Letters From Vee

There are a number of rough parts about this pandemic but I won’t bother going into any because I find it all rather boring. Yes, it’s terrible, but I got things to do and there is only so much mental trauma I can endure before I lose interest and focus my attention elsewhere. The abyss will eventually stare back but I wouldn’t know because I was too busy checking my phone. 

I should also mention that I have the attention span of a gnat, which also has problems that I will go into but not too deep since this is also boring.

The biggest problem I face on a daily basis is my job. I am a software developer, which affords me a luxury of being able to work from home. The inherent flaw of this setup is that I work from home, where all my stuff is. 

Work is easy when I’m at a place where I have to show up wearing clothing and regularly interact with people in a way befitting an inauspicious professional like myself. When I’m at home I am surrounded by books, computers and video games and the only time I am required to wear something is when I go out twice a day to check the mail. There is absolutely nothing stopping me from sitting around all day and scrolling through social media except for a distant looming pink slip which can be staved off by uploading some code once in a while. I would describe my current situation as somewhere between a Faustian Bargain and a Monkey Paw wish.

Despite my shortcomings I consider myself the kind of person to not ruin a good thing so I’ve been forced to come up with ways to keep my attention throughout the day. The most effective solution I could come up with is writing postcards.

Writing has a certain focusing effect on me and writing a letter doubly so. Call me a hipster but I find something special and intimate about exchanging words meant only for a single person. Real life conversations and their spontaneity have never been my thing but when I have a pen in hand I can move at a more relaxed pace over the course of several days while I work. Writing back to someone gives me time to consider a response, pick a tone, think of topics, write it down and rewrite again because my spelling and grammar are nearly incomprehensible unless I have a computer to walk me through every single sentence.  

At present I have one correspondent and I find her rather lovely. I’m not sure I’ve always felt this way about her but I’ve come to notice a budding sense of giddy excitement when I get dressed to check the mail to see if she’s sent me anything..

This has been an odd trend for me because romance is normally not my thing. Over the course of my life I’ve tried on multiple occasions to find a loving, healthy relationship but these endeavours invariably end up going nowhere and often leave me with a sense of forlorn frustration . There are no doubt reasons behind my romantic dysfunction and it could very much have to do with my stoic, emotionally closed off personality but I won’t be talking about this because, again, boring.

Let’s talk about the girl I’ve been writing because she is not boring. I’m calling her Vee.

I met Vee last year when I passed through her town on an adventure and we managed to hit it off fairly quickly. Vee is a nurse that works with children or something. I say ‘or something’ because I don’t know exactly what she does. She goes to the houses of children with medical needs and does her best to make sure they don’t die. The specific details of how she goes about this are lost on me, no doubt in the same way the digital minutiae of my job are for her. One detail that is not lost is her unique flowery way of writing.

Vee writes with the intensity of a junior high student that just passed you a note in class and won’t stop staring until you read it. Before the Pandemic the semi-regular letters I received would talk about her various friendships and how happy she is for their growing relationships. She’ll talk about her trip to another state where she tearfully watched her parents accept her sister coming out as bisexual. The handful of times I’ve visited would always be bookended with a letter detailing in length the activities we had along the way. As the pandemic devours the fleeting summer month her letters have been shifting from the more exciting moments of parties and get-togethers to talks about her day to day life.

The letters I receive now express joy about the great bargain she found at the grocery store, about the cute thing said by a kid she helped keep alive and about every little thing that’s on her mind. These letters are silly and inconsequential and despite the narrative handicap of barely leaving her house except for work and errands she has somehow managed to write to me even more. Each week I receive a new letter in the mail and I consume it with literary voraciousness. 

 Vee is not the person who puts words to paper but rather the person who lives a life between strokes of a pen.

When I write back, I find a growing concern that I won’t find anything worthwhile to say. 

Before the pandemic I wasn’t exactly Ms Adventurous but I certainly had enough story material to write down in my monthly postcard. Now my life consists of waking up, shuffling a dozen feet to my work computer and maybe squeezing in a light walk if I’m up for it. 

Alright, I admit, I have some hobbies. Playing video games and coding projects are great time wasters but they’re not exactly the sort of thing you write to sparks passion in a lover. Yet I do write it all down anyway because I don’t have a lot else to talk about and I don’t want her thinking I’m ignoring her. I try to temper the tales of my daily routine with more interesting tidbits. Last week I wrote Vee about the ice cream I made that came out just nearly perfect and the week before I regaled her with a tale of a video game ending that made me almost cry. Sometimes I try to write to her about a programming problem I’m having at work or at home but I usually end up scrapping those letters because there is no amount of paper that can properly describe finding a comma out of place. Usually when I’m running low on material I’ll talk about a show I’ve been watching that she may enjoy or sometimes about a show that she most certainly would hate in hopes that she at least gets a laugh. 

 I write my letters with as much emotion I can muster, which is not much, and I send them with a fear that I’m just boring her but Vee loves them anyway. She always texts me to let me know when my letters arrive and how excited she is to read them. Vee’s letters regularly refer back to things I’ve said written about in past letters and she keeps everything I send in a box on her nightstand that will no doubt be overflowing by the end of the year. 

I view my life as just another thing to deal with but Vee views it as something beautiful. The cynic in me scoffs. It points at the disparity between us in distance, in life and in our outlooks. I’m a cold, materialistic person who sits in her house and watches things fall apart on the news and she’s a dreamer that goes out to fix a part of the world that was already breaking well before the pandemic. 

There is a part of me that holds doubts on her appraisal. Life isn’t like the movies, finding a person who believes in you doesn’t make you all better. But maybe there is something to that old trope. I may not be the type of person to smile everyday like her but I smile whenever I see her postcard resting in my mail slot. Maybe that’s worth considering.

The other day I received another postcard from Vee. This time she talked about taking her cat for a medical checkup and the new food the vet prescribed. The letter was simple and full of cute moments were she pretended to talk in the voice of the cat who was “hecking amgry” about the new diet it had been placed on. At the end of the letter she finished with “I love you. -Vee”. This gave me pause. Vee didn’t write “Love -Vee” which is her usual, she wrote those three words everyone strives to hear. And she meant it for me.

I’ve been thinking about this letter quite a bit but ’m not sure what to say.