Unsent Letters #37

Dear B.,

These days I have little time to write and, perhaps more importantly, to read. So I’ll be brief. I wanted to tell you that we’re selling the big red family house. You spent time there years ago, remember? We went every weekend, almost. At some point we had even contemplated leaving the city and moving down there, hundreds of kilometers south, where we would transform our lives. For the better? I don’t know. We discussed pros and cons late into the night, and in the end nothing happened. Then I got into that great school in America and left the country, and you stayed, and a new chapter started, and our thing sort of tapered off naturally. And neither of us really suffered each other’s loss. Maybe it’s good that things went the way they did.

But anyway, we’re selling the big red family house, with its mirrors and travertine, and the belvedere, and its secure tranquility, and the distant, muffled laughter of whoever walked in the woods, and the sky above. We’re taking the memories and leaving behind their backdrop, ready to build new ones.

Certain nights were strange nights, in the big red house. And the strangest thing about those strange nights was that we could feel them coming. We would go about our days -- walk our walks, read our books, cook our meals, write our pages, have our teas, make the occasional telephone call -- knowing that within a few hours, occurrences would take place. Occurrences that most people could easily define as otherworldly, eerie perhaps, mysterious. Well, most people is an understatement, as I’d dare anyone belonging to the human race to deem them normal. But then again, statistics aside, normal is a construct born of the laziness of the human mind.

I remember when you made me notice the white light for the first time. Do you see what I see, you asked. It was the middle of the night, and I was as sound asleep as I ever was when I slept in the house. You reached out and shook my arm as discreetly as possible, without moving any other part of your body, as if fearing that whatever was hanging over our bed might suddenly disappear, and whispered the words: Do you see what I see? I remember that it took my vision a while to adjust and focus on the object, and that I was about to dismiss it as some weird light filtering in through the shutters before rolling over and going back to sleep. But the big red house lies in the middle of nowhere, deep in the countryside, and there was no weird light outside. Plus, it was a moonless night. And even if someone had used a powerful torch to illuminate our windows from outside, there was no way in the world that its beam could form a cloud of white, glowing light -- pulsating at the center, vaporous at the edges -- almost as large as, and positioned directly above, our bed. So I started to pay attention -- immobile, breathing as imperceptibly as possible, eyes wide open, staring at the thing.

But we weren’t scared, remember? Whatever that thing was, it didn’t produce the smallest hint of fear in us. It felt as if something had come to visit us from somewhere, doing all it could to make us feel at ease, to not appear intrusive. Something was observing us, and we were observing it back, with the minor yet crucial difference that it probably knew what it was observing, whereas we didn’t. Ours was the demeanor of those who don’t want to disturb, more than anything else. Disturb who, or what? I remember you asking, when we had discussed this the morning after and I had brought up the same thoughts. I don’t know, I had answered then, as I would now. But that was the way it felt. The only certainty I had was that it felt like a benign presence.

Some days, there was a scent in the air. Something blueish, sweet and ethereal which, with time, we learned to recognize as the announcement of those nocturnal occurrences. As if the white light filled the daytime air with a message -- I am returning tonight. And sure enough, when we detected that scent, it did return. Then, at some point -- I think it was around the spring of nineteen-ninety or ninety-one -- it stopped.

After almost thirty-five years, now that we are about to move out and the house is full of boxes, last night it happened again. The same cloud of white glowing light appeared, pulsating in the center and vaporous at the edges, in the blackness of my bedroom. Almost as if someone, the orchestrator of these occurrences, wanted to give us -- me, really -- one final showing. It was around four in the morning, and no one was there to reach out and give me a discreet shake, but my eyes opened on their own. I felt warm, secure, protected. And I thought of you -- that I hadn’t seen or heard from you in more than three decades.

These days I have little time to write and, perhaps more importantly, to read. But I thought I’d reach out, anyway.

Briefly.

"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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