The Letter She Didn’t Have to Write

A reader named Anna sent me a letter. She’d been following this journal for years—I was first in her feed reader, she said, and had stayed there. She wrote that my writing had helped her through situations she’d been close to failing, that sentences I’d thrown out had drilled into her brain and done something useful. She cried when I wrote about Mona’s death. Bitterly, she said.

You write into apparent silence for long enough that this kind of thing genuinely knocks you sideways. She called me her number one. Told me to keep living life the way I see fit, because that’s how you get it right. I don’t know what to say to that, which almost never happens.

Sorry for making you cry, Anna. I’m an ass, and apparently a forgiven one. The letter means more than I can make sound not stupid.