Art: Nicola Lynch Morrin
“and all is Blue for a Time”

Sister, me again,

Proust is sweeping me away. He writes with no hint of a storyline; he just seems to write… life. And then suddenly he will interject these philosophies, paragraphs that jump out of the page as if meant for only my eyes, only my mind.

“In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever” (Pg 37).

I’m finding a lot of change in such a stagnant place. In myself. I’m lying in bed with beautiful things right now. I have Proust and your printed letters on my lap. It’s a sunny day outside that I can only observe from the small slit of a window behind me. But we make our own beauty in here. There’s an energy that exists between us as people, that I was vaguely aware of before this place, but it is stronger here, more prevalent because in here we need it, we need each other.

You asked me if I can imagine a time before regrets and failure, unkindness and loss and honestly, yes. Yes, I can… but it’s not a time before, it’s now. Proust says:

For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go beyond it, to reach the outside, with a sort of discouragement as we hear around us always that same resonance, which is not an echo from outside but the resounding of an internal vibration (pg. 88).

I think the capacity for regret, failure, unkindness, and loss always lived inside of us, it never didn’t exist. I think because of that it is possible to find, also within us, the capacity to exist autonomously from it. It’s so easy to find gratitude when deprived of the things we think we need. It’s hard to regret when you’re grateful to be where you are. It’s easy to be grateful for where you are when you know things can always get worse, when you’ve experienced the worst things.

Art: Delaney Accomando
“Equity”

I’m glad I never became monstrous to you. I was too distorted to become monstrous to myself. I think that’s what makes us so important to each other; no matter how much we change separately from one another we have always known the base of each other, in a way that no one else has or will ever be able to. When we see each other, we recognize ourselves as we were before, and even if we won’t ever be as we were before again, it’s a comfort to be reminded it was real and know someone else knows it too. “The souls of those we have lost are held captive…effectively lost to us until the day which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close… come into possession of the object that is their prison” (pg. 44). I know he’s speaking of death but the more I believe that we are transient beings made of more than just matter, the more I believe we are self-imprisoned.

It’s Father’s Day, I can’t help but think of Daddy and his own self-imprisonment. I often wonder if he found freedom in death or if he only traded one captivity for another? I told you of my friend a few years ago who contacted me, unknowingly, on the anniversary of Daddy’s death to ask if anyone had ever died in our house? He said that the new owners had a “haunting” going on, and it killed me to think it was Daddy stuck there waiting for us to come home. But I wonder if maybe, once we are all together again, he will know it and won’t have to wait any longer.

Every night before I go to sleep, I remind myself of three things I am grateful for. Sometimes they are small and silly, sometimes they are the big ones. Every day I try and find something beautiful. You and Sky should do it with me too, and then we can tell each other all the beautiful things that the world has shared with us.

Love you always and always will,

B.