Story: A Letter

Dear John:

All knowledge is only fiction with an earnest smile. You say to me, “We are not as good friends as we should be, because while I know you the longest, I know you the least”, but writer H. L. Mencken once said that “We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine”, and I will go one step even further and say to you because even here and now are frequently moonshine, we are not only as good friends as we should be, we are also as good friends as we can be, as any two people can be, because we are still friends.

For the past twelve years you have come to my birthday celebrations as I have come to yours, and since we follow the same rituals you yourself must know the truth of what I am about to say.

Birthdays are microcosms of life, and like any life the morning is given to the family. I sit at the dining table, me on my side, my sister on hers, my father on his, and my mother on hers, and we are four people divided, divided by experience, divided by memories shared in secret with one but not all. In my family this experience appears as the specters of my youthful crush, my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, my mother’s lost prince, and my father’s infidelity – ghostly men and women, perhaps even joined by more that we know not of. But whoever they are, whoever they were or will be, known or unknown, they share our table, sometimes forgotten, sometimes noticed, but always there waiting. They sit between us, they whisper in our ears, and they cannot be driven away. It might not be the same with you and your family; your specters might not take human form, but each family has their own ghosts, ghosts who stop the tongue and dam the ears, who speak with our words and ask things like whether school was good or whether we want more vegetables. And on any birthday morning, yours or mine, this is true as it is of most days – this I know, and this you know too. But even our mutual knowledge is not a bridge across a chasm, because my specters haunt only my family, as your ghosts haunt only yours. There are no words I can use that would let you see the specters in my family; there are no words that would summon them to a table shared by you and me. And so as my family is divided by what we know, so are you and I divided by what you cannot truly know, because these are things I cannot truly show.

But would you want to see them, even if I could find the words that would open your eyes? Friendship is two people covering their eyes; it is two people blinding themselves with the white cloth of the morgue so each need not see the other’s ghosts; in the same way we cover the dead so as to not offend the living who have no connection to them. I see this when you step through my door as morning passes into afternoon and life passes from family to friend – I see you stooped over from the daily imps that burden your back, and I know that you do not want to have to carry mine as well. Like in Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting The Lovers, life is sometimes an ink-filled sky, made even more horrible by the comicality of its darkness, and we need to blind ourselves if we are not to realize how alone we are in our troubles. We need to cling onto each other in the necessary pretence that you are like me as I am like you, featureless and generic in our feelings so that we can understand each other. I understand this, as do you, and this is why we keep our distance, why we bind the cloth around our heads as in the painting, why we use words not to build bridges across chasms but to push each other further away even as we hold onto each other. As we sit down, we are aware, you and I. You think to yourself that this is my birthday, and I do not want to hear your problems. I think to myself that this is my birthday, and my problems should remain my own. We both think that we sympathize with each other’s problems anyway because they are, if not the same in themselves, then the same in our suffering of them. The hilarious thing in this would-be farce is of course that we both know all these truths are lies. We sit across each other, and we are blind – we cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts. We only want to think and say that we can and we do.

And so that is exactly what we think and say, even as afternoon passes into evening and friends and family begin to merge, proving once and again how little we can know of each other as we sit and chat. You are no longer the only friend here – people from all around the city-state have come, each of who see me in one particular way, and thus render me a fraud in everyone’s eyes. This is what you feel when I speak with other people; you feel my falseness because you cannot understand, you cannot see me in those circumstances no matter how much you smile and nod, and so my outline begins to fade in your eyes. You try to reach out to me; you may try to include yourself in this exclusive circle circumscribed by superficially shared knowledge, but how can you? When names are meaningless sounds to you, when the pictures we draw with words are for you like the pictures in a stranger’s scrapbook, the elements instantly recognizable but the whole they make never so, how can you possibly do anything other than feel like an invoked monster outside this group of human beings, and in the end finally become one? And so it is with you, so it is with me, and so it is with everyone else in this room – we are all monsters, we are each one of us something other to everyone else, even as we sit and talk to each other, even as we pretend that we are connected by something as illusory and frivolous as human DNA.

But this is not the extent of the unspoken and accepted tragedy of humanity as a civilization. We are not only our incalculable selves, each one unique and therefore unrecognizable – we are also the victims of time, which will twist every true word we speak into a lie. I loved once, but that man I loved is not here, because he does not exist now, not anymore, and neither does the I from that time. I built him up with my illusions, I clothed him in the colors of my fancy and made him a beautiful creature, but he was never that creature, and now I am not that I too, because time will strip away all these paints to reveal the strange monsters that we are, were, and always will be. Love is not transformative; it is we who transform love and with love, just as we transform friendship and with friendship, and so friendship is not transformative either – and time will thus kill all those I’s that dare to dream otherwise. This I know, and this you know too. Birthdays are also death anniversaries of those I’s that have passed into nothing, killed by time, and some presents are also our gifts of mourning to those selves. As I open a present, as my face flickers for an instant in an awoken memory of a self that liked it but that no longer exists, you can see in that moment the ghost that I am. How wonderful, I might say, but you know better. And you will look back at those conversations that we have had this day, and you will realize this terrible fact – when I speak to others I am a monster, and when I speak to you I am a ghost, because the only way we can connect is through shared and fading memories, memories of things dead and gone, with only our words dragging them forcibly from the grave like so many tomb-robbers hoping to find something valuable in our dead memories. And so as my outline begins to fade when I speak to others, so it is fading when I speak to you too, because I am an amalgamation of not only something alive and something other, but also of something that is always dying and is always dead. We are all monsters, but we are also all ghosts – we cannot help being either, and that is why we dress up in our uniforms of skin, not only to hide ourselves but also to give us an enduring substance.

You know this, as do I, and as evening passes into night the facts of our existence only become clearer. Look at us, we are gathered around the table, and the lights are switched off, and this is what we are – alike only when the darkness comes. Then one candle is lit, and this tiny and solitary flame illuminates a few faces, but not completely. Features dance in and out of shadows, and the whole scene is grotesquely mocking from the beginning, as it will be until the end. Another candle is lit, and another few more faces are brought into being, even as this same candle casts the faces before into struggling obscurity. Another candle is lit, and another, and another. But they will all burn down to nothing, beginning with the first, leaving only their unchangeable and easily removed traces upon the mutating cream scribble of my name. And this is what we celebrate – this is what we celebrate when we sing the song of life.

Now it is over, and people begin to leave. You will too. You may choose to stay longer than the others, but you will leave, sooner or later. And when it is over I will clean up the mess, kiss my parents goodnight, and go to my room. And the day will end as it began, with me alone.

This is a birthday, but this is also every day of every life. We cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts, we cannot even see each other clearly for we are all ghosts and monsters, and we will all leave each other in the end, if we were ever together. This is what we are, and since you and I both know this, I say to you – are we not already the best of friends, simply because we are friends?