I can do for now, to think of her, to laugh at how I could celebrate by trying to replicate the terrible food she used to serve us though I know I won't.
I return the mug to the wooden tray and shift my attention to the open puzzle by my side. The pieces are not loose in the box but neatly compiled in boxes numbered from 1 to 24. A different friend who also lives miles from me has sent this novelty advent calendar to my partner and I and it is finally time to open the first box.
I take my time to lift the flap, to let the pieces topple onto the large windowsill, to separate the flat edges from the others, to compile the colours together. Then, I pick up a piece and start to assemble the image. It's the top corner of the puzzle, the dark of night crisscrossed by the black of winter tree, and in a corner the lights of December lit bright, golden and white.
The pieces of the day put together, I lean back, swallow the last of my tea in one large gulp and smile. I linger in the movement of my lips, in the feeling of subtle contentment for a moment. I want to encode this feeling into my being and to let it devour the pain and anguish of the last few weeks.