Notes from a Quiet Train Car
Dear Reader,
Time has a way of slipping past unannounced, and so it has since I last sat down to write to you—though by now you know this refrain well enough to finish it yourself: Daniel, when is it not a whirlwind?
Still, I owe you an account of the months between January and now, so let me give you what I can.
As you'll recall, the close of last year and the opening of this one found me consumed by the labor of bringing The Playbook into its print form—a labor that reached its end just in time for my thirtieth birthday this past February. So here I am, thirty years and some six months into this life, writing to you from a train car, watching the streetlights strobe past the window in their steady, indifferent rhythm.
The car is quiet tonight, save for a stranger's fried chicken—a scent so insistent I half expect it to rise from its container the way it might in an old cartoon, curling itself into a beckoning finger, drawing me down the aisle toward it. I am, it must be said, very hungry.
At home, Suki waits for me, absent Lucy—though I should say Lucy now lives in a home where she is the sole territory keeper. My friend David keeps her in Long Island and sends me word of her now and then. It was the kinder ending, in the end—she and Suki, both of them lighter for the distance between them. As for Suki herself, she has taken to her new territory with the particular chaos of a creature who has discovered that space is a thing to be tested, not simply occupied—flinging herself from furniture, delighting in her own unruliness.
Suki, taking in the early morning light.
I too have been occupied, though differently. Real estate work has claimed my days since March, and my nights have become a kind of reclamation—the shows I let go unwatched, the albums I bookmarked and never returned to, all of it finally given the hours that writing, teaching, and coursework used to consume whole.
This is, in fact, the first thing I have written since finishing The Playbook in February and releasing it into the world that April—grocery lists notwithstanding. And the response has humbled me in ways I didn’t anticipate: the messages, the reading circles, the quiet confessions of readers who found in these pages a way into rooms of themselves they hadn't known were there. I don't take that lightly.
It was my eighth book in six years—my seventh in three. I think, in the end, I needed to stop and sit inside what I had made, rather than reach immediately for the next thing. Though I would be dishonest if I told you there wasn't already a manuscript stirring somewhere in the back of my mind—one unlike the others, further removed from my own life, my own movement, from me.
When I sat down to write this, I assumed I would give you an inventory—the months, the tasks, the small accountings we tend to offer when we've been away too long. But I find I don't want to do that this time. I’ve given so much of myself to the page already, poured so freely into every writing space I've built. This letter, I think, can just be what it is: a small note to say that I have missed you, and that the old bug—the one that first put a pen in my hand—may be biting again.
Perhaps next time I'll tell you more. For now: hi, hello, hola. I hope this finds you well, and I find myself, unexpectedly, eager to write to you again.
