Five Letters

Email — Letters to a Stranger program, January 23

Elise: Tyler. I've received your five letters. The last one, from last Wednesday, arrived with three lines crossed out. I want to know what they said.

Tyler: Elise. They said I've been smelling you for five months without ever having smelled you. I crossed them out because it wasn't time yet.

Elise: Maybe it is time.

Tyler: We're moving from paper to something faster. I prefer Signal over Gmail. Do you mind?

Elise: I'll send you my number. Please, messages that self-destruct after seven days. I don't want an archive.

Signal — Monday 27, 11:14 PM

Tyler: Elise. I'm starting. We have 7 days. If anything makes you uncomfortable, tell me and we'll slow down.

Elise: Start.

Tyler: In the first letter you told me your name and your job. Elise, manuscript restorer. In the second you told me you've been single for two years, and that you'd been missing someone who hadn't arrived yet. That broke me a little.

Elise: And what have you told me about yourself?

Tyler: That I'm a photographer. That I live in Austin in an apartment with three windows facing south. That my last partner left eight months ago and that I haven't touched anyone in six months. That I joined the program because I wanted to write by hand again, not because I was looking for something.

Elise: Tyler, you came to write by hand and found the same thing I did.

Tyler: Yeah.

Tuesday, 1:22 AM

Elise: Are you asleep?

Tyler: No. Are you?

Elise: I was re-reading your first letter. From last August. You write strangely.

Tyler: Strangely how?

Elise: Like someone who's gone too long without writing anyone and suddenly has too much to say.

Tyler: That's exactly what it was.

Elise: Is there anything you didn't tell me in the letters?

Tyler: Yes.

Elise: Are you going to tell me?

Tyler: When it's time.