Letters to Home
Imagine you found this in your mailbox
I can hardly compare the life I lead to that of a soldier deployed overseas, but there are some similarities. The idea struck me, as they often do, as I wrestled with sleep around 1am. I had been complaining to family and friends throughout the week about being uninspired (I have a small but loyal band of followers who were growing increasingly upset with me for not posting anything). Jokingly, I told one friend that I could write his memoirs if he wanted me to. He has a lot of funny but embarrassing stories which I’m sure he regrets telling me, since if they don’t appear on my blog, they are certain to appear in my memoirs forty or fifty years from now. Anyways, he took my suggestion more seriously than I thought he would and seemed excited by the idea. I guess he decided he had nothing left to lose.
But there were a few other things I thought about writing too: the usual mixture of interactions, observations and half-formed thoughts that would otherwise litter the pages of my journal, in very poor prose, or fill the ear of my disinterested younger brother during our weekly call.
That’s when I got the idea of letters to home. I could write about the string of recent events—the mundane, the moving, and the amusing—much like a soldier would write home, but with the shadow of imminent death replaced by that of imminent cognitive decline.
It doesn’t matter to whom this letter is written. Imagine it’s to you.
Letters to Home
It’s February. It’s gotten a little warmer, and there are hints of spring on my walk to the bus stop, though the locals tell me not to trust it, no matter how loudly the cherry tree in front of the library proclaims it. Whether it is springtime or not, I have little time to appreciate it; I work about ten to twelve hours a day, five days a week, mostly indoors. I sleep a lot, I walk a lot, and do very little else.
I say that I work ten to twelve hours a day, but sometimes I walk past the chapel to my friend’s building, where there is an open kitchen with free coffee. I make a pretense of working at first, but invariably waste an hour or two listening to his stories. He is doing a math Ph.D., which means he spends his days thinking about matrices and pining after his professor (a woman at least two decades his senior). When he is not doing one of these things, he is spewing nonsense to whoever will tolerate him—a select few, of which I am one. He is a brooding philosopher type, with little regard for social graces. He derives amusement from debating pretentious academics and vehemently taking up the unpopular position, regardless of his true opinions. He considers it a victory if, by the end of the debate, neither party understands what they are debating anymore.
Sometimes he falls into disrepute for no reason—though people cite his “off-putting demeanor”—but other times he brings it on himself, like when he attended an Indian student community event and called it a “sh*thole” in the hearing of the event organizer, who thought he ought to have more national pride. He had to make a formal apology to escape unscathed, but fortunately he makes quite a good impression of abjection. This talent served him well during his brief time as a research assistant in Singapore, where he had to remain neutral amid clashing roommates, one of whom was a large and powerful man who seemed to bear a grudge against anyone who was not from his particular region of India.
Speaking of roommates, he has a habit of getting into bad housing situations. He lives in one of the worst apartment complexes in town and, of the three people living in the apartment, ended up being the one stuck with a mattress in the corner of the living room. I asked him why he doesn’t look for something nicer—he gets the same stipend I do—and he shrugged and said he doesn’t care that much. Besides, he has to save up “for cancer,” which he views as his inevitable and terrifying fate.
In general, he has a reputation for being non-materialistic. There was a time when he refused to use pillowcases, viewing them as a sign of the decadence of society, and covered his pillow with a T-shirt instead. Looking back, he admits that this was a ridiculous stance to take. He has a pillowcase now, but no bedsheets, though he claims this is out of laziness, not political conviction.
Whether I like it or not, I seem to have found a place amongst the misfits, the radicals and the sexually repressed of higher academia. I guess that’s what I get for starting a book club in which the current literature selection, by popular vote, is Ted Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and Its Future.”
Among our more interesting members is a large Russian man of mysterious political convictions. He is morose and a little intimidating and says that “crying is for the French.” We believe he holds radical views, although we have nothing to confirm our suspicions besides a few frightening but cryptic comments. Despite all this, he is a remarkably likeable person. He loves plants and knows the names of nearly all the flowers on campus. He tracks all the campus food events and shares the calendar with everyone. He drinks half and half by the thermos (I watched in horror as he poured it from the pitcher at Panera). And he has whimsical ideas about a certain staircase near the physics building, half-shrouded in foliage. He thinks it’s a portal to somewhere, and now I dare not climb it for fear I’ll break the spell.
From reading my stories, you might think that all the people I know from school are men, but that’s not true at all. Men just make a lot of noise and do stupid things that make for entertaining prose.
There’s a Chinese girl who works in the cleanroom and started her Ph.D. around the same time I did. She is almost absurdly tiny, like a child, so that even in full PPE I can recognize her immediately. Even though she is the same age as the rest of us, she is so small and has such childlike mannerisms that we often inadvertently speak to her as if she were a child. She spends long hours in the cleanroom but never seems to tire, though I am certain the tasks are more difficult for her because of her size. When I talk to her, she chatters about fabrication like a child chattering about toys. She has no pretension, just honest excitement about her work.
Then there is a German girl in my class who, although I believe she is younger than most of us, has the air of someone much older and wiser—an almost motherly persona. She is very pretty, smiles often, and has a soft, gentle voice with a slight accent. She is unassuming, but incredibly intelligent—far more intelligent than any man in the class, for all their swaggering confidence. Every time she speaks in class, I wonder why the rest of us are even here, gumming up the works.
Besides people-watching, going to class and listening to my friends’ talk about their far more interesting lives, I am usually going mad in the lab or the office. One friend described it as a prison of his own making: he had committed no crime, and yet he sat in a four-walled room with no windows and limited access to food or water. I don’t know if I would paint my scenario in quite so bleak a light (my office has windows, for one thing), but sometimes I do wonder what my life would look like if I had chosen a different path. And then I wonder what other path I would have chosen—what other life would suit me? Then the prison analogy doesn’t seem so far off. We feel sentenced to this, just by being who we are.
Love,
Ruth