Letters

Something longggggggg tell me how you like itttttttttt

For the seventeen weeks that they are apart, Kitty writes her girlfriend an average of 7 emails a day. 833 in total—41 sent, 793 slipped quietly away into her drawer.

She writes to her in bed. In the kitchen. After work. Fresh out of the shower, purple toner in her hair to color-correct the blonde dye. Touching herself. Grinding her teeth. Spitting out her mouthguard. Slick with sweat. Buzzed by excess chlorine in the YMCA pool. The campus is dead for J-Term, and even when the semester begins again, her four in-class-friends rotate in and out of commission—overprotective boyfriend, five courses, chronic health issues, introverted.

In those seventeen weeks, Yasha writes back 23 times. The emails are deceptively meaty—fat at the onset but dwindling down quickly. When she’s home in Novosibirsk for winter break her replies are curt and irritable. Come February, when she’s settled in her study-abroad housing in London, they bulk up again minutely. She recounts how the British math students alternate between being vastly behind her and wildly ahead. It is hard to get comfortable. She draws herself out of keyboard characters and adds “xo” to the ends of her messages. Sometimes just “x”.

Kitty spends her free time in the spring pretending to draft her creative writing thesis. In biweekly appointments with her advisor, she speaks at length about her plans.

“…But then, the boy’s mother passes, right? And he knew she was going to pass, but it doesn’t make it any easier. So the father sends him to Catholic boarding school because he isn’t sure what to do with him, and that’s where Adam meets this boy. Evan. A little effeminate, maybe, but nice.”

Dr. Beaufoy has heard her fair share of Genesis reimaginings. She does not seem thrilled to read another. But she says nothing. Her comments are vague and only focused on deadlines. The application is due the last week of April. Kitty needs a blurb and some example writing by then.

On their rare phone calls, when one of them can muster up meager change, Kitty complains about Dr. Beaufoy to Vasha. Her lover’s breathing is like white noise. It itches her inner ear and wets her underwear.

“I just feel like she doesn’t think I have potential. Or drive.”

“Maybe you don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re just doing the thesis because you think you should. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I’m saying just because you want to do it and should do it doesn’t mean you’re gonna be…like…good at it.”

Kitty tries to laugh, but it sounds like the pant of an overweight dog. On Yasha’s end rain drags its fingers on the glass phonebooth. They end the call soon after. Besides, Kitty’s roommate Jessica, her only solid friend, needs the phone to talk to her terminal great-uncle about if she can take his cat.

When the application deadline rolls around and Kitty finds what she knew all along, that she has #1. no better ideas than queer genderbent anti-Catholic Genesis and #2. no halfway decent work written in the last six months, she sighs and submits a blurb for L’Origin, as she’s calling it, and one of her unsent emails to Yasha. It’s a drag, typing on the clunky computers, so they’re all written first in a composition notebook and later copied online. Kitty rips out the page, crosses out the names and replaces them with “she” and “me” and calls it “autobiographical fiction.” The envelope is dropped into the maw of the in-box outside the department chair’s office.

The semester ends. Mostly B’s and A-’s. One piece of glowing feedback; “Now this is a writer!” Kitty flies home to Nashville and pens down a few dozen more emails. Eating bacon-covered mac and cheese. Drinking Heineken with Jess when she comes to visit, and kissing Jess’ cat named Dog that she took on the plane with her. Buying increasingly gaudy jewelry at vintage stores to hide her body, which is slowly taking shape from baby fat into hormonal fat into plain old fat. Her parents, both big-time music producers, leave her to her own devices. She makes up stories about women hitting on her in breweries and extraterrestrial presences on late night nature walks and finding a tooth in her PBR. The fiction is what Yasha laps up, what gets her to answer within 48 hours.

“I bet that woman knew you were mine and she couldn’t have you so she came back as an alien and a molar. Too bad for her I win in every physical and discarnate form. I’m kissing your temple and your right butt cheek right now. Can you feel it? xoxo Yasha”

When Yasha gets off the plane at the beginning of August, Kitty almost runs away. It’s too much to have her in person. She doesn’t deserve it. In the middle of all the plebs comes Yasha in big movie star sunglasses and a black sundress carrying an yellow duffle bag. A goddamn yellow duffle bag. Jaundice. Yolk. Canary.

Kitty’s parents are away for the whole month. Two of their clients are touring together—Wollongong, Adelaide, Gold Coast, and jetting to Jakarta and Bangkok for a few festivals. A rare opportunity. Kitty watched them go. So many people entering and exiting through these 4,555 acres. She cried a little, but now is glad for their absence. Yasha’s hair has blond racoon layers and her calves are taut from walking. They buy her a pack of golds on the way home and then have sex, moving their way unhurriedly through the house, tasting each other’s differences, eating their familiar sounds, kissing because there is nothing else worth doing. After, on the pinstripe couch, with Kitty’s fingers still inside her, Yasha has a gold and amusedly recounts bits she remembers from their email exchanges.

“You told me you felt like a wet piece of pottery mid-spin,” she laughs, shoulders shaking and moving her girlfriend’s fingers up and down inside of her. Kitty smiles at Yasha’s photographic memory and curls her hand until they both keen.

On the eleventh day of August, Kitty receives a letter. Plain white, addressed from the college, unassuming. She opens it while Yasha is in the bath, and then reads it over again and again. Quietly before bed. Making breakfast. On the toilet. The chair of the department loved her work, but not L’Origin. She wants more of these letters.

“I showed it to my husband and daughter,” the chair writes, “and they begged me for a whole book, just of that. My colleagues agree. When you come back to campus, we’ll have a chat about how to take what you have and expand it. L’Origin is not what you are meant for. This is.”

The rest of the summer passes languidly. They eat fatty foods and suck the grease off each other’s fingers. Yasha recounts every detail from Russia and England—the way the girls dress, open fields, her favorite meals, her most difficult math problems. They make a life together out of cigarettes and cheek kisses and Gin Rummy. The letter burns a hole in Kitty’s schoolbag. A half semester thesis. Presentation in four months.

Her parents come home two days before the girls’ flight back to school laden down with trinkets from Oceania and Asia. They do not mind queerness. It makes for good music. All four of them go out to dinner, see Cabaret at a playhouse, and come home to watch Arrested Development until midnight. When they part at the airport, one couple planted, waving, the other steadying each other for TSA, it is like a funhouse mirror. Kitty tries to hold hands while they take off. Yasha bites her pinky.

The fall crashes them together like a cymbal. Senior year. Yasha is class president, in jiu-jitsu club, and doing independent research. Kitty joins a new-ish acapella group called the Paradiddles, frequents pottery nights, and keeps hiding her progress from her girlfriend. When asked, which is perhaps not as common as it should be, she simply says she’s working on transferring her life experiences into fiction.

“Like a memoir?” They are head-to-toe on Yasha’s tiny twin bed with its eggshell sheets. Yasha is working on a little whiteboard—erasing, rewriting, erasing, rewriting. Her hair is in two fishtail braids and fully black again. Kitty is revising a letter in her head from February 16th, 2:22 pm. Unsent.

“I guess.” She swims to the surface of her memories and focuses her gaze on what she can see of Yasha. The rise and fall of her stomach. The twitch of her big toe.

“Will I be in it?”

“It’s fiction, Yasha,” Kitty snaps. A nerve has been tweaked. Yasha does a crunch to see her lover’s face and then flops back.

“I mean the essence of me. You could pull out how we met in Logic class. Make me a boy named Chad. Turn it heteronormative. Keep your blonde hair. Give me a big dick.”

“Sure.”

“And love handles!”

Alongside the department chair and a grad student, Kitty whittles down her collection to around 100 letters. Some have been combined, others cut or extended. Names of people and locations are changed and slight fantastical details are added—she gives herself a pornstar brother and sets the emails five years in the future—but the bulk remain the same. She copies down some of Yasha’s emails and makes couplets. Her and I. The guilt burns off like a Flambéed Baked Alaska. Yasha has never shown interest in the humanities. She will attend the ceremony, hear a carefully selected portion that Kitty will read aloud, and beg for a copy which will collect dust in her bookcase. More than anything, she should be proud. Kitty is technically parodying her favorite genre.

The day she finishes, Kitty drives around town with Jess and Yasha and Jess’ boyfriend Sober Stan and Yasha’s friends Lily and Marta. They rent a minivan and Kitty drinks rosé in the third row and eats rocky road ice cream with rainbow sprinkles mixed in. Sober Stan drinks ginger ale with his right hand and drives with his left. Afterwards, her and Yasha make love in her dorm room to Sonic Youth and Yasha whispers in her ear, “You are so smart. You are so smart. You are so smart,” until she comes.

On December 15th, Yasha falls ill. The presentation is the next day. She drinks chicken soup by the gallon (thank you Marta) and orange juice and pops zinc. It is no use. Her bedding has subsumed her. Kitty kneels at her side, joints popping upon contact with the linoleum floor, and tells her it is okay.

“It really is.”

“It’s not,” Yasha insists. “You’re always there. And I want…I wanted to see you. You would be so shiny up there.”

“I’ll bring my polaroid. Jess will take pictures. I’ll feel your love, okay? You’ll feel the shine. Just get better.”

The presentation takes place during the lunch hour in Dana Auditorium. There are approximately twenty faculty members and fifteen students. Jess is front row, and Sober Stan holds the polaroid camera. Kitty enters through the side door after wiping her pits with paper towels in the bathroom and climbs the stage. In her long black choir dress and Mary Janes, she resembles a goth Dolly Parton. They’ve left the back doors open for any stragglers or interested passerbys, and the spatter of applause leaks out.

“T-Thank you. I’m Kitty Davidson, and I’m really honored to be here today talking with you all about my thesis. It’s called Letters—obvious, I know,” she quips, pausing for laughter, which is obliged, “and it’s a short story about a relationship told through both physical letters and emails. I’m going to just start by reading a small portion.”

Kitty turns to the marked poem in her manuscript, pauses, and flips back a few pages. Letter #42 whimpers and arches into her mouth. It is made for reading. “Dear dear,” she begins. Nothing has ever felt more natural. A hush grips the room. Towards the end, during a part she has read over so many times in her notebook and on computers and slashed with her professor’s red pen that it’s etched in her heart, she chances a look up. The faculty ranges from invested to half-asleep. Her peers are undoubtedly cataloguing her mistakes and thinking of how they could’ve written it neater. More bravado. More punch. Jess shoots her a thumbs up. Sober Stan pounces on this opportunity for picture taking.

So it is in the aftermath of the flash, with white still rolling across the backs of her eyes, that Kitty sees Yasha. She’s leaning against the doorframe with her Pokémon blanket wrapped like a cocoon, and the “P” is situated on her left hip, where Kitty liked to bite down. Kitty cannot stop reading, cannot stop the personal biographical details that Yasha spoon-fed her from spilling out. Yasha adjusts her neck, like she has a crick, and Kitty knows it is done. The applause at the end of the reading cannot rouse her, nor can the questions. Yasha raises her hand, and Kitty does not call on her. At 1:10, when those with afternoon classes have to go, the department chair leads them all in another big cheer. Kitty watches Yasha turn and step through the open door. She watches her go.