Eight small love letters

from me to you

After I had taught you German for a semester, you gave me a lime with your phone number written on it — a pick-up lime — and asked me out for ice cream. You were my best student and all this time you hadn’t really been interested in German. I thought of you sitting through the last class with the lime in your bag. I thought of the intimacy of teaching: the knowledge passing from one person to another, the time spent, the giving of it. Your hands were shaking very privately at your sides when I fumbled something about a boyfriend. It is a response I have always regretted for its smallness.

/

You and I go to the mall. I fall in love with a huge, soft scarf I cannot afford, and you say yes, it is very nice, and we go home. The next month I find a job and with my first paycheck I buy the scarf — but two days later, an identical scarf arrives in the post: you have bought it for me, you who don’t believe in buying things for your adult children, especially me, whom you sometimes don’t like. The debt I owe you, a whole life long, grows heavier still, but I’m glad you are my mother.

/

You sit on my bed and cry and cry, and afterwards you go off into the dark and I can’t go with you. You hurt all the time and insist you’ve lost yourself; can’t remember joy; think you’re boring me. But I remember when we took that class together on the Pre-Raphaelites, and you gasped when they put Millais’ Ophelia on the screen. I remember spending an hour wandering a single street in Vienna because you wanted to look at every building; and eating birthday cake with you under a thousand dreaming magnolias; and walking the waterfront until I couldn’t feel my feet, just to hear your next thought. Did you know about the crease that appears between your eyebrows when you think I’m wrong but are hearing me out? You could never bore me. I could never love you less.

/

You knock on my door and ask me what it means when a boy says see you soon. Does it really mean he’ll see you soon? you want to know. I love you unimaginably in this moment, my flatmate for whom English is a fourth language, your eyes so wondering as you ask me about the vernacular of hope. I have to tell you, I don’t know. I can help you decipher your lecturer’s cryptic scrawl, and I can explain what falafel is, and we don’t have to talk at all when we go walking through the University Parks — but boys have said see you soon to me, and sometimes I have seen then and sometimes I haven’t, and what exactly their words mean has never become less mysterious, in English or any other tongue.

/

You show me how to cut ginger into slim, precise batons. You slice the spring onions to match, then lift the flounder out of the steamer with silver tongs. You scatter the ginger and spring onions on top, gold and green, and douse them in soy and shimmering oil until the kitchen is impossibly fragrant. You watch the fish, with your face that has never frowned at me, and when I ask, how do you know it’s ready? you turn and say, because it’s ready!

/

You are talking about the new adaptation of Emma, which we agree is perfect. You are talking about the scene where Mr Knightley is struggling to tell Emma how he feels and she gets a nosebleed, which isn’t in the novel but we don’t care, we love the nosebleed in all its symbolism and silliness. You are talking about how Mr Knightley is so direct always, so sure of what he’s saying, and you say it’s beautiful, beautiful is the word you choose, to watch him struggle with his feelings. You laugh as you say this, my friend who knows all about love, who is not afraid to risk her feelings over and over for the potential of a connection she can’t yet imagine, and you are so beautiful yourself, I almost can’t breathe.

/

Remember when we went to Narrow Neck? You were wearing a pink and purple dress and silver sandals and you brought me a bunch of sunflowers. When we walked to your car our arms kept touching by accident and I was thinking about the sunflowers, so big and bright they promised a day without hurt. We drove over the Harbour Bridge with togs under our clothes and swam in the August water and shivered together in our towels. I kept wondering if you wanted me to kiss you. A couple came past walking a little dog and joked about our bravery. I didn’t think I wanted to kiss you but now I wonder whether I just wasn’t brave enough.

/

You hold my hand across all the fields in Oxford, where I go walking with my self-doubt. You hold my hand down Holywell Street and St Giles; under the greening trees, below the anxious spires; in the ice cream shop where I go after every hand-in, exhausted and fiendish for sugar; in the queue for third-rate coffee; in the rarefied transcription class I feel so stupid in. You look over my shoulder in the seminars where I am too afraid to say anything, and climb with me the stairs to the professor’s office where we talk about your work over too-weak tea, smiling your half-smile at the things we miss and put in. In the morning when I wake too early, heart racing at the thought of the dissertation I am sure I can’t write, you look with me at the deer behind Magdalen College, their antlers forking the light. They will be there forever, but I won’t, and you reach out of your novel and promise there is something else.