how i hope my email finds you

(Well, of course.)

‘All My Tears,’ from the series “Correspondence” using Silk, type, pearls, pins, and silk thread on envelope by Rita Bernstein (Source: Instagram)

If my email finds you at all, I hope you’re seated in your favourite corner of the couch in your living room, feet tucked away underneath your legs. I hope you’re caught by surprise—pleasantly, like finding spare change in your jeans—as you see your screen light up with my name. You must be slightly tired— enough to feel defeated and resign yourself to reaching for your device and touch me—my name— and read me. I presume you’re sitting there after a long day, slightly disheveled and mostly unraveled. I hope you’ve eaten, or are going to eat. I wonder whether you use your hands the same way. I wonder whether I will ever meet a man who peels an egg as gently and with as much grace as you did. I wonder whether you still do.

I hope that in the madness of your day, you’ve found some moments of calm while standing beside the coffee machine and watching it whirr and whizz, grind, and dispense, while you stare into the nothing surrounding it. If not then, then while ticking the tasks off of your to-do list and feeling a sense of lightness and a passage of air clearing up for you to breathe easily. I hope you found calm somehow, somewhere before I found you.

‘Why are we not talking’ from the series “Letters” using silk, type, silk thread, and collage on envelope by Rita Bernstein (Source: Instagram)

I suppose it’s late where you are when I find you (rather, when you find me). I could only imagine the moonlight trickling in through the window, illuminating your bed. I hope you’ve made your bed. I wonder whether the sheets are the same ones that I had picked out for you. I wonder whether you still remember when I sat there and talked for hours. I hope that the sounds from outside and the noises within are both at bay. I hope this email fell silently into your lap as a letter would through the crack of the door.

Is it the same door of the same house of the same neighbourhood where we took walks and shared fruit underneath the shade of a mango tree? Where, in that brief moment when I had lost sense of space or time and wandered into the shade with you, you caught that bit of fruit bursting between my teeth and trickling down my lips, and spread it against them with the tips of your fingers? I think about your hands and how they were made to hold. I think about how they held me. I hope this email finds you just the same.