First Subscriber

Anna’s letter caught me unprepared. Specific and unsolicited—she’d been reading for years, she said, was my first subscriber and never stopped. The posts where I’d written about failing, about confusion, about things falling apart and then not falling apart—they’d actually reached her. At moments when she needed proof that someone else was lost too.

She cried when she read about Mona. That one still gets people. Laughed at the jokes. Felt less alone reading someone’s unfiltered thoughts about difficulty and stumbling through. And then she wrote to tell me that it had mattered, knowing she didn’t have to, that no one asks for that kind of letter.

Mail like that is hard to know how to take. It’s not quite praise. Someone saying what you wrote helped me, not because they’re performing gratitude but because they just wanted to say it. The difference is subtle but it lands heavier.

The whole reason to write anything is probably this: that it’ll reach someone at the exact moment they need it. That possibility is abstract, theoretical, something you do without proof. Proof is rarer and weirder than you’d expect.