These Battleships Never Sink

Dear K,

Have you noticed how dramatic we've allowed ourselves to become? I suppose you have cause to be dramatic, being in love and in the hospital. That's fair I suppose. We write our letters though as if we were fighting in a great war. They are communications sent from a sinking battleship, or a city under siege.

I suppose we've been at war though. Life is a great struggle. Or anyway it seems like one when you end your adolescence.

What happens when the war never ends though? If the battleship never sinks, but just sits there half in the water? Or the armies never leave the field. People will go on with their lives. They'll ask the soldiers how the war is going, but still they will bake bread, and make soup, and gather crops, and have sex, and make children. If the siege never lifts it stops being a siege and simply becomes life. Soon everyone forgets why the siege began, and only that it is the way of the world, and the siege must happen.

But here we are, all grown up. Out there in the world, and I think we've found out that the war is not ending. The war isn't going away. The struggle won't end, because it is simply life, and life goes on and on.

Have you ever gone on a long run or hike? You follow a trail, and you've got this goal to get to the end. The whole time you are running along you say to yourself that this trail or road will never end, and the sun is shining and beating you down. You are covered in sweat, and tired and sick from the exhaustion, but because you have told yourself you will, you keep running to the end of the damn eternal road, it stretches on for miles and miles, it could be a hundred miles, it could be a thousand miles, but you keep going.

Then finally, finally you reach the end of the pavement. You reach the end of the trail, and you stop, breathe, and maybe sit and have a drink of water, and it occurs to you that you could run the whole thing again.

I think that is like life. I think that is what dying will be like. And I know it is what living is like.


You're city is under siege, and I hope the siege never ends,

All My Love,
K