“You learn the most insane shit pretending to be other people,” he told me once during our lunch break. “K-pop crushes, who’s cheating on their spouse.” He used to be a bereavement coordinator at an elegy hotel, which makes sense, since he seems to have a way of handling people in crisis, those who come into our offices looking like they’re about to crumble.
“You need to talk really slow,” he said, when I asked to bum a cigarette once. “I know I sound like an ass, and I really do care. But it’s also a job, and if you allow yourself to feel everything all the damn time it’ll wear you down.”
I don’t want this letter to turn into a novel, but I need you to know who I am. It took me weeks to get this far. I’ve been too afraid to knock on your doors, certain I was too much of a stranger for any of you to care. For an introvert who hated social niceties, who always said no to invitations, I have begun to crave any kind of human contact at all. I want to know if you still see your family in your homes, walking through the halls as if caught in a moment. I want to know how you are nourishing your bodies—food or alcohol or photo albums or maybe with the scent of unwashed clothes in the hamper. I want to know if you remember anything from our time away from the world, if the dreams I had while I was comatose were anything more than dreams—a dark place where we didn’t feel like strangers, where we could witness past moments from other lives. When I look out the window, I feel like we’ve shared a lifetime of memories together in a dark womb: a first kiss relived forever, a long-dead grandparent returning from war, our secret histories becoming our shared pastime.
I look at the Flannery house two doors down, that tiny Spanish-style cottage, and I think of two sisters jogging together, coaching softball in the park. I know Penny is lost to us. I’ve seen her name on the wall of remembrance at the community post office. I see you jogging at night, Kate, crying. Once, I almost ran outside to help you after you collapsed, but someone else, someone who probably knew what to say, reached you first. If the void we shared was real, I saw that you and Penny liked to escape from your money troubles with black-and-white horror movies. You sold a screenplay about two sister con artists with demonic powers and, for the first time, your parents seemed proud of you. I know the film studio that bought it no longer exists.
As the social nexus of our cul-de-sac, Alex and Amalia’s house used to be the place where many of you gathered for barbecues and late-night drinks. I missed out on most of that, didn’t I? If Alex were still with us, he’d be grilling every day to keep up morale. I was away for your backyard wedding, Amalia, but while I was in the void, I saw you tell my wife that you were pregnant and show her the ultrasound photo. I saw Alex secretly stash money for a belated honeymoon in a shoe box on the top shelf of a guest room closet （you might want to check if it’s there?）。 I know from the community newsletter that you are, by some miracle, still expecting after eleven months in a coma, as if your baby remained in stasis. I know I should have come over long ago with baby things like I’ve seen the others doing. I know I should have been one more person to let you know that you aren’t alone.
And Benny on the other side of our back fence, I know there’s only you now. But before everything, you and Phillip used to hold virtual minigolf battles with your son Zeke every night before bedtime. I never knew Shelley helped you two with your coding for the immersive VR app you built to help senior citizens experience the world from their homes. I never knew how often she hopped the chain-link fence and finished bottles of wine with you, confessing our marital woes, how I was barely home anymore. I’ve wanted to come over and drink wine with you, too, and maybe learn about the woman Shelley was in the end. I have a bottle of pinot that I bought just for you.
And Mabel across the street. You were away for so long, living abroad in Japan when the plague hit. I know you dreamed of becoming a tattoo artist in your ancestral land. While you were gone, my wife and I would watch your mother sit outside on the stoop, as if she was expecting you home at any moment.
“I hope she’s okay,” your mother said to my wife when she came over for tea. We had learned of the first outbreaks in Russia and Asia, but the plague still seemed so far away then.
On the day you returned, two weeks ago, I peered through my window and watched your mother embrace you. Your body was covered in tattoos. I shouldn’t know （but I do） that each of them tells a story—the big dipper on your ankle an homage to a high school friend who passed; the iridescent feathers on your calves for the time your father chased a peacock around the Honolulu Zoo so you could have a souvenir; the virus on your neck, to own the plague you contracted in Thailand when you jumped off a cliff into the ocean.