A Mark in a Notebook

Welcome to Letter From Somewhere

Dear Lovely Subscribers,

I had the perfect launch planned for this newsletter.

I was going to send out the first Letter From Somewhere on summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, that long long day of heat and light when the Earth pauses on her axis with one of her faces turned fully toward the sun before beginning the long journey back into darkness again. It seemed symbolic. I'd written what I thought was a splendid opener, and I'd tweaked it to perfection. I was ready to go.

Except that. . . by the time the summer solstice rolled around, I was – not in a good way. I was a mess. I was on the verge of, or in the middle of, a nervous breakdown. (Who decides when the breakdown has actually occurred versus when you are pulled back from its brink?) More on why in a minute.

But first – it rightly caused me to push back the launch of Letter From Somewhere. That was smart.

However, what followed was not.

Once I had pulled myself together again – a few weeks later – I began toying with the first letter again. I half-wrote one version and then another. Was the time right? Were the words right? I wanted it to be perfect.

That word again.

Perfect.

Some of you will already be nodding your heads in recognition; still more may when I say that it quite suddenly occurred to me, only today, that I was viewing Letter From Somewhere the way that you look at a gorgeous new notebook you've purchased.

This is it. This is gonna be the one, you think – maybe not in so many words, but that's what it represents. The great short story. The great novel. The journal that is so timeless and insightful that in a hundred years people will still be swooning over your words.

You've set your expectations for yourself so high that you don't spoil the beautiful new notebook with your actual thoughts.

My mental construct of Letter From Somewhere was a perfect little gem of a thing – but like a creature trapped in amber, it was beautiful but devoid of life.

And here we come to the reason for the delayed launch and my was-it-or-wasn't-it nervous breakdown – life, or where all life ends up eventually, at death's door. Not my death (as least not as far as I know), but that of my mother, diagnosed with lung cancer last year and now on hospice.

It's not that I've never lost anyone before, but it's the first time I've had such an up close and personal seat to it, day in and day out, for most of the last year, as her primary caregiver.

(Please, no condolences/sympathies etc are necessary — I know that you’re sorry, but I didn’t write this seeking that and it feels vaguely distasteful to me to leave that impression. Feel free to comment below about death — or life — or whatever else you like though!)

Beyond this, I'm not going to write anything more about that here, not now anyway, because it violates her privacy, but I will say this: impending death has a way of bringing with a scouring kind of clarity. You can spend or talk your way out of a lot in this world, but in the end, not the implacable march of cancer cells or whatever it is that's going to kill you in the end.

I have a lot of thoughts – so many thoughts – about life, and death, and the visceral stuff of it all, but that's for later as well.

But the clarity – you know, you can't bullshit death.

There's a lot of bullshit in the world today. More than usual, more than ever before? Eh, who can say. But I originally conceived Letter From Somewhere as a kind of riff on the mid-(last)-century conceit of the American writing a column in a glossy magazine or their hometown newspaper about their exciting life in some faraway place: Letter From Paris, Letter From Kathmandu, Letter From Marrakesh. I wanted – want – to write about travel, primarily, among many other things, but at the core of it, I wanted to puncture bullshit. I wanted to talk to people and write about it here. I wanted that oh-so-elusive-and-oh-so-cliched authenticity.

You don't get much more authentic than confronting death, and everything that accompanies its approach.

So, instead of a carefully conceived and written, tastefully constructed introduction, you get this. And instead of interesting slices-of-life from faraway places, you get me in my childhood home, sitting on the front porch after one summer thunderstorm and on the verge of a second, listening to cicadas and the sound of an oxygen tank puffing air into my mother's lungs. (No – that last bit is a writer's invention; you can't hear the oxygen tank out here. You can't hear anything over the thunder rolling in and the cicadas.)

Pretty sure that’s a gateway to another world on the other side of that foreboding fallen branch. The forest of my childhood — that I’m gazing into as I write this newsletter — is full of such gateways.

All that stuff I said I'd write about here, in the little slug for the newsletter – travel and psychogeography and literature and walking and films and the gothic and all the rest – that's coming too. Right now, given the backdrop against which I am writing this, I don’t know how often you’ll be hearing from me. But I had to make a mark in this notebook first to get started.

And you know what? That first missive I had all ready to send out into the world on the summer solstice – it wasn't perfect. It wasn't even that good. It was fine, I guess. But it wasn't like this — it wasn't real.

If it isn't real, if it isn't true, then it's not worth writing. But I’m still extremely apprehensive about hitting the “publish” button, even though there are only a few of you out there right now.

But here goes nothing. Thank you so much for joining me here. I know your time and attention is valuable, and I appreciate your directing a little of it my way.

Best,

Lynda