My Dear Mr. Kappus:

Much time has passed since I have written you a proper letter–certainly not since we started this experiment could a typed note from me rightly assume that title. I’ll blame the medium in part: typing is too immediate at times. Knowing that I can edit and endlessly revise a thought to another person –and, in this case, even after it’s been published–makes everything a little lighter, maybe facilitates triviality (and not inevitably or necessarily. I’m simply speculating on this as a case).

The pen is heavier, does not erase, revises in ways that make visible hasty inaccuracies and so requires a slower pace to effect linguistic precision–at least if maintaining the aesthetic of a letter is also a desired end aside from what it might actually say.

But, medium aside, I am equally at fault.

In the large group lecture last Tuesday, the Dean of the Honors College delivered the lecture to all the first year students. He spoke on the purposes of the university and what it means to be an educated person and read, at one point, from Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” This:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same with the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

A few days later, I stood in front of the same group of students paying lip-service to a message about intentionality in action and education. Lecturing like that nauseates me; I’ve already put a chunk of it out of my mind. But in general, I was urging them to reflect on what it means to be an educated person and how <and whether> going to college achieves that end.

In these tea leaves of my life, I read my own need to slow down in order to be more intentional and precise. So I write to you now with pen in hand rather than keys under finger.

That was a necessary detour, but my primary concern in writing you is to address the topic of friendship.

Before we got married, Dave said to us that couples have the same handful of fights–maybe even the same one fight–over and over. I sometimes think of this as the same set of characters wearing different costumes.

For us now, I wonder if our one fight is over friendship–our friendship, or the lack thereof. Are we friends?

The answer, for me, has been uncomplicated and automatic–yes, of course–such that when people ask me how we operate like we do, I pull from the script that says “We’ve been friends since we were ‘kids.’”

But the past does not exist for you like for me; it dissolved when our marriage did. You’ve told me that, anyway. As if we started from scratch a few years ago, neither of us drawing on a persoal history that the other was a part of. This is your part of the script from the recurrent friendship fight.

I wouldn’t’ve brought it up. I don’t ever. That’s at least partially because the conversation inevitably implies or directly states that you do not like me (in the way that Olive might say this to another child on the playground). And, in return, I marshal evidence to call your bluff or convince you otherwise. It’s a rather awful and personally humiliating role to play. So I choose, instead, to believe you maintain a higher regard for me.

But it never goes away, this debate. It occupied most of ex-night last week.

You asked me, “Why are we friends?” or “What do friends do?” or some other question that was really the overlap of those two. I took you as asking me for a definition. I took you to mean that there must be something in common, some shared quality among all those you’d call “friend.”

Even though I balked at the question(s), suspecting you were trying to lead me into a debate-style sneak attack, I have since been searching for a common thread beyond “mutual affinity,” which was the commondenominator that occurred to me at the time.

I thought, today, of friendship as comfort, as ease. A lack of pretension. I was thinking of you and mom, actually–of how I automatically do not think of ‘how to be’ in the presence of either of you; I just am. And later, of crying–how I cry only in front of her or you and not as a matter of design or preference. (I’d rather cry less in front of you, frankly. I used to manage that just fine.)

But I realized that those were family sentiments–unguarded comfort, assumed acceptance, plain-faced pain.

It wasn’t very long ago that I thought of what we do more squarely in those terms: we behave as a family working out a fractured fairy tale.There’s a level of closeness that we no longer breach, but a basic framework of support and interdependence remains. I still listed you as my emergency contact when Olive and I went on the cruise in June. You’re still among the first to know of major events in my life–vocationally and avocationally.

It’s a necessity in light of our parenting arrangement, sure. But the urge to share has roots in the unquestioned assumption that you occupy and will occupy a permanent place in my life–a member of my immediate family.

Can you do “family”? I would take “family” instead of, and perhaps over, “friend.” I suppose from what I’ve just said, that I already do. With family, you don’t have to constantly decide on the nature of the thing–hell, you can hate me more straightforwardly this way, if you like–you can just be.

“Family” would likewise alleviate concerns over meeting either set of our criteria for friendship–which, by the way, I’ve determined (for my part) are these: (1) shared meaning and (2) the desire to foster it. At this juncture, I understand you to eschew both.  I cannot, it seems, count on your reading of my letters or the desire to do so and may write into a vacuum indefinitely. Perhaps that’s another matter.

Over the last 14 years or so, we’ve made a series of choices accumulating to our present circumstances. But god knows, at the outset, neither of us would’ve chosen to be stuck to the other’s life in the way we are now. But we are here still–related without will, a family tie that just is that way.

Love, ash