The Letter I Never Sent

My friend's name is Maria. We met at school. I miss her because she is in another city. I want to say 'hello, I think about you'.

Two years ago, I wanted to send a message to my old classmate. We were good friends, but after school we did not talk. I started to write 'Hi, how are you?' on my phone many times, but I always deleted it. I was afraid he would not remember me, or that he would not answer. Now I think I should have sent it. The next time I think of an old friend, I will try to send a short message. It is only a few words, but it could make a big difference.

When my grandmother was in hospital, the doctors told us she had only a few weeks left. I went to see her almost every day. I wanted to say thank you for everything — for the lunches she made me, for the stories she told, for the way she always made me feel I was enough.

But every time I sat next to her bed, the words got stuck in my throat. I was afraid that if I said it, she would understand why I was saying it. I didn't want her to feel that we were saying goodbye. So I talked about small things — the weather, my work, the family. We laughed together, and she patted my hand.

She died in March. I think about it now and I'm not sure I was wrong. Maybe she already knew everything I wanted to say. Maybe small talk was its own way of saying it. But sometimes, late at night, I wish I had been just a little braver.

Six months ago, I almost asked my father about something he had said to me when I was twelve. It was a small comment, made in passing, that I had carried with me for nearly thirty years without ever bringing it up. I had a coffee with him last spring, and the question was sitting on the edge of my mouth for about an hour. In the end, I let him talk about the football, and I said nothing.

When I'm being generous with myself, I tell myself this was the right call. He's seventy-eight. He almost certainly doesn't remember the comment. Forcing him to revisit something he said in a difficult year of his own life, just so I could close a small private wound of mine, would be a kind of selfishness disguised as honesty. He's earned his peace. Why disturb it?

When I'm being less generous, I notice that this is also exactly the argument I would make if I were simply afraid of his answer. Maybe he does remember. Maybe a quiet conversation would have given us both something. Maybe my generosity was just a more comfortable name for cowardice.

I haven't asked him. I probably won't. I'm not entirely sure whether the right word for that is wisdom or convenience, and at this stage I don't think I'm going to find out.

I have, on my phone, the unfinished draft of an email to a former colleague who once gave me a small but pointed piece of negative feedback that I have, somewhat predictably, never quite recovered from. The feedback was, I am now almost certain, accurate. It described a tendency I have spent the intervening four years half-noticing in myself, occasionally trying to correct, and more often quietly justifying. The colleague has, in the meantime, moved to another country and almost certainly forgotten the conversation entirely.

The email began as a thank-you. I wanted to tell her, with the modest seriousness the moment seemed to deserve, that her feedback had been useful — more useful, in fact, than she could have known, and more useful, possibly, than I had been brave enough to admit at the time. I wrote three short paragraphs and then stopped. The draft has been sitting there ever since.

When I am being charitable with myself, I tell myself that the email would be a strange thing for her to receive. She made an offhand comment in a meeting four years ago. To send her, now, an unsolicited reflection on it would be — I am persuaded, much of the time — a kind of imposition: a request for closure on a conversation she does not know is unfinished.

When I am being less charitable, I notice that this argument also conveniently spares me from doing something publicly courageous. Sending the email would be, in some small way, on the record. Not sending it preserves a comfortable ambiguity in which I get to feel that I have learned something without ever having to say so.

I suspect both things are true. I suspect I will not send it. I am increasingly aware that the fact that I will not send it is, like the fact of not making a great many other small calls, no longer just a procedural detail. It has become, gradually, a feature of how I move through professional life — and I am not entirely certain I am a better person for it.

I cannot, at this stage, tell whether what I have just written is a piece of self-knowledge or a piece of literary self-decoration. Probably it is both. That itself is a thought I have been having more and more often lately, about increasing portions of what I do.

I have, for several years now, been not quite finishing books.

I do not mean the obvious not-finishing — the holiday novel abandoned at page forty, the gift still on the shelf, the worthy biography that defeated me in chapter three. I mean a more particular pattern. I get to within fifty pages of the end of a great many books I have very much enjoyed — books I have spent weeks with, recommended to friends, made notes in — and then, without much ceremony, I find that I do not, in fact, read those last fifty pages. The book is left on the bedside table for several weeks. It is moved, eventually, to the shelf. The bookmark stays where it was. I file the book mentally as 'read', and there is a sense, somewhere underneath the filing, in which I know perfectly well that I have not.

When I am being kind to myself about this, I tell myself that endings are often the weakest part of books, that what I love about a book is rarely concentrated in its final movement, and that a great many writers, having done their best work in the middle, decline gracefully toward their conclusions. There is some truth in all of this, and I have, on occasion, used it to give what I hope was a half-creditable account of books I had not, strictly speaking, finished. I am almost certainly not the only literate adult who has done this. I am, perhaps, slightly less repentant about it than the average.

When I am being less kind to myself, I notice that this argument also conveniently spares me from a thing I find quietly difficult, which is the moment of finishing — the closing of a book that has, for some weeks, been a small private companion, and the small accompanying obligation to register what one feels about its ending. To finish a book is to be required to have a view of it. To leave it forty pages from the end is to keep the book, in some sense, open: still in process, still companionable, still mine to think about without having to commit to anything in particular about its conclusion.

I have begun to suspect, with the faintly embarrassed recognition that small private patterns sometimes generalise alarmingly, that this is also approximately how I do a great many other things. I do not, on the whole, finish difficult conversations; I leave them at a tactful conclusion that is not, in fact, a conclusion. I do not, by and large, complete the small administrative tasks attached to closing things — the final email, the formal goodbye, the explicit thank-you. I file these mentally as 'done', much as I file the books, and there is a sense, again, in which I know perfectly well I have not done them.

I am not, I think, particularly cowardly about this. The avoidance is not dramatic. It is something subtler and more stubborn: a quiet preference for keeping things open, for resisting the small definite act that closes them. I am not entirely sure where the preference comes from. I suspect it has something to do with being slightly afraid of how I might feel afterwards — of the small flatness that follows the proper ending, the closure that turns out to be smaller than the open thing was. As long as the book is open, I am still inside it. As long as the conversation is unfinished, the relationship is still in motion. Closure has a way of fixing things in place, and I find, when I look at it directly, that I prefer my things slightly unfixed.

This is, I am aware, a small failure. It is not the kind that anyone is going to notice; my unfinished books cause no harm, and my politely unconcluded conversations are usually received as conversations that just happened to fade. But I have come to think that small failures of this shape are, cumulatively, more revealing of a person than larger ones — which tend to be visible, and therefore correctable. The small ones go on, undisturbed, for years, while we tell ourselves we have not yet quite gotten round to them. I suspect that I have not, in any meaningful sense, gotten round to a great many of mine. I suspect, too, that I am, by now, the kind of person who is unlikely to.