Dear RC,
I haven’t mailed a handwritten letter in what seems like ages; it feels silly and futile these days. I’m not sure I even have any stamps now that the last of my bills are on automatic payment, and to tell the truth I don’t know how much it costs to send a letter in the mail now. Did you know in elementary school I was something of a philatelist? I suppose I could unearth my old collection of international stamps from the bottom of a box of my childhood belongings my mom brought to me when she was cleaning out our old house. They’ve got to be worth something—at least as much as it costs to send a letter. So, why am I writing to you when I could text, call, send an Instagram reel? In short because it’s raining this morning, which is unusual here, and I’ve just started my cup of coffee and I’m feeling pensive.
I’m thinking about the aurora borealis, a phenomenon I’d wanted to see my whole life, a “bucket list” item, as they say, which, ironically, I saw for the first time last week this far south in my own backyard in Albuquerque against the backdrop of the Sandia mountains. It’s hard to get excited about anything these days—you know what I mean by that—but I’ll admit the northern lights restored some little feeling of wonder. Those broad curtains of silently roaring magenta were evocative of the ghosts of Mars. I could try to wax poetic about the experience of seeing the high-altitude desert version of the aurora at the risk of cheapening it. I could come up with something about how the world looks through my brilliant eyes, a celestial event as I see it and what it means to me, as if anyone gives a quarter of a fuck.
But I am reminded of another instance in history where the aurora was seen at a rare latitude, and that was at the Battle of Fredericksburg in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War. Following a brutal defeat by the Confederate army, Union soldiers took stock of what remained in the denouement of battle on a cold December night amongst their dead and dying and above them the northern lights beckoned like an indifferent sign from the heavens. It seemed they were losing the war in general at that time. It must have felt hopeless to push on through in light of it all, with no way of knowing which direction things were going to take. And I wonder what it was like to observe solar particles dancing across the sky in a grand display, ignorant of the science behind it, all the while dying from being ripped apart by a cannonball, the great loneliness closing in. One can only imagine.
Well, my last sip of coffee has turned cold and dissatisfying (I keep forgetting to use the app-controlled mug that keeps liquids hot that I received as a gift last Christmas) and I’ve got an uninspiring breakfast to eat, e-mails to send, Zoom meetings to sleepwalk through. I’ll probably send you a text message before the day is over, one that is unrelated to this letter. Just a means to connect with someone, which is getting harder and harder. We’ll probably have several text message conversations before this letter reaches you. This will be a surprise, then—a sort of cannonball. A reminder that the physical world still exists.
Sincerely,
ESK
P.S. I wrote this in the Notes app on my iPhone.
Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared in Unlikely Stories, Whiskey Tit, Maudlin House, Carmen et Error, HAD, and Bending Genres, among other places. His writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. You can connect with him on Instagram @the_hanta or read more at www.eliotsku.com