The Best Letter I Never Received: Whiti Hereaka

This letter was commissioned by Verb for Verb Festival’s showcase event on Friday 6 November 2020 at National Library of New Zealand.

Whiti,

Must I write the words plainly for you? You know how I like to hide in my sentences, how I like to make my meaning opaque. And if I leave everything unsaid then I have … what was the phrase you used? Plausible deniability. 

I should have said this to you in person the last time I saw you instead of the vague promise that we’d keep in touch. You had a flight to catch, but really it was me who was leaving.

This isn’t the first letter I’ve written to you to say this — it is the latest of many. Most I have composed in my head; it has taken a long time to commit to the words. I wasn’t ready to give up the idea of you. Sometimes, I like to imagine you frozen in time — perhaps in one of those loops you’re so fond of. That when I was ready, I could come back into your life like I hadn’t left at all.

Will I send this letter? I don’t know. I’ve lived with the burden of these words for far too long, but it does seem cruel of me to expect you to read them. If you don’t hate me now, perhaps you will if I send you this letter.

Perhaps, then, I will let the letter decompose itself in my pocket or bag — each word tearing itself away from the whole to be free of the burden of my meaning: the weight of it is unbearable. 

It’s so quiet without the noise of you in my head. You took up too much space.

In the quiet, in the vast openness you’ve left I decided to plant a forest, which is to say that I am writing again. 

Do you remember that dream you told me about? (You shouldn’t tell people your dreams by the way, other people’s dreams are insufferably boring and writers, well, we’ll just steal them) The one where we were walking in a forest at night and we were talking and you felt safe for once. The only thing you were afraid of was that the conversation and forest might thin and eventually end. 

And then, much later at the gallery when we were walking through that room of projected water colours and you gasped and said: “This is it. This is the forest I dreamt.” And the look on your face — dappled in yellows and blues — it was a look of wonder and, I have no better word for it, accomplishment. Because it was like you had willed it to be. That you were even there with me was impossible, and I got caught up in the impossibility of it with you. For a moment I thought that perhaps you could bend this world to your liking.

I’m sorry to be the one to contradict you. 

When I’m writing, sometimes I imagine you reading it. It is like talking to you without actually talking to you. I imagine that perhaps one day you’ll walk in the forest that I’m creating. I hope that you will gasp in wonder and astonishment at what I’ve accomplished. I wish I could see your face. Although I’ll be there in every needle, lichen; in the very leaf mould — I won’t walk with you in that forest. You need to walk alone.

I’ve stretched that metaphor too far, and now I sound like an inspirational quote.

I ought to send this letter to you. Would you read it if I did? I think too much time has passed between us now. 

But did you mean what you said: that you’d always be in my life? I hope you did. Although, it is unfair of me to hold you to your promises when I can’t hold to mine. 

Perhaps you are reading this when we are both very old. Would I still be welcome then? Thirty, forty years from now and I still imagine you waiting for me. 

Perhaps this was sent to you as my dying wish. But could I be that monstrous? To drop myself back into your life as I leave this reality? 

You asked me how many times a heart can be broken, and I have an answer for you: hundreds of times — thousands, hundreds of thousands. And still it will beat on. 

If we were in the same room, sitting across from one another, this is where you’d try to catch me out. It’s the lawyer in you I suppose, trying to find a loophole, forever playing devil’s advocate. 

“Ah ha!”  you’d say perhaps with your drink in hand gesturing wildly, “But it would callous over, it would be strangled by its own scar tissue.”  

And I would lean in closer to you and say “Only if you let it.”  And you would lift your eyebrows and drink to me, you are a sucker for a pithy line. But I think that it is true. Think of it this way: each time it is broken, your heart opens up a little more. Your love is not diminished into fractions — it becomes fractal: self-similar, infinitely complex. 

I know this because each of these words breaks my heart.

You asked me to break your heart. And I have, and so I will again. 

Goodbye.