Letters Sent and Unsent Carmen Raillard
Dear –,
It is morning in Korea, and today is a beautiful fall day full of the pale sort of sunlight
that stretches over the hilltops softly. I’m on the high speed train from Gyeonju (경주) to
Seoul (서울). My mom is obsessed with Chinese historical dramas and she’s watching
her show on her iPad in the seat across from me. She’s kind of like my
Korean-American daughter; I keep our passports, I book the tickets, I recommend
where we should eat and shop, I speak to her in Korean and she responds in English.
One time I caused the upset of an argument over a mountainscape in Mexico I thought
didn’t particularly move me. Nothing could move me the way the mountains in Korea
could move me, watching the Pacific Ocean crash into the cliffside of the peninsula.
Life is more beautiful when it has meaning, and what could be more meaningful than to
look over some spot in the world and think there is a small piece of you lodged in the
bedrock there? The coffee I’m drinking tastes like its aluminum can. My mom said
yesterday that she thinks of all the identity I have, I am the most ardently Korean,
though everything I know about Korea has been something I have learned, not
something that was passed down to me. Strange. I find myself listening to your songs
quite often. I’m not sure why. I think I miss talking to you because you make me feel
like I’m probably not a bad person when we’re in conversation. Probably your superior
capacity for being a good listener and how I always envy the qualities in others I feel I
lack myself. I have this image in my mind where I’m about to fall asleep in my bed in
Brooklyn, tucked under the sheets, turned to the right and you’re at the other end ofthe mattress,
wearing jeans and a jacket, on the outside of the sheets, you even still have your sneakers on.
And we talk for a really long time and you tell me something very private which I keep
a good secret because I am the good listener this time. I’m very selfish to think things like this.
I wish our social circles weren’t so concentric, that we didn’t live in New York, which is the
worst place to think about your friend too often. I doubt I will ever have the courage to send this letter in any form,
so I might as well be honest.
Or maybe I had better not be.
Yours,
Carmen
9월26일2025년, 서울특별시
(much drunker this time)
Dear –,
This will be my second letter to you. The first one I can never send. Not, perhaps, for
the reasons you think. There is no confession in it. The truth is that I think the letter
makes me out to be a poor writer. I’m inarticulate in it. I can’t figure out what to say, or
more how to say it. I speak simply of how my days pass, but I think I’m really hoping to
demonstrate to you that I am capable of seeing the world in a profound way – and I
don’t quite think I succeed in doing this eloquently. At least it’s not sophisticated
enough in my eyes. I like the way you talk about me, and it’s flattering to believe thatanother
person thinks highly of something you’ve made. I guess I just want to remain a
good writer to you. That’s what I’m anxious of losing. It’s so easy to look into your face
sometimes, while you speak about things, with the sense that they are kind and
genuine. I am always terrified of upsetting the expectations others have of me, and
sometimes I try not to look at you too long because I am worried I cannot live up to the
expectations I am creating between us. You are always easy to pass time with, maybe
too easy sometimes, and I worry for myself. I think I like you a lot sometimes, too much
for my own good and then I feel badly because I’m pretty sure I can never give you
what you want. I’m sorry. I wish I could be simpler. I wish I had easier excuses, but I
don’t know how to explain to you why I feel like I will never be able to provide earnestly
the person you see in me. I guess this is all a convoluted apology. I don’t want to waste
your time, to mistreat you when you’ve already been so graciously honest with me.
Sometimes I get jealous when I see you talking to other people and then I feel the most
guilty of all. I cannot give you what you want. I’m too analytical to be impulsive.
I’m now out of obscure ways to say the things I want.
I’m sorry for this convoluted message.
I hope one day I can make more sense of myself.
Until then.
Yours,
Carmen(on the subway with a dead phone)
Dear –,
The worst place to be with a dead phone is on the subway. When I’ve lulled myself into
a world where every solitary moment is accompanied by music it feels cruel and
unusual to listen to the artificially feminized voice announce that the next stop is Canal
Street and to Stand Clear of the Closing Doors. The guy sitting next to me is reading
Nietzsche, and I peek over his pages and think about how Nietzsche died in a
psychiatric facility after spending his last sane years in the most exquisite scenes of
Switzerland. I watched a movie tonight that felt mostly like it wasn’t saying anything in
particular and I got bored and started thinking about you and how much more tolerable
the movie would be if I could put my head in the crook of your neck and tell you
something witty and clever to make you laugh in that bashful way you sometimes do.
The guy just flipped past a page on linguistics and I felt I might almost reach over to
counter the point being made. I feel an inexplicable need to know things and,
moreover, to explain them to people. I think I’m worried I’d become selfish and aloof if I
didn't try my very best to share all the things I am so lucky to be able to know. When I
was younger, my parents would never fail to remind me of the privilege it was to learn,
to be wholly and completely dedicated to knowledge and its acquisition, and
furthermore to question it, to sharpen it critically and thus generate some knowledge of
your own and keep creating knowledge endlessly and forever. I think learning and
loving others have been the two most exhilarating joys of my life and so I think I
would very much like to spend the rest of my life doing this in some way or another. Maybe
that’s a bizarre thing to find purpose with. Writing this on the uneven surface of my
crossbody has led to my finding the end of the page sooner than I might have
otherwise.
Yours,
Carmen
We kissed on my couch while a movie played loud behind my left eardrum and it felt
like highschool. I wondered at what it was I really wanted and you wouldn’t stop smiling
at me. I didn’t really want to be mysterious, but it was a bad habit of mine to never quite
know what it was I wanted. You smiled a lot and very sheepishly and when I put my
hand through your arm walking down to Delancey I was glad that you couldn’t see me
flush up red and embarrassed, and I angled my face towards the pavement like I was
calculating the slope required to skip the next puddle.
I thought you wanted to be friends.
It probably would have been in my best interest to carry on in that way and stop looking
into your eyes every time I turned to your face. I’m pretty sure I had put myself in the
compromised position by now, now I had real obligations of how to behave towards
you since I had kissed you in that desperate sort of way people only do when they have
something to lose. This was probably a grave error on my part, because I had quite a lot
to lose by this and I wanted to reassure you not to be so nervous, but I secretly thought
it was probably a good thing you were a bit weary. My mind enjoyed the fantasies of
following you through a streetlamp lit Brooklyn and pulling my index finger through the
belt loop of your jeans, but I felt very juvenile inviting you over to kiss you on my couch.
Maybe I hated too much conversation, knowing too quickly, or maybe…
Maybe there was no use in self-mythologizing. I didn’t want to be cruel. Really, I should
end it now, while there was still something left of friendship between us.
(so drunk I can barely see, 5:00 in the morning)
Dear –,
I miss you very much already, which bodes very poorly for me. I think I’m very much
afraid of caring too much about other people. It has been my fatal flaw before, and I
feel it now, up against my cerebral cortex and in a way that makes it feel impossible to
admit.
Maybe I have aphasia. It’s a cognitive disorder that leads either to an inability to
process language (Wernicke’s Aphasia) or to produce language (Broca’s Aphasia). I
guess I’m suffering from Broca’s then. The words feel all jumbled in my head (note: this
is actually Wernicke’s Aphasia, must have been pretty drunk to make this mistake).
Maybe that’s more to do with the fact that I’m going almost 24 hours with no sleep. I’m
in a type of cognitive paralysis maybe, where nothing makes that much sense and all I
can hear are the sounds bouncing off the walls of my mind and I can’t stop thinking
about kissing you which feels very stupid of me. I embarrass easily and especially in
front of people I’m worried of impressing.
(the only one I sent)
Dear –,
I miss hanging out with you. A lot. I hope everyone knows they’re very lucky to
monopolize all your time this way. I hope your days are full of the kind of wind that
brings you to the beach, to sit there terribly cold, and try to light cigarettes against the
wind coming in over the ocean. My morning bike ride managed to bisect the perfect
portion of the sunrise. I turned left on Knickerbocker and Manhattan was disappearing
into a pink swell in the distance. Tonight I’m hosting my book club and tomorrow I’m
going to a conference on psychoanalysis with my best friend. I’m worried you’re
missing the best days of fall, which always feel so precious because you never know
when you’ll wake up and realize with a pang that everything has dissolved into the cold
dredge of winter. One of my secret opinions (a hot take which prefers to remain
mysterious) is that winter is for real lovers. When you can feel the wind in your bones
and the wet under your soles, but you still take a train to see someone’s face and laugh
into it, that’s real love. I explained this in much cruder terms to the woman I work with
“If we’re still linking in winter I must really fuck with you.” This anecdote makes me
realize I think I’ve already told you this. My best friend says I have a bad habit of telling
the same stories over and over, and that when she points it out I just go on telling the
whole thing regardless! Alzheimer's runs in my family, so maybe I’m just having a
particularly early onset. I think I just like telling stories, and maybe the fact that they’re
so endlessly repetitive is a testament to my honesty. Sometimes I wish I could wring
the truth out of everyone, hear them spit their accusations at me. Though it runs
contrary to the rules of social expectation. Like, I wonder what truly rotten thoughts are
floating around in the grey matter in other peoples’ skulls. The barista at the café near
my work asked me the other day if I was an artist and I gave a sort of oblong glance
against the sheen of the metal table because I don’t really know the answer to that
question.
Wishing you all the best as you speed through the rest of the coastline.
Mit Liebe,
Carmen
You imagine chasing down the browning grass in Central Park and peeling back the hair
strewn across eyebrows for a proper look before you kiss. Crashing over crisp leaves
until you topple over each other. In your mind you’re always the one following, down
Jefferson and through the grass and down 1st Ave and through the rain, and there’s
always a look back at you on every corner with a wide smile like a secret untold. Like
there is something that’s about to be spoken, but you’ve never been good at
constructing dialogue so really it’s mostly the smile that’s plastered all over the images
in your mind. You watched one night, while – was looking into the mirror, a towel raking
through hair while assessing whether it looked the right shade of chestnut, and you
thought it all looked quite elegant, angled against the mirror in that way, and you kept
rearranging your feet on the chair because you felt rather inelegant in your pinstripe
pants with the black of your shoes smeared against your white socks. That night you
threaded your finger over the patch in a favorite pair of jeans and your heart felt like it
was at the base of your neck instead of thumping along inside your chest. Maybe you
wanted to cry. To stop feeling guilty over the kindness offered in the face of your
inarticulate indecision and you squinted at the index finger’s ring like it could give you
an answer. You liked when you looked at each other without saying much.
The sweetest sort of amusement to my mind.
The things you dreamt up about were laughably simple, the crossing of arms or your
forehead against the place where shoulders receded.
I don’t know the right words to say. Light is harsh and heavy and it makes your face
look all yellow and ill-aged. I would’ve happily wasted your time if you had let me. I
don’t believe you when you say you’re afraid of letting me know you. I don’t believe
people can float – be buoyant – with no one who knows them truly. That’s far too cruel
a way to live.
Everything I know is something I’ve learned: from a book, a lecture, a person. I don’t
think I was born with any truths: tabula rasa.
You’re the kind of person who likes to imagine themselves in love all the time.You’re the kind of person who is always searching, sometimes unaware of what. You
live your life much more selfishly than I live mine – not an accusation. I think your
dumplings must be cold by now. I wish I were… not sure.
I try to avoid looking you in the eye because when I do it feels like we’re flirting which I
hate because I’m trying to put my foot down and be mean.
Maybe I should be less concerned with loneliness, but sometimes I feel it tearing at me,
clawing inside my chest, desperately. I feel like I want to cry, but that would only make
me more pathetic so I roll the plastic of the chopstick cover between my thumbs and
my fingers turn all green. You almost touch them, but you don’t and I want to yell at
you, you’re so stupid. I know I’m not saying things in a way that makes sense to you
and it’s my only defense to over-intellectualize things, make them complicated. If I let
them be simple I might as well run out and lay on the pavement of Hester Street and
wait for the next car to run me over. I keep biking past these emaciated birds in
Bushwick, with their blood all over the road. I’ve never been good at confrontation
since I realized that I can’t find it in me to be honest anymore, not completely. The truth
is that honesty isn’t as coveted as people pretend. They don’t really want to hear the
truth, usually.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I wish I had never met you and we had never been
friends. I have enough friends. It’s not that I’m so hurt by You, more that I feel
embarrassed in a discarded sort of way. It’s not even your fault I just want a villain and
to stop feeling so bad about myself. Why is everybody obsessed with the future? I was
always obsessed with the past, because I thought it was the best attempt anyone had
at knowing something/someone. I wish I could demand the truth and remain the silent
one. The sad songs of my adolescence don’t sound the same. I want to chase you all
through Manhattan. Not sure if that’s violent or romantic.
1. What is something you love?
2. What’s your earliest memory?
3. What’s the hardest piece of truth you’ve ever had to learn?
4. What’s something you can never give up?
5. Tell me something about you that everybody knows.
6. What’s the worst thing about the place you grew up?
7. The best?
8. Who cares about you most in this world?
9. What’s one lesson you still haven’t learned?
There are two kinds of people and I am the second kind.
Dear –,
We can be friends, strange and mangled and maybe never the way we should have
been, but I promise to try.
BIO