I finally figured out why I’m a writer and it’s the simplest reason, but I never knew the right words to explain it until a few days ago.
I recently came upon a clip of a Susan Sarandon movie1 where she asks Richard Gere why he thinks people get married. He says something glib about passion, and hopeless romanticism, but she cuts him off. “No,” she says. “It’s so that we can have a witness, to everything we do and everything we go through.”
I started writing letters during the early months of 2021 as a way to circumvent the isolating effects of the pandemic. Ohio gets dark in the winter and spring; I saw more sun during my semester abroad in Scotland than I ever did in all three springs I spent in Ohio combined. The cold crawls up your nose and sinks straight into your bloodstream where it lingers until well after the crocuses bloom. I did my best to keep my dorm room bright and warm, but only two of my classes were in-person and the cafeteria was closed to sit-in dining more often than not. My closest—and much of the time, only—company was my own reflection, and there were only so many colors I could dye my hair to keep that relationship interesting. Writing letters was my safest idea for adding another illusion of social interaction into my day, and I already had the stamps and some crayons. I sent out a call over social media for addresses and heard back from people I hadn’t talked to in years, all eager for something happy during those horrible gray months. I wrote to them on canary-yellow legal paper, the same kind my father uses to draft his poems, and drew pictures on every envelope before sending it off. It was simple, cheap, and guaranteed to inject a little good into the world. For a while there I was writing ten to fifteen letters a week.
This project gave me an excuse to check my PO box and call it an adventure. Walking to the post office was a safe little excursion, because I went at night, often on my way home from the dining hall while carrying a rapidly cooling box of fried mac ‘n cheese bites and Bosco sticks. The building would be empty and always smelled sweet like paper and tarnishing metal. If I thought hard enough about it, I could remember even now the number of my PO box, but I used to find it by muscle memory and unlock it with a key so old it was almost smooth. Rarely was there anything in it, but I’d drop off however many letters I’d managed to write that day and walk home with my mask frozen against my cheeks and my eyes on Orion overhead, happy to have a reason to be outside of my room.
With each letter I wrote, I invited someone new to come sit with me in the midst of isolation. For the thirty minutes to an hour that it took for me to write each letter, I had someone to tell about the weather and my classes and whatever knitting project was currently rubbing callouses into my fingertips. After hours of zoom meetings and leaving TV shows on in the background to cut the quiet, the presence of an audience to my inner monologue was a decided relief.
I reached for a witness every time I put pen to paper. I wanted someone to see me as I walked home taking small steps with my headphones in and one hand reaching to feel the leaves on the bushes I passed. I wanted someone else to notice what I was hanging up on my wall, how the sky looked through my window, which sink I stood at to brush my teeth. In a very human way, I wanted to be known for the smallness of my life, rather than the larger parts. The mundane is more intimate, and was what I felt an intrinsic need to have someone see.
The library processes people in the most rudimentary and ordinary moments of their days. Of course, we do see people in the extraordinary times, usually on the negative end of the spectrum, and we do our best to assist and assuage the horror that pours from their wide eyes and taught hands. Just today I helped a woman make some copies and had to pull a chair over to the machine so that she could sit, because she was only two days out from a heart attack and was struggling to stay upright. But 75% of a librarian’s day is (thankfully) pointing people towards the restroom, or telling them which floor their book is on, or scaring stubborn books off the shelves when they hide from our patrons. A few times a week I do the Pick List, which consists of my printing out a list of what books people have put on hold from our department and walking between the stacks with a book cart to gather all of them up. I listen to music and walk slow so I can explore our collection and take pictures of books I want to read some day. I love it for how slow and ordinary it is, despite every day carrying some small adventure. I love the regularity and routine. I love that the letter U is so close to the end of the alphabet, which I never really realized or thought about until I took this job. I love paying witness to people in their ordinary moments. It feels religious to me, ordained and right. I like being able to do for people what I once needed for myself.
It’s a symptom of adulthood that I wait until the third or fifth date (odd numbers feel safer, don’t ask me why) to start introducing any deeper truths about myself. By the time I’m 26 I’m sure I’ll be waiting for the seventh or eighth. Measuring someone by their reaction to a true library story isn’t the same as measuring their reaction to True Facts: Emmaline’s Shower Thoughts, Special Edition. If someone doesn’t react well to my telling them about some kids asking us for food or about a man having a mental health episode and making threatening comments to my coworker, they’re easy to extricate from my life (and this is often a test I give before agreeing to meet someone in person). But it’s harder to rid myself of someone who has laid eyes on parts of me that are genuine and in earnest. I’ll catch myself having conversations with the people who have seen that far into me when I’m alone in the car, or imagining their reaction to my music, or thinking about how I’d arrange my body around theirs if we were sitting on the couch talking about our days. This is true even when I don’t want that person in my life anymore and have no urge to reach out to them. They still live with me for a little while, sometimes a longer while, watching as I grow out of who they knew me to be. I rely on them paying witness, long after I have relinquished them to a life separate from mine.
I have always wanted a witness. Susan Sarandon was right, it is a stubborn reality of the human experience that we are always looking for someone who sees and recognizes the small ways in which we fight to live a life we can love. The need for a witness brought me a sense of incurable loneliness from an early age, it brought me deep into the heart of the Church, it tormented me throughout the pandemic, and it has always been what has caused me to pick up a pen. I never knew its name, but that’s what it is. I write to invite some foreign eye into the intricacies of my mind that I cannot bear to imagine going unnoticed.
My next book will likely be about a woman, my age, who spends her days like I do, noticing the people who come into the library looking—sometimes asking—for a witness. She will catalogue them away like I do, only her created worlds will fit into shoeboxes rather than notebooks. I will press my early twenties into the pages like the flowers I’ve kept from every important bouquet and field I’ve passed, and that will be how I honor those nights spent walking in the cold talking to Orion with a letter in my pocket.
If you or a friend needs a letter, I’m still writing them. Not at the same rate or regularity as I was, but when it’s quiet at the library, I’ll pull out the stationary and my stubby crayons and tell someone about my day. Just to keep my hand in the game. And to have a reason to walk down the driveway on nice nights to check the mailbox and catch up with the stars.
Writing Update: I showed a writerly coworker of mine the chicken-scratch mess of edits I’ve been making on paper and they said, “It takes a while to develop enough psychoses to edit like that, I’m impressed.” Hopefully the next draft will be better.
Current Read: inching (millimetering?) my way through East of Eden. Positively champing at the bit to get to Sally Rooney’s Normal People next. It’s time.
Shall We Dance, with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez.
This is gorgeous.