Letters to Sophie by Hailey Reissman
Dear Sophie Kerr,
I imagine you beautiful. You are a woman in a café with a long, thick neck and a wide-brimmed hat, one of those women whose epitomizes the quality of being there, who is elegant and beautiful and never makes apologies for themselves. You are the woman I long to be, the grownup with temperance, grace, intelligence. You dress in long dresses speckled with bright, oversized prints, whose flowing hems almost graze your ankles. You have a voice that will momentarily lilt in the middle of a sentence, silencing all other things. This is a power you reserve, because you understand it. You leave your silverware crossed in a small X on your napkin. You watch, contented by the lives of others.
Dear Sophie Kerr,
What I like about the Eastern Shore is the birds. In spring, young hawks circle the red-bricked college, teetering and swooping in smooth streams of movement, long, feathered pendulums constantly balancing against some changing wind.
Then there are the small birds; the ones that chatter and have fanned tails that part from their bodies with the curve of the space between a frog’s legs, with the texture of small, sand-beat scallop shells. They leave wispy clumps of feathers that blow across the cement outside my front door and I imagine smell animal and strange.
Dear Sophie Kerr,
Did you ever sit at your desk, looking at the same green-patterned grass of Maryland that I can see now, and fear for everything you wrote? Did this feeling ever stay with you through the night, biting through your blankets?
Did you ever want to write something so badly that you couldn’t get out? Did you cry at small things, like the shake of weeds in the wind or a small gathering of freshly-born birds? When people published your stories, did things change? Did you feel validated or disappointed or simply nothing at all? Did you talk with hours with acquaintances about the parts of life most misunderstood? Did you eat with your napkin tucked in your collar or spread across your legs?
Dear Sophie Kerr,
Why this gift? Why us?
Dear Sophie Kerr,
I wonder if you’d like me. I imagine you in a dark-wood house with red-and-orange rugs and many paintings; I imagine sitting with you. You read a draft and you mark it up with slant, black handwriting. You are generous with your advice and your company and your conversation. In the minutes with you in your house I am given the great strength of being understood.
Dear Sophie Kerr,
Did you ride the subway at night? Did you drink whiskey? Did you miss Maryland? Did you sit by the Hudson and watch boats pass? Did you ever wish you were someone else? Could you feel stories the same way you feel a jacket against the skin? Did your memories ever get so bleary that you just weren’t sure who you were?
Dear Sophie Kerr,
What comes next?
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